Different strokes

The greater part of valor was choosing what to leave out. It's not a memoir in the strictest sense, because it's not really about us, it's about food production and local economies. The largest emotional events of the year, for us personally, are hardly mentioned, if at all: the death of Steven's sister; my slow recovery from a crippling accident; our family's adjustment after Camille moved to college -- these were not the domain of the book.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them. "Because it really happened" is the worst reason to write anything, leading directly to ramshackle prose and the painful American custom of oversharing. I suppose 10,000 bloggers would disagree with me on that point. Perhaps here we've hit upon the distinction between blogger and author.

Barbara Kingsolver commenting on her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, in Salon.

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Obituary: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood (her Mum)

globeandmail.com: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood:

"LIVES LIVED
Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood
Mother, dietitian, ice dancer. Born June 8, 1909, in Kinsman's Corners, N.S. Died Dec. 30, 2006, in Toronto, of natural causes, aged 97.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Someone said to me recently, 'You must have had an unusual mother.' True enough.

Margaret Killam was born in 1909 in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Her father was a country doctor, and she grew up as a socially shy but physically brave tomboy. Unlike her academically brilliant sister, Kae, she was not a natural student. Her father refused to send her to university because she was 'frivolous,' so she taught school, saved the money for her own fees, and won a college scholarship, just to show she could.

More at the above link.

Spotted on Google's blog

In addition, we've just added our most important location yet: an online home at google.com/talks/authors with a video archive
of our events on YouTube. Just this year, we've hosted a great variety of authors, including Martin Amis, Strobe Talbott, Bob & Lee Woodruff, Jonathan Lethem, Don Tapscott, Senator Hillary Clinton, and Carly Fiorina. The subjects of their talks range from literary fiction to science fiction, sociology to technology, politics to business.

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Literary birthday

Oxford DNB: Lives of the week

Fielding, Henry (1707–1754), author and magistrate, was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, the eldest of the seven children of Colonel Edmund Fielding (1680–1741), a veteran of Marlborough's wars who would rise to the rank of lieutenant-general, and Sarah Gould (bap. 1682, d. 1718), daughter of Sir Henry Gould (1643/4–1710), judge of the king's bench, and his wife, Sarah (c.1654–1733), daughter of Richard Davidge, a wealthy London merchant with property in the west country, whose estate at Sharpham she inherited.

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