Mine the gap: anatomy of a lyric memoir

In my former life as a journalist, we had a saying: Gathering string. It meant going out and collecting unconnected facts and figures that led to other facts and figures that led to others, and still others ... all of which would lead to something more, a story that revealed something new or captured an interesting slice of life.

We accumulated. We hoarded our bits of string and twigs for the future, collecting more than we knew we would really need.

Then one day, we decided we had gathered enough. It was time to turn that string into a story.

But what if the string we sought could not be found, no matter how hard we searched? What if the facts and figures were wiped away by death, silence, forgetting?

In her 2006 memoir A Family of Strangers, the late Deborah Tall pulled off the seemingly impossible. She tracked down every piece of string she could, found that it barely fit inside a thimble ... and made it sing anyway. And what of the material not available to her, the material irretrievably lost? She turned those into the gaps that held the book together.

Dog Books in Drag, or a Poet's Take on Writing Prose

Mark Doty considers himself a poet, and for good reason. He's written twelve books of poetry, and his latest collection, Fire to Fire, won the National Book Award for poetry in 2008. He's also the only American poet to win the U.K.-based T.S. Eliot award. But the prolific New Yorker has also written five books of prose, including Dog Years, a memoir revolving around his two retrievers (golden and black) that became a New York Times bestseller in 2007. On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, Doty came to the St. Paul Central Library to read some of his work and talk about writing. He also waxed poetic about loss, goats and walls, among other things.