Unveiling Heartbreak and Healing: Brenda Miller Reveals the Secrets Behind Her Powerful New Memoir.
RP: We always do! All right, I’ve got one more question before we wrap up, although I could talk to you all day long. Considering how long you’ve been doing this and how long you’ve been teaching and writing and sharing in this genre, what would you say to those who are just starting now? Looking ahead?
BM: Gosh. Well, this is going to sound cliche, but I think it still is a golden age for creative nonfiction and the personal essay. We need very specific and personal stories more than ever, and we need new forms to keep developing and evolving. So learn from your predecessors, but create your own forms. Create new ways of expressing things that will attract people’s attention amidst the noise and craziness that we have going on. That’s the biggest challenge we face now, that I didn’t have back in the day. There’s so much coming at us, and we don’t even know what’s real anymore. So we need the realness, the authenticity. We need the young folks to be able to tell their stories. So yeah, create new frontiers.
