Search results for: William Zinsser
Dancing With Scrolls
Simchat Torah, a Jewish festival that pays its annual call this week, celebrates the completion of the yearlong reading of the Torah. Scrolls are removed from the ark and carried or danced around the synagogue seven times. As a descendant of German and Yankee Protestants, I had never heard of that joyful rite. But I …
Read MoreHold the Emotion!
… for peeling paint in the bathroom?” I don’t know anything about water stains and peeling paint. I’m a writer. The callers are trying to reach William Zinsser & Co., my father’s shellac business. The company was in New York so long—well over a century—that some old customers think it’s still …
Read More“Who Would Care About My Story?”
Every September they come out of the New York night—20 adults, mostly women, who have signed up for my course, at the New School, on writing memoir and family history. This is my 20th year of teaching the course, heading out into the night myself to meet my students and help them wrestle their …
Read MoreNo Place Like “Home”
My wife is locked in semantic combat with The New York Times. As a historian she has long made extensive use of the free online Times archives for her research, grateful for its boundless access to historical information.
Recently the Times began to charge a fee for that access. Fair enough; the newspaper is entitled …
Flunking Description
I don’t enjoy descriptive writing; I was fed too much George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in school. I can take just so much heath and bracken. I also don’t like to write what I don’t like to read, so I reduce my sentences to the minimum number of facts I think a …
Read MoreImproving a Masterpiece
“I should like very much to talk with you,” George Gershwin wrote in 1932 to DuBose Heyward, co-author with his wife Dorothy Heyward of the Broadway play Porgy, about a community of Negroes in the Heywards’ hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. “In thinking of ideas for new compositions,” Gershwin wrote, “I come back …
Read MorePeter McGuire's Holiday
United we crouch like sprinters on the eve of Labor Day weekend, ready to hurl ourselves into the three-day swirl of activities required of every good American, squeezing the last ounce of pleasure out of summer’s final gift of unexamined time. Officially, summer won’t end for another three weeks. But in our …
Read MoreNo Degrees of Separation
Our oldest grandchild is going off to college next week, and his mother, like mothers in every corner of the land, is contending with a lot of pain. How did time so suddenly accelerate? During the long journey of parenthood it often seems that the day when the first child leaves for college is so …
Read MoreThe ‘A’ Word
I was born into the Northeastern WASP establishment and have never quite stopped pretending that I wasn’t. One word in particular has always dogged me unpleasantly. My parents both had charm and humor. In short, they were attractive. Their house was attractive and everything in it was attractive. That was the point of being …
Read MoreSummer House Books
There’s nothing like the library of a summer house to reverse the tides of literary improvement. How the nation’s English teachers must sigh, having assigned as summer reading such edifying works as 1984 and Lord of the Flies, to think of their charges curled up with the glorious chestnuts of yesteryear that line …
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