creative nonfiction – Page 4

In his book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life, Henry Oliver highlights how some of our world’s most successful people — Vera Wang, Frank Lloyd Wright, Julia Child — achieved their most notable successes later in life. This week’s featured writer, Tracie Adams, might feel at home among those late bloomers. For Tracie, that second act began last year at age 58 with the publication of her first writings in various literary magazines. Her memoir, Our Lives in Pieces: A Collection of Flash Memoir Essays, came out earlier this year and has been praised for its honest reflections on life’s joys and sorrows.

A writer since childhood (when she wrote “truly awful poems about horses and mushrooms”), Tracie spent twenty-five years teaching writing to her four homeschooled children on her family farm in Virginia along with hundreds of other homeschooled and private-schooled kids. “While teaching writing and literature was rewarding,” she writes on her website, “I have found immeasurable joy in retirement as I have finally begun publishing my creative nonfiction work in literary magazines.” And we her readers are the better for it.

With Father’s Day just around the corner, it seems appropriate and timely to shine the Friday Five spotlight on Daniel Roberts, a historian, writer, and host of the Dad Lit podcast, which is available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

A professional historian, Dan has many published works of history, but no published works of fiction — not yet, at least. He is the author of the biography, The American: The Life, Times, and War of Basil Antonelli, the story of an Italian-American immigrant that Amazon describes as “a quintessentially American biography of immigration, assimilation, and sacrifice.” Currently he is on submission with two novels, The Black Hole Pact, a Sci Fi novel about a woman investigating her father’s role in saving the world from a killer asteroid, and Cursed at the Hanging Pine Inn, a horror novel best described as The Shining meets Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

He established the Dad Lit Pod earlier this year, not long after a bit of hand-wringing in The New York Times about the disappearance of the literary man (a topic I also blogged about). So the topics Dan delves into on his podcast have never been more timely.

As you might expect from such a booster of Dad Lit, Dan is himself a dad. He’s the father to a four-year-old girl and has been blissfully married for eight years.

Tag: creative nonfiction

Friday Five: ‘Our Lives in Pieces’ memoirist Tracie Adams

Friday Five: historian, writer, and Dad Lit podcaster Dan Roberts