Description
Book SynopsisSean Prentiss is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University, USA. He is author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (2015), which won the National Outdoor Book Award for Biography/History. He is also co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre (2014) and co-author (with Joe Wilkins) of Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Nicole Walker is the author of the collections The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books. Her previous books include Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story with Sean Prentiss and with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. She's nonfiction
Trade Review
This book offers intriguing takes on the question of how our unknowable brains reckon with experience and lead us to the artistic practice of creative nonfiction. Cognitive science, neuroaesthetics, mirror neurons, memory and metaphor all come out to play with these inquiring minds. This is not an instruction manual, but rather a series of brilliant provocations to expand the field of our writing lives. * Alison Hawthorne Deming, Author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit *
The Science of Story makes a great case for the essay as premier scientific instrument. Each contribution in this anthology illuminates a new intersection between writing and science. How does time or space work in memory or on the page? How do description and emotion affect us? How do memory or metaphor work to produce the magic they do? How do the essays we love affect us emotionally? And more importantly, how can writers use or repurpose these tools to make more interesting and beautiful things? This book will be revelatory for writers of nonfiction and their many readers. * Ander Monson, Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA *
Table of Contents
Table of Contents 01 Introduction, Sean Prentiss and Nicole Walker 02 Bengal Tiger Moments: Perception of Time in the Brain and on the Page, Sean Prentiss, Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA 03 Sipping from the Transmitter: Theorizing the ‘Potential Essay’, Lawrence Lenhart – 04 The Brain is a Master Class, Dave Madden, University of San Francisco, USA 05 Brain on Fire, Nicole Walker, Northern Arizona University, USA 06 The Brain Split in Half, Ira Surungruang, University of South Florida, USA 07 When the Body Reads: Writing Sensory Perception for Reader Embodiment, Nancer Ballard, Brandeis University, USA 08 Lens: A Lyric Meditation, Katherine Coles, University of Utah, USA 09 The Heart and the Eye: How Description Can Access Emotion, JT Bushnell, Oregon State University, USA 10 The Memory Agent, David Lazar, Columbia College Chicago, USA 11 On Metaphor, V. Efua Prince, Wayne State University, USA 12 The Glittering World of Synapses, Lyncia Bega, Dine´ writer and artist 13 A Sense of Oneness with Sun and Stone, Leila Phillips, College of the Holy Cross, USA 14 A Gardener’s Education (Animal Body), Marco Wilkinson, Oberlin College and Lorain County Community College, USA 15 The Secret Lives of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives, Frank Bures, author of The Geography of Madness 16 Conversations in Intensive Care, Amy Wright, author 17 Mindfulness and Memoir, Julie Wittes Shlack, author
