Conversation Pieces

Vol. 99 — Writing’s Writing: A Memoir

by Rebecca Ore

$12 $10.00 (paperback)
$5.95 (e-book)	EPUB	MOBI (unavailable)

Read a sample from the book.

In Writing's Writing, Rebecca Ore engages in what she calls "fishing in memory," in which strange short scenes float up, things forgotten for decades, linking to names and to scenes she has to thread with words to connect them. Memory never delivers everything it holds along a particular thread of words, but it can tell a tale. Ore knows `that someone else from those days might see her thread of words as only one link in a different narrative of those times. Her memoir is personal, and it reflects and reflects on how she herself changes over time.

Advance Praise

With Writing's Writing, Rebecca Ore takes us back to the 20th century, to life as a woman in the southern United States and life as a poet in New York City, to life as a student, a writer, a teacher, a person — to life. In memoir, prose, and poetry, she evokes a lost world, maybe even an alien world, with exactness and without rosy nostalgia. I caught my breath on the vertiginous sweep of some sentences. In this book, Ore returns to us a writer we might otherwise have lost: Rebecca Brown, a young poet who deserves to be heard and remembered.
 —Matthew Cheney, author of Changes in the Land and The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories

Ore is a fine, intelligent writer who covers topics not usually covered in SF. The longest essay in this book is a kind of autobiography: how Ore became a fiction writer through living in the rural South as a child, then in New York City as an aspiring poet, working clerical day jobs and going to poetry readings at night. She moved on to the poetry scene in San Francisco, then back to the rural South. Those moves and her experiences explain how she has such a good sense of regional and class differences. The second essay is about a bicycle tour of New Jersey. I haven’t figured out why I like it, but I do. All in all, this chapbook tells you interesting things about an interesting writer. If you haven’t read her other books, find them and read them.
 —Eleanor Arnason, author of Ring of Swords and Hwarhath Stories

ISBN: 978-1-61976-284-8 (13 digit)
Publication Date: Feb 2026
paperback 82 pages