If you’d like to see the photos from our May 15 Salon with James Brown, Dinah Lenney, and Claire Bidwell Smith, click here. (I’ve been trying to post them here, to no avail.)

One of the many reasons I love doing the show is because of what my guests bring to me. Thank you, Hope Edelman, for mentioning this video on the show yesterday.

Our next Pen on Fire Writers Salon is around the corner. This time we’re hosting an evening with writers of fiction (novels / short stories). 

On Tuesday night, June 5, Pam Houston (Cowboys are My Weakness, Contents May Have Shifted), Stacy Bierlein (A Vacation on the Island of Ex-boyfriends) and Eric Puchner (Model Home) will be my guests. We’ll talk about writing fiction (autobiographical and otherwise), craft and the business of writing fiction.  We’ll also have nibbles and sips. Laguna Beach Books will be on hand selling books, which you can get signed as you chat with the authors.

Our events have gladly been selling out, so if you’re interested, visit the Salon page now to reserve your seat. That night, should you find you can’t be with us, you can give (or sell) your seat to a friend.

Hope to see you on June 5, if not before.

I was talking with a friend who worried that the critique of her memoir by her group was verging on the personal. Where is the line between critiquing the work, and critiquing the person?  She wondered if perhaps people were wanting to know a bit too much about her, rather than sticking to the work.  This is an interesting quandary because when you’re in a critique group presenting your work, you want the criticism to be focused on the work, and not on you.  But in memoir, the work and you are pretty much one.  Where is the line? Good question!  If a friend in a group says, “Why did you react that way? We want to know more about how you really felt,” that may seem to be a personal question, yet, it’s relevant to the work because maybe it’s just not on the page, how you felt when your mother said that horrible thing to you. When you’re presenting fiction and a workshop member says, “How did she really react?  It’s not on the page,” we don’t feel personally attacked, because the criticism is about a character, not you.  This is especially on my mind because I’m also writing a memoir and find it interesting, parsing what someone is saying about my work and what parts of what they’re saying I need to pay attention to.

What do you think? Should memoir and fiction be critiqued in different ways? Where’s the line between focusing on the work (in memoir) and focusing on the writer?

Biographers Steve Weinberg and Jack El-Hai, author of The Lobotomist in the first half, and memoirist Julie Metz, author of Perfection, talk with Barbara about the art, craft and business of their chosen genre..

 Download audio.

(Broadcast date: May 9, 2012