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Sundays Cover

Release Press, 1979

 

 

"I started writing what I called autobiographical sketches in around 1966. I describe it in the book What We Deserved in the piece 'Plugging In', where I describe trying to circumvent my brain and write from my gut. It was a device to get me going and it worked, at least for a while and helped produce On Sundays We Visit The In-Laws. At the time I wanted what I wrote to be exactly the way it had actually happened. Now I think that’s impossible. You can’t reproduce life exactly. What you write reflects choices—what to put in, what to leave out—and how to shape meaning into the writing. I went to a creative non-fiction workshop in the summer of 2001. The workshop had rules—everything had to have happened the way it was written and dialogue had to be exactly what had been said. It seemed a little like painting by the numbers. I don’t think good writing can have such a strict set of rules. It took me a few days to recover from the workshop. I think of myself as an honest writer, or at least one who tries to be, but I’m not a reporter putting down the facts, nothing but the facts."

- Steven Schrader

“Truth, a felt, wry, warm, lonely truth left as the painful imprint of living, marks these stories. There are few pains greater than the love for a child lost, or half-lost through the split-up of a marriage, and Schrader has caught it all with the candor, wit … and a little rage to keep the colors pure.”

- J.R. Humphreys

All content © Steven Schrader