Taylor Brorby – författare

“I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power.” So begins Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, “a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking.”In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.

In this unique volume, 14 of the US's most distinguished writers pull back the curtain on their processes whilst drafting their works of creative nonfiction. Using side-by-side examples of first drafts and final versions of their writing, including original full-page reproductions from the writers’ personal notebooks, an original, illuminating essay accompanies each draft, recounting the journey from inspiration to completion. Offering a generous insight into the creative process from the rough bold strokes to refined, clear, elegant prose, this behind-the-scenes look delves into the creative minds of working writers, including African American, Latin, Asian American, and Indigenous writers from across the US.An invaluable resource for students and instructors looking to enliven the classroom or offering practicing writers a peak into the processes of their peers, this book presents the false starts and missteps, the self-editing, tinkering, cutting, rearranging and craft working writers make in the plight for perfectly polished prose. The Art of Revising Creative Nonfiction is an enlightening and unparalleled collection of modern-day creativity in action, a must have for aspiring writers and teachers of all levels.