Center for Autobiographic Studies

Michael Sean Kaminsky has written a brilliant new book that focuses a lens on journaling, blogging, and video blogging. Naked Lens: Video Blogging and Video Journaling to Reclaim the YOU in YouTube is well worth the read for those of us interested in the everchanging world of journal and diary writing. You can learn more about Sean and his book at his web site http://www.videogeneration.com. Buy your own copy through Amazon.com by clicking here.

Interest in journal and memoir writing has gone global, as you will note from the e-mails from Italy and Denmark below. Innovators are extending the benefits of journal and memoir writing within their fields of business and
technology. With the permission of the senders I am sharing two e-mails I recently received.

Tristine Rainer, Director, CAS

Dear Tristine,

As you might remember almost one year ago we exchanged some emails regarding an article
(http://www.grin.com/e-book/111781/enterprise-autobiography-writing-the-past- to-ensure-a-future) I had written quoting your work on the new trends in autobiographic literature.

Recently a book has been published in Italian and English - The Beyhond Code summarizing the experience we gone through with the application of this autobiographic methodology in Organizational Development.

Next August, Professor Susan Cartwright - will present a paper on this specific narrative OD methodology at the AOM meeting in Chicago (http://meeting.aomonline.org/2009/) and around the same period a chapter in a major UK publication will be dedicated to the same theme.

This brief email is to thank you for the very promising OD research stream you have inspired to me with your work.

Warm regards,
Luca Magni

Dear Tristine

I address you, because I have been concerned with diary writing as an important issue the last 15 years. I read your book around the time it appeared in Danish, 1983, and it has followed me since. I have opened a discussion on diary-writing in a LinkedIn group on metacognition, which attract several very qualified researchers and others, - the topic is related to my development of a very complex (freeware) software to facilitate diarywriting on a personal laptop, and I think it would be very valuable to the group, if you, as the truly qualified expert, could come in and give your comments and opinions. I invite you to connect with me directly on linkedin, from where I could invite you to share the metacognition group, or you might go directly to it, if you prefer.

With deep respect from an old Danish researcher
Kresten Bjerg

www.bjerg.psy.ku.dk

Publication news on writers who have consulted with Tristine

In 2009, Elyn Saks received a MacArthur Genius Grant for her work. Congratulations!

Elyn Saks recently received an excellent reveiw in Publisher's Weekly for her upcoming memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. The review states:

"In this engrossing memoir, Saks, a professor of psychiatry at U.C.-San Diego, demonstrates a novelist's skill of creating character, dialogue, and suspense. From her extraordinary perspective as both expert and sufferer (diagnosis: "Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation"; prognosis: "Grave"), Saks carries the reader from the early "little quirks" to the full blown "falling apart, flying apart, exploding," psychosis. "Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog," as Saks shows, becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on." Along the way to stability (treatment, not cure), Saks is treated with a pharmacopeia of drugs and by a chorus of therapists. In her jargon-free style, she describes the workings of the drugs ("getting med-free," a constant motif) and the ideas of the therapists and physicians (psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, cardiologist, endocrinologist). Her personal experience of a world in which she is both frightened and frightening is graphically drawn and leads directly to her advocacy of mental patients' civil rights as they confront compulsory medication, civil commitment, the abuse of restraints and "the absurdities of the mental care system." She is a strong proponent of talk therapy ("While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that helped me find a life worth living"). This is heavy reading, but Saks's account will certainly stand out in its field."

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness is available for pre-order through Amazon.com. Just click on the title.

Congratulations!

From Kirkus reviews:

The memoir Bill Cosby might have written if he were a clever Jewish girl from suburban New Jersey sent to summer camp in the Maine woods.

A brand-new teenager in 1974, humorist Schneider spent eight weeks at kosher Camp Kin-A-Hurra (a seemingly Native-American term that's actually Yiddish for "may no evil find you"). It was a dump, run by an amiable hustler who had added nothing to the ramshackle enterprise since 1922. There the young captive Mindy mouthed age-old folk songs with campmates Dana Bleckman, Betty Gilbert, Borscha Belyavsky and Autumn Evening Schwartz. The quick-witted girls played softball indifferently, hiked ineptly, baked challah and frequently visited the boys' encampment across the lake. Goofy parents showed up, much to their progeny's mortification. Mindy Schneider's short-term goal: getting popular and getting a boyfriend. Would it be Kenny Uber or Philip Selig? At summer's end, who would bestow her first kiss? The author winsomely recalls sleep-away dreams, growing into a training bra, struggling to control inconvenient rashes, and awkward hormones. She punctuates her droll entertainment with references to junk food and TV staples of a generation ago, embellished with songs and snapshots from old Kin-A-Hurra.

A sweetly humorous fugitive from the Young Adult category, playing dress-up for nostalgic adults.

Congratulations!