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Gut Feelings: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions
In these highly personal essays and powerful tales that verge on memoir, Merrill Joan Gerber opens to us her life and work as a writer. She is candid and unflinching in revealing the truths and inventions of a writer’s vision and the use of life as the raw material of art. Her personal essays range widely, from the mysteries of love and marriage to painful encounters with suicides and family deaths.
Gerber writes of her apprenticeships with celebrated writing teachers Andrew Lytle and Wallace Stegner and recounts her ghostly (and ghastly) experiences during a month at Yaddo, the famous retreat for artists. Gerber includes three pieces in the book—originally published as stories—but which blur the line between fiction and memoir, demonstrating Gerber’s contention that the deepest secrets in life beget the most passionate fictions.
Gerber writes of her apprenticeships with celebrated writing teachers Andrew Lytle and Wallace Stegner and recounts her ghostly (and ghastly) experiences during a month at Yaddo, the famous retreat for artists. Gerber includes three pieces in the book—originally published as stories—but which blur the line between fiction and memoir, demonstrating Gerber’s contention that the deepest secrets in life beget the most passionate fictions.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published February 3, 2003
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About the author
Merrill Joan Gerber
40 books9 followersPrize-winning novelist and short story writer who has published seven novels — among them King Of The World, which won the Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award for an "important and unusual book of literary distinction," and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for "the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme" — as well as five volumes of short stories, nine young adult novels, and three books of non-fiction.
Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in literary journals such as The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southwest Review, Shenandoah, The Chattahoochee Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
She has published essays in The American Scholar, Commentary, The Sewanee Review, Salmagundi and The Writer.
She earned her M.A. in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in literary journals such as The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southwest Review, Shenandoah, The Chattahoochee Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
She has published essays in The American Scholar, Commentary, The Sewanee Review, Salmagundi and The Writer.
She earned her M.A. in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 27, 2025
The write-up is accurate and definitely a worthwhile read - an unrecognized treasure.
June 29, 2008
An interesting collection of inter-related short stories, many of them based on moments or events from the author's life. Particularly recommended is "Getting Mother Buried." Any author who can move me to tears deserves high praise in my opinion.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews