We Were Pirates
- Naval Institue Press
- 2009
Memoir, the familiar essay, critical and cultural essays, reviews–the many genres of “nonfiction” writing provide a vast field for reportage, reflection, confession, and speculation.
Varying in tone from conversational intimacy to artful formality, we speak the full range of our experience and our minds in essays of different kinds, constructing places where writers and readers meet within realms familiar and strange. The French verb essayer, “to try,” captures the spirit of the literary essay, which is a venturing forth, less a declamation of settled views than a meditation in which story and thought collaborate in an improvisation that can lead, with luck, to discovery.
Robert Schultz’s nonfiction includes We Were Pirates, a work of history and biography, and a variety of essays ranging from memoir, cultural and political comment, literary criticism, and journalistic opinion pieces. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Subtropics, The Gettysburg Review, as well as a variety of edited collections and newspapers. He is currently working on a series of connected essays entitled Father, Son, and Sports.