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Stefan Merrill Block Biography

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“It won't be until much later, years from now, that I'll seek out other former homeschoolers, and realize how common, how deep this fear can run: to confront your homeschool teacher or to hurt them in ways they might never forgive is to risk losing not only a parents but also your entire childhood social sphere, the worldview in which you were raised. It is potentiallly an act of self-exile from a home country to which you can never again return, and maybe this fear is one reason why there still aren't proper regulations on homeschooling, why homeschool kids can still so easily vanish from the world. With the odds stacked so heavily against speaking out - and homeschooling still a relatively new phenomenon - so many of the necessary stories have not yet been told.”

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Book:Homeschooled: A Memoir
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“Before I published my first book, I worked for a while as a documentary and wedding/bar mitzvah videographer, and a part of me still mourns the lost filmmaker I'll never be. Working on a documentary is nearly the opposite artistic process to writing: as a writer you are always trying to fill out a world to fit your story, but as a documentarian your work is to carve a story out of the world. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly blocked at my computer, I miss the days when I could just point my camera at something interesting and wait to see what happens.”

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Author:Stefan Merrill Block
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“I think that I write much more naturally about characters in solitude than characters interacting with others. My natural inclination - and one that I've learned to push against - is to give primacy to a character's interior world. Over the three books that I've written, I've had to teach myself that not every feeling needs to be described and that often the most impactful writing more elegantly evokes those unnamed feelings through the way characters speak and behave.”

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Author:Stefan Merrill Block
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