What a nude “gesture sketch” class taught writer Rachel Howard. Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one. —Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and …
A novel approach to the absurdities of mass desolation. Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel Graywolf Press, 336 pp., $26.00. Guest Review by Lanie Tankard We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story . . . —John Steinbeck, to the Paris Review A Google search for the term lonely can yield 287,000,000 results in less than twenty seconds. A Facebook Community called “Loneliness” has …
Don’t submit your beloved manuscript too early. This is part three of a three-part series on the major lessons I learned while writing Shepherd: A Memoir, which is scheduled to be published in Spring 2014. There’s such a high in completing a book’s first draft. A whole manuscript. In You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams, Elizabeth Sims nails it: To write a book is to open and give yourself to a world thirsty …
In writing, I learn, it’s wise to emphasize love over discipline. This is part two of a three-part series on the major lessons I learned while writing Shepherd: A Memoir, which is scheduled to be published in Spring 2014. There’s a common notion that self-discipline is a freakish peculiarity of writers—that writers differ from other people by possessing enormous and equal portions of talent and willpower. They grit their powerful teeth and go into their little rooms. I think that’s a bad …
I ponder the writer’s never-ending education. This is part one of a three-part series on the major lessons I learned while writing Shepherd: A Memoir, which is scheduled to be published in Spring 2014. “I don’t think writers go to college,” my father informed me as I prepared to leave home for college. His unsparing honesty was one of the reasons I hadn’t revealed my ambitions, of course, but my dreams were obvious. And while Dad was trying to be helpful, …
Shepherd: A Memoir to be published in Spring 2014. I was fifty and the marketing manager of a university press when one day I decided I would write a book. My own book. The story I needed to tell. There I was, bent over a drawer in the press’s endless row of gray-green filing cabinets, and from the radio perched somewhere overhead I heard a writer, a man my age, talking about his latest book. What am I waiting for? …