A motivating combination of self-expression, philosophy and practical exercises for aspiring writers.
A longtime writing professor shares her sensory approach to developing creative writing skills.
For more than 30 years, Fennimore (Earth Talking, 2010), a professor emeritus at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, taught writing to public school students ranging from preschool through graduate school levels. In this 15-chapter guide, she sets forth her “field-developed” curriculum, a series of activities that begins with such sensory exercises as considering what words come to mind while contemplating a cotton ball and builds to crafting a satisfying story with conflict, characters and style. Fennimore, also an illustrator and published author of poetry and on the art of bookbinding, infuses all her creative interests into this work. She uses drawings to spark flights of fancy, including cover art of a sketched flower that has the caption “petals having a gossip session.” She encourages readers to bind together books of their own writing to celebrate their creative expression. Fennimore’s exercises are, not surprisingly, focused on reading or writing poetry, although many prose selections and activities are also included. One of Fennimore’s particularly interesting ideas is to use children’s picture books as a springboard to launch other stories. While Fennimore’s approach has plenty of New-Age flavor, it’s also her pedagogical belief, backed by other educators whom she cites throughout her narrative, that one learns how to write through a process of observing experiences, talking about them and then expressing them in written form. This credo has plenty of mass as well as academic appeal, and Fennimore must have been a wonderful mentor to many in her career. Based on its abundance of writing prompts alone, this book will be greatly valued by parents, students and teachers. Experienced writers may find some of Fennimore’s tutorials a bit too remedial, and her preference for children’s literature and student writing as reading selections won’t be to everyone’s taste. Overall, however, this is an effective—and affecting—starter text to calling forth the writer’s voice.
A motivating combination of self-expression, philosophy and practical exercises for aspiring writers.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494289140
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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