A book of benefit to well-practiced as well as novice writers, full of useful advice, pointers, and prompts.
A welcome vade mecum on the business and art of writing for publication.
“Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.” So growled the prolific sports journalist Red Smith, who had to bleed daily. As Poets & Writers veteran editors Larimer and Gannon note, the business of publishing has changed considerably since Smith’s heyday, but the verities are eternal. “Writing is a lifelong endeavor,” they write, “and one that doesn’t end when you finish a poem, story, essay, or longer writing project.” That is just so, and against that truth and others, they propose sets of “action items,” such as making a list of your personal goals as a writer, at first short-term (daily word count achieved, for instance) and then longer-term career objectives. These items are highly specific: If you want to sign up for an MFA, they write, then research which ones fit your needs best, interview administrators and students, and otherwise do your homework. This specificity is the most helpful part of a book that is altogether instructive, if sometimes a touch discouraging: As Larimer and Gannon are quick to point out, in 2017, the median income for full-time writers was $20,300, a shade south of the poverty line for a family of three. For those willing to brave the long odds, the authors offer a few bits of cheerleading, including the thought that it’s OK to “give yourself permission to brag a bit”—which is to say, if someone asks what you do, call yourself a writer and own it without apology. Among the many highlights of this book for beginning writers is a list of writers’ conferences that appeal to underrepresented constituencies in a publishing world that, because it’s so economically marginal, tends to favor those advantaged enough not to have to worry about income.
A book of benefit to well-practiced as well as novice writers, full of useful advice, pointers, and prompts.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2307-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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