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WHY I WRITE

Name: WHY I WRITE
Author: Will Blythe
ISBN: 0-316-10229-6

edited by Will Blythe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 1998

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Twenty-five fiction writers answer the former Esquire literary editor’s question: why do you write? Blythe, now fiction editor at Mirabella, envisions this anthology as a counterpoint to the flood of how-to books that assume “some odd, unspoken consensus that imaginative writing is an activity well worth pursuing.” His larger question, then, is why should anyone write. Ultimately, there’s no better answer than the entertaining diversity of the answers we get here, which are various as snowflakes. They range from the high-minded (Richard Ford champions literature in the age of Seinfeld) to the flippant (Stephen Wright repeats for four pages “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”). Norman Mailer, uncharacteristically humble and brief, writes to feel “a quintessential religious emotion.” Mark Jacobson writes for the money, and “to dis Dad.” Others, like Terry McMillan, write for deliverance: “This writing stuff saved me.” The tone ranges from Thom Jones’s profane rant against the “blow job” method of career advancement to the pained embarrassment of a perpetually blushing Amy Hempel to Pat Conroy’s unabashed song of himself (“When I write a book, I move with all the magic of language toward a fixed star, offering a present of my troubled, violent spirit”). Among the most affecting are Ann Patchett’s heartfelt tribute to Alan Gurganus (in which she admits wanting to write because of the elegant, cultured figure cut by Gurganus when he taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence) and Mark Richard’s essay, which reads like a novel outline and details the safe haven books provided in his difficult childhood. There’s useful advice beneath the inspiration, too: Rick Bass’s “Why the Daily Writing of Fiction Matters” should be required reading in all creative writing workshops. By turns cantankerous and dreamy, and an inspiration to writers and readers alike—a living monument to the vitality and value of the writing life.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1998

ISBN: 0-316-10229-6

Page Count: 252

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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.