The Writer's Home Companion: An Anthology of the World's Best Writing Advice, From Keats to Kunitz - Softcover

Bolker Ed. D., Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805048936 ISBN 13: 9780805048933

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 1997

Synopsis

A Boston Globe Bestseller

Writing is a solitary sport—but none of us can do it without good company at crucial moments. This spirited collection of inspiring and useful essays and exercises on the craft of writing is the next best thing to having an experienced writer at your side. These twenty-nine pieces, more than half of which have never been published in book form, include selections as unusual and diverse as behaviorist B. F. Skinner's "How to Discover What You Have to Say"; Brett Candlish Millier's investigation of the seventeen drafts of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art"; Ursula Le Guin's "Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?"; Anne Eisenberg's "E-Mail and the New Epistolary Age"; and Nancy Mair's "The Writer's Thin Skin and Faint Heart." Other contributors include Gloria Naylor, Stanley Kunitz, Bernard Shaw, Natalie Goldberg, Anne Tyler, Rita Dove, Peter Elbow, and Gail Godwin.

About this title

Review:

There are a lot of compendia of writing advice around. The Writer's Home Companion strikes a deeper chord than many because its editor, Joan Bolker--who's also a psychologist--used to teach writers at Harvard as well as counsel them. Hence, many of these essays get inside the writer's head and heart: Anne Tyler recounts her "distractibility," Gail Godwin and Bolker herself examine those internal "watchers" that keep us from our best work, poet Patsy Cumming shares a terrific system for getting started, and manuscript reproductions from the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Henry James show us the struggles aren't ours alone.

About the Author:

Joan Bolker, Ed.D., has taught and counseled writers at Harvard, where she cofounded the Writing Center; at University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she began The Language Place; and at Wellesley, Brandeis, and M.I.T., where she was a psyco-therapist and writing consultant. She has coached the authors of more than one hundred doctoral dissertations and is currently a clinical psychologist who works with many writers in her private practice. She is the author of Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day.

About this edition

• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0805048936
• ISBN 13: 9780805048933
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Bolker Joan