Amazon.com Review
A marvelously wide-ranging compendium, and why not, since just about everything printed has to start out being written. Thus editor Heffron has license to put together a volume with short, pithy discourses--this is a great book to travel or take lunch breaks with--on poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, nonfiction, and the death of Louis L'Amour. The surprise comes, though, not in pieces by the likes of Tony Kushner or William Kittredge (you know they'll be good) but in previously obscure gems like Nancy Mairs' moving essay on "The Literature of Personal Disaster."
From Publishers Weekly
Heffron likens this first-in-a-series volume to "a meeting of today's top writers... trading tips and opinions about their craft." It's more the literary equivalent of a diner menu: some familiar names and some new in a vast and eclectic collection whose only unifying theme is that everything within is written by a writer. Heffron has assembled essays on every aspect of writing, from the highly personal Why-I-Became-a-Writer variety to the more practical. Among the latter is "Why Stories Fail" by Kansas Quarterly editor Ben Nyberg, who includes examples of personal rejections that make form letters seem appealing. There's also plenty of advice. Edward Albee recommends reading lousy plays because "if you read only Beckett and Chekhov you'll go away and only deliver telegrams at Western Union." James Michener suggests looking into university writing programs, while British poet James Fenton warns against it: "Babies are not brought by storks," he reasons, "and poets are not produced by workshops." With 27 writers weighing in on everything from friendship to AIDS to why one should think twice before writing about relatives, it's doubtful that the entire collection will satisfy everyone, but there's enough variety to give most readers something worth thinking about.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
