Provocation is Buhner’s mission in this unusually passionate and delving writer’s guide. The author of books about plants, healing, indigenous culture, and the environment, Buhner not only tackles the art of writing with conviction, vigor, expertise, and a touch of devilry but also outspokenly advocates for the maligned form of “genre nonfiction.” Who says a how-to book can’t be a work of literature? It’s what you bring to the subject and to the page that make a book vital and significant. A book about plumbing can be just as revelatory as a poem if the writer marshals her feelings, the wellspring of meaning. Buhner sagely covers technical matters and the pragmatic business of book proposals and such, albeit not without lambasting corporate publishing. But his is a heroic view of writing. Quoting his mentors Raymond Chandler, John Gardner, and Robert Bly, Buhner offers liberating exercises and ardent, even wild exhortations to help writers tap into their dreaming mind and “inhabit” every word, just as he does in this inspiriting call to creative intensity. To sing the book electric. --Donna Seaman
"
Ensouling Language is Stephen Harrod Buhner at his most spellbinding and enchanted. Every sentence is infused with a livingness that is rare in today's nonfiction. More than simply a book about writing, it is about wielding power--and responsibility--of language itself. Stephen encourages us to breathe the Breath of Life into the words we write, to call forth such a deep richness of meaning that it transmits feeling from the writer to the reader like some otherworldly telepathy. If you can
feel you can write, write in
this way, turning otherwise empty leaden words into golden Ensouling Language." (
Daniel Vitalis, June 2010)
"Buhner's book describes how any writer, even one writing about, say, adobe walls, can achieve the sense of expansion--of traveling into larger worlds--that has always marked the best art. And although the subject is nonfiction, what Buhner has to say applies to serious writing of any kind." (
Akshay Ahuja, The Occasional Review, May 2010)
“The most subversive book on writing I have ever encountered--and the most important.” (
Herbie Brennan, New York Times bestselling author of
Faerie Wars)
“If Lao-tzu and Emerson could have a dialogue on writing, they would welcome the company of this remarkable book.” (
William Howarth, author of
Walking with Thoreau)
“Stephen Harrod Buhner has produced a manifesto and guide to bring American writing back from the cages of the academy and release the power of language into the streets and wildernesses where the wild things live. If you love to read, if you like to write, you have finally come to the right place.” (
Charles Bowden, author of
Murder City, recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman award)
“Stephen Buhner’s
Ensouling Language invites you to sit down for 23 cups of coffee and talk about the mystic journey of the writer, the solitary pilgrim, the witness yearning to tell the world indelible stories that cannot be known by any other voice than yours. If you are a teacher, a writer, a friend of a writer, this book will offer companionship in this life quest. This book harvests lessons from a writer and helpless lover of books who is old in experience but young in perennial devotion.” (
Kim Stafford, director of Northwest Writing Institute and William Stafford Center, Lewis & Clark College, and author of
The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Oth)
“Ensouling Language is a fierce and generous meditation on the writer’s life. Fierce, because Stephen Buhner goes right at prevailing commercial and academic assumptions about literature. For him, writing is above all a portal into vividness, compassion, and discovery. Generous, because he weaves his own quest as a writer into his reflections about the art of nonfiction. Books, in both the reading and the writing, have absorbed him for a lifetime. And the connections he conveys here are always arresting, sometimes extravagant in their intensity, and very often funny. As a writer and a teacher, I’ve learned more from Buhner’s book than from anything I’ve read about writing since the works of John Gardner and William Stafford. I’m truly grateful to him for having written it.” (John Elder, Professor and Director of Breadloaf School of English, Middlebury College, and author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run)
“I can’t easily imagine a more useful book on the craft of writing. Covering all the steps--from glimpsing a first, furtive idea foraging in the mind’s brambles to tracking that idea and coaxing it to unfurl on the page, from finding the right words to securing the right publisher--this volume also, in the process, transforms your take on the universe. For Buhner brings all his inspired lunacy to bear, illustrating his passionate insights with lively stories and poems and with glimmering nuggets from other authors, fashioning this instructive, how-to book into a breathing compendium of word magic.” (David Abram, author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous, winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction)
"Provocation is Buhner's mission in this unusually passionate and delving writer's guide. The author of books about plants, healing, indigenous culture, and the environment, Buhner not only tackles the art of writing with conviction, vigor, expertise, and a touch of devilry but also outspokenly advocates for the maligned form of "genre nonfiction.". . . Buhner sagely covers technical matters and the pragmatic business of book proposals and such, albeit not without lambasting corporate publishing. But his is a heroic view of writing." (Donna Seaman, Booklist, September 2010 )
“Stephen Buhner writes with passion and perception about the entire range of the writer’s experience. He shows us in detail how to write, issues of craft and art, but also how a writer lives--the commitment, the dreaming, the business, the way a writer uncovers secrets on many levels, even how a writer loves and hates.” (Rachel Pollack, author of Godmother Night, recipient of the World Fantasy and the Arthur C. Clarke awards)
