The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life distills 20 years of teaching and creative thought by the well-published author Priscilla Long. The Writer's Portable Mentor helps writers understand and incorporate the regular practices of virtuoso creators; provides a guide to structuring literary, journalistic, or fictional pieces or entire books; opens the door to the sentence strategies of the masters; provides tools for developing a poet's ear for use in prose; trains writers in the observation skills of visual artists; and guides them toward more effective approaches to getting their work into the world. Says Maya Sonenberg, Director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Washington, "I have never seen anything quite like Priscilla Long's book. It presents a true alternative for the advanced writer."
Photo by Tony Ober.
Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based writer of poetry, essays, creative nonfictions, fictions, science, and history. She is a longtime teacher of writing to developing professional writers.
She writes a blog-column, Science Frictions, which appears every Wednesday on The American Scholar website: http://theamericanscholar.org/. In Science Frictions science rubs up against the rest of life.
Her new book is The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life (2010). The Midwest Book Review called it "a choice advisory and very highly recommended."
"My Brain on My Mind," an abecedarium, appears in the Winter 2010 issue of The American Scholar. "Genome Tome," which also appeared in The American Scholar, received a National Magazine Award for best feature writing.
She is author of Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry (1989). Christopher Hitchens called this "an intense and accomplished social history" (New York Newsday). Barbara Kingsolver called it "One of those rare works that asks and answers important questions about who we are...as a nation and how we got to that point" (Women's Review of Books). Howard Zinn commented, "As a piece of historical investigation, it is superbly done. But it is more than a history of the coal industry; it illuminates the development of the American corporate economy in the late 19th and early 20th century, and gives a rare picture of intense class conflict in a country often presumed to lack that. Her account of the Colorado coal strike is not only impeccably accurate but recaptures the drama and excitement of that astonishing event with rare skill."
Priscilla's essays, short stories, and poems appear widely in literary journals such as The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Southern Poetry Review, Raven Chronicles, North Dakota Quarterly, The American Scholar, Ontario Review, The Seattle Review, Chattahoochee Review, Passages North, Painted Bride Quarterly, Under The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Cincinnati Review.
She was a Hedgebrook Writer in Residence in 2012 and a Jack Straw writer in 2009. Her awards also include the Richard Hugo House Founder's Award and awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and the Los Angeles Arts Commission.
She reads her poetry and prose widely, and performed with the Seattle Five Plus One poets during most of the group's existence in the 1990s.
She serves as Senior Editor of www.HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history.
She graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and has a Master's of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the University of Washington.
She was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Her grandparents on her mother's side were Pennsylvania Dutch. Her paternal grandmother was Scottish, and her paternal grandfather, Walter Long, was descended from the Winslow family, English farmers who migrated to New England in the 1600s.
Walter Long was a reporter for The Philadelpia Bulletin and his grandfather, Stephen Winslow (1826-1907), edited the Philadelphia Commercial List and was known as "the grand old man in the newspaper life of Philadelphia."
