Something that you feel will find its own form. Jack Kerouac I’ve shared Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones with a lot of readers, who went on to do writing practice or freewriting. But what does…
A professor had a wife who never had dinner ready on time and every day he had to sit around waiting. Suddenly it occurred to him that he could utilize this time and he began…
I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was…
The basic function of literature, as far as I can say, is to entertain the spirit in a very big way. —Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell, p. 75.
Often quoting Stendhal to the effect that one should “write every day, whether inspired or not,” Alain encouraged his students to sit down at a desk and write prolifically, as he did, at least two…
I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. –Natalie Goldberg, Writing down the Bones
My job has been to spread the writing gospel. –Natalie Goldberg, The True Secret of Writing Sao Paulo; photo by Mev, September 1990
[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping. A card index of all imaginable inhumanities. Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…
Recently my friend Lindsay Wolff inquired if I was doing a writing class this fall. Giving it some thought, I decided to offer the following just because I thought it could be (1) a fun …
In a sense, everything Proust wrote was a rehearsal for the Search, but the important point—made clear by his many anguished doubts about whether or not he was a novelist—is that until he found the…