Sewanee Writers on Writing (Southern Literary Studies) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807126314 ISBN 13: 9780807126318

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 2000

Synopsis

For two weeks every year, literary figures from throughout the country gather in rural Sewanee, Tennessee, to lead the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a series of workshops and colloquia aimed at cultivating the craft of writing. Gleaned from the first ten conferences, the "craft" lectures collected inDisclosing Craft offer a range of perspectives on writing as practiced by various playwrights, poets, and fiction writers whose gifts have made the Sewanee conference a mecca for developing talent.

The essays offer a banquet of topics that will whet the appetite of all authors, professional and amateur. Russell Banks ponders the role of research in the constitutive power of the imagination, John Casey considers simultaneity in art, and Ellen Douglas describes how a writer confronts the changing shape of memory.

Reviewing the many changes he has witnessed in his distinguished career as a playwright, Horton Foote offers his perspective on the collaborative spirit of the theater, and Ernest Gaines explains why his subject matter must always remain the people of Louisiana. Anthony Hecht responds to W. H. Auden, revealing the ways both poets pair talent with subject, and in a discussion of Robert Frost, John Hollander explores the delicate subtleties of Frost's figurative thought.

Diane Johnson offers a witty and frank answer to the question all writers face at one time or another: "Write what?" Donald Justice expounds on the virtues of obscurity in poetry, and Romulus Linney offers practical guidelines for using dramatic action to revise a play. In her examination of Nabokov's Bend Sinister, Alice McDermott demonstrates that fiction writers are bound by no rules other than "do whatever you can get away with." Marsha Norman provides a witty list of the dos and don'ts of playwriting and Francine Prose stresses the importance of detail to a story's credibility. Finally, volume editor Wyatt Prunty discusses the figure of vacancy in the stories of Flannery O'Connor and Peter Taylor.

About this title

Review

In 1983, Sewanee, the University of the South, received a donation from Tennessee Williams's estate to be used to encourage "creative writing and creative writers." In 1989, poet Wyatt Prunty founded the Sewanee Writers' Conference, which meets on the rural Tennessee campus for two weeks each July. The 14 craft lectures gathered in Sewanee Writers on Writing were culled from those given--by Donald Justice, Romulus Linney, Francine Prose, and others--during the conference's first decade. This is a strange stew: there are fiction writers, poets, and playwrights; some of the essays are personal, others academic. Diane Johnson talks about finding one's subject; the question "write what?" she says, "does not automatically have an answer any more than a hunger pang comes complete with a slice of chocolate cake." Marsha Norman likens a play to a ski lift: "What you want from a ski lift is to get in, ride to the top of the mountain, get out, look at the view, say 'Wow,' and go home." Anthony Hecht and John Hollander contribute more scholarly pieces, about Auden and Frost, respectively. And Alice McDermott rails against the very thought of telling people how to write. "You can do whatever you can get away with," she says. McDermott cites Nabokov's Bend Sinister as proof, showing that the novel is full of examples "that would never pass muster in any number of writing workshops." Mishmash? Sure. But it works. Each morsel has a distinct flavor; together, they provide a wonderful sense of what it must be like to consort with these writers in a place that Prunty touts for its "remoteness without cultural dislocation." --Jane Steinberg

About the Author

Wyatt Prunty is director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference and editor of the Sewanee Writers' Series at the University of the South. He is the author of several poetry collections--including Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems and What Women Know, What Men Believe--and Fallen from the Symboled World: Precedents for the New Formalism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0807126314
• ISBN 13: 9780807126318
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 184
• Editor: Prunty Wyatt