Jump Start: How to Write From Everyday Life

For years, Robert Wolf traveled around the Midwest and the South teaching small town folk, farmers, and homeless individuals to write about their lives through poems, essays and fiction. Through his own small publishing company, Free River Press, Wolf published these stories of the forgotten parts of America. In 1999, Oxford published an anthology of his students' works in a volume entitled American Mosaic: Poetry and Prose by Everyday Folk.
Now, we have Jump Start--a concise guide that offers Wolf's writing techniques from his Free River Press workshops across the country. Rooted in the oral tradition, Wolf's methods include storytelling, visualization, spontaneous prose composition, and sketching. Useful for both the individual and groups as well as for beginning or practiced writers, his concrete techniques are flexible enough to be applied towards any form (poetry, composition, non-fiction, plays, etc.). With the inclusion of writing samples from past workshop participants, Wolf's main emphasis is that people from all walks of life, even with no previous background in writing, may produce meaningful and memorable work.

Robert Wolf is Executive Director of the Free River Press. He is a writer and teacher who has lived and worked in many regions of the country and now runs private seminars and workshops. He is the author of An American Mosaic: Poetry and Prose by Everyday Folk (OUP, 1999). He lives near Lansing, Iowa.