The Life Writing Class

Twenty people coming together in a creative synergy in the Life Writing Tutorial at the Huntington (WV) Museum of Art made for serendipity. The class's work bubbled over into this book of true-life tales, a number of which are headed for publication as books on their own.

Here you will find stories of training to be a champion skater in windswept isolation, of doing a delirious dance on a Florida dock as an antidote to a crushing marital separation, of trembling in bed waiting for a Soviet nuclear attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis, of Ndlazi the witch doctor operating out of a smoke-darkened hut in South Africa, of a child being chased by a cherry-red gobbler turkey, of visiting the cell in a crumbling prison where the writer's grandfather had died -- and considerably more.

For men and women of all ages who aspire to be published, The Life Writing Class is a welcome ray of inspiration and hope!

From the Introduction:

Once class members had made their choices of what life writing mode they wished to commit to, they worked amazingly well at home. . . . As they were each writing something different, there were, once we got past the warm-up writing exercises, no required word lengths for each week's draftings. It seemed that the dynamic of the class itself inspired serious, and sustained work. . . .

The classic question debated among writing teachers has always been, "Can writing be taught? Or is it 'caught'?" I incline more to the "It's caught" school, but in Huntington we had writing fever in the air, and if class members caught writing from anybody, they caught it from each other.

--John Patrick Grace, Editor