The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft - Softcover

These fourteen thought-provoked essays originated as lectures delivered at a variety of writers conferences. In "Can Mothers Think?," Jane Smiley addresses "the failure of literature to include mothers" and argues that such authors as Toni Morrison, Sue Miller, Alice Walker, and Louise Erdrich are creating "a new literature, the literature of real, live motherhood." Gary Snyder, at the Art of the Wild Conference in Squaw Valley, claims that like ecosystems, "consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild," while over at the Paris Writers Conference, Julian Gloag laments the tentativeness of students who "haven't been trained to think." Michael Dennis Browne proposes that it is a sense of constantly failing to reach perfection that propels us to continue writing; Donald Justice, similarly, discusses the elusiveness of the ideal. Thanks to editor Kurt Brown, we can consume the lean, nourishing meat of the conferences without having first to pick our way through the fat. --Jane Steinberg

This anthology of 14 essays, first delivered as lectures at several writers' conferences around the country, contains some wisdom and inspiration but lacks coherence. Jane Smiley reflects thoughtfully on "the extreme paucity of mothers, and of the tradition of a maternal vision" in our literary culture, and suggests that a new "literature of real, live motherhood" is being forged. Christopher Merrill, reporting on a writers' conference in Slovenia, finds the famous panelists ignoring the nearby Bosnian war and instead haranguing the U.S. government about copyright law. William Kittredge, citing the disenfranchised, suggests, "We need stories that will encourage us toward acts of the imagination that in turn will drive us to the arts of empathy." Agha Shahid Ali criticizes American ethnocentrism for ignoring Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a great Pakistani poet who wrote from Beirut and whose death was front-page news in the Middle East and elsewhere. Several lectures, however, are slight, and despite the book's title, few pieces address the craft of writing. Brown, former director of the Aspen Writers' Conference, is co-founder of Writers' Conferences and Festivals.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.