Dale SalwakBesprekingen

Writers and Their Teachers, edited by Dale Salwak, brings together 20 essays by writers discussing their most influential teachers, in the broadest sense of the term.

This is an excellent book for anyone who likes to read something relatively short before bed that leans heavily toward the positive. From warm remembrances to interesting anecdotes, these essays show just how important the right person can be at the right time in someone's life. In this case, teachers/mentors.

This can, for an active reader, be a wonderful source of ways to reach your own students, not just writing students. Admittedly this is not designed for that purpose, but one hopes that anyone teaching creative writing is creative and active enough in their reading to find the core of each of these essays and translate most of them into actions that might have a positive affect on their students. Unless, of course, the "teacher" needs a step-by-step regimen, which pretty much means she/he may well be employed as a teacher but she/he is not an educator.

Recommended for those wanting memoirish essays about mentorship for pleasure reading as well as those looking for tidbits for being a more effective writer or educator. Though finding those tidbits does require being a creative and active reader and not a passive reader that needs one's hand held.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.½

This little volume is divided into six topical chapters, four with additional sections, populated with quotes by people whose credentials indicate they know something about the wonders of solitude. Authors, scholars, philosophers, politicians, historical figures, doctors of various disciplines, artists and musicians, spiritual and religious leaders, and many others provide pithy insights about the philosophies of solitude. Following are chapter titles and one quote from each chapter:

A Noisy World
"The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak." Spinoza, Dutch philosopher

Solitude as Discovery
"The choice of solitude is not so much a rejection of community as a recognition that certain experiences and truths are so alien to ordinary consciousness that the individual must withdraw in order to experience them." Carol P. Christ, American professor

Solitude as Inspiration
"Creative times are quiet, very secretive, and lustful." Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director

Solitude and the Natural World
"People talk about the silence of nature, but of course there is no such thing. What they mean is that our voices are still, our noises absent." Sue Halpern, American professor

Other Places of Solitude
"There is a hush in a house on the morning after death, a silence that would be violated by too many words." Emily Dickinson, American poet

The Power of Silence
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact." George Eliot, British novelist

Hugh Prather wrote the foreword, and Dan Salwak wrote the introduction. An extensive bibliographic index completes the work.

This book was very intriguing. This was a series of essays written by various authors on an interesting topic. The authors were asked if they could talk to any dead author who would it be and what would the conversation be like. This book is the compilation of those answers.

The interesting part is that the authors who were questioned were all from various walks of life and genres. So the responses were not always along the same lines. Some were much more serious. While others were very light hearted.

My favorite essay was called A Traveling Coincidence by Ann Thwaite. In this essay, Ann finds herself seated on a train across from four unlikely seatmates. They are Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse, a very young A.A. Milne, and a recently widowed Emily Tennyson. Ann finds herself fascinated by the conversation that these four great minds have.

If I had the chance to be able to speak with a dead author, there is only one person that I would really love to speak with. That would most definitely be Edgar Allan Poe. I have always been fascinated by him. I have no clue what I would say beyond introducing myself.

If you had the chance to speak with a dead author, who would it be?

In conjunction with the Wakela's World Disclosure Statement, I received a product in order to enable my review. No other compensation has been received. My statements are an honest account of my experience with the brand. The opinions stated here are mine alone.

AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead is one of the first books I requested from NetGalley because it’s a collection of essays about writers and books, and I love a good collection about writers and books. I was a little disappointed in it, though; I thought the book’s idea sounded promising, but either I was mistaken about that, or the execution didn’t live up to the possibilities. I think the problem may be that the essays were uneven and perhaps, generally speaking, a little too short. They didn’t dig into their subjects deeply enough and so left me feeling a little dissatisfied.

The premise is that in each essay, a writer imagines a meeting with his or her favorite author, or perhaps an author he or she has written about or grappled with in some fashion. The various essayists tackle this task in different ways, some pretending that they have traveled back in time, some imagining they are meeting their subject in the present day or in some nebulous in-between space. In some cases, the authors know about things that have happened after their deaths, and in others they don’t.

Read the rest of the review at Of Books and Bicycles.

This book provides several different benefits to its reader. As the title suggests you get a book filled with diverse writing about the passion readers have for books. But you also are entertained by a selection of wonderful essays that demonstrate that art while covering the titled topic. The interested reader is presented with a cornucopia of ideas and suggestions for reading based on the authors' passions. These passions include general topics like "Books in My Life" by G. Thomas Tanselle or essays on obsessions with individual writers like Mann and Larkin. There are also excursions into the connections between reading and art, theater, or music. And most poignant are the discussions of the impact of one's family on the life of reading and its impact on the soul. The result is something for almost everyone except, perhaps the solipsistic reader who while immersed in a book is disconnected with the rest of the world. I've heard such creatures exist, but for the rest of us readers there is the passion for books.

An insightful, most enjoyable, appreciative compilation of essays in three sections: as the Preface explains, ‘the [four] essays in Part I consider Barbara Pym’s life; those [eleven] in Part II evaluate her novels’ and those [four] in Part III ‘discuss her human and artistic achievement’. The writers are John Bayley (‘Where, exactly, is the Pym world?’), Hazel Holt (‘The novelist in the field: 1946-74’), Philip Larkin (‘The rejection of Barbara Pym’), Robert Liddell (‘A success story’), A. L. Rowse (‘Miss Pym and Miss Austen’), and 14 more.
Muriel Schulz draws a detailed and fascinating comparison between the novelist’s methods and records and those of the anthropologist, both involving research into people. Lotus Snow’s ‘Literary Allusions in the Novels’, of which Hazel Holt wrote (in her obituary of Lotus Snow in Green Leaves Nov. 2000), ‘it must always be required reading for all Pym scholars’, is reprinted here. Snow identifies all the many quotations and allusions in the novels, drawing conclusions as to Pym’s ‘range of knowledge and her preferences among the English poets and novelists’, finding that ‘More Victorian than Romantic poets are alluded to in the novels’, and ‘Pym’s characters are not passionate devotees of the novel as they are of poetry’.
The volume has lost none of its validity, or its appeal to Pym devotees, in the fourteen years since its publication.