A provocative and anti-intuitive manual for making fresh art.
An award-winning poet, memoirist, and critic offers unorthodox advice in this update to his guide for aspiring writers.
Writing teachers generally advise their students to write every day, often in the morning, sometimes for a set period of time or number of words. Biespiel (Poet-in-residence/Oregon State Univ.; Republic Café, 2019, etc.), whose honors have included a Lannan Foundation fellowship, urges young writers to resist that level of regularity. In fact, he advises them to resist writing itself. “Put off the first draft for as long as possible…because as soon as you make the first draft, a certain end is in sight and it may not be the end you want.” Eschew the draft-and-revise method taught in most writing workshops. Replace it with blur-and-get-lost. Confused? That’s part of Biespiel’s point. The author hopes to shake readers out of their entrenched habits and into new and uncomfortable ones—for comfort, like routine, is the way to stagnation. His book is not just about how to write, but how to keep writing: not just for as long as it takes to compose a poem or a novel but for an entire career. The process is the same for all arts, Biespiel says, which should make his book as helpful to painters and musicians as to poets. His prose rattles along in a buoyant patter that seems almost improvised: “To write, to make art, to dance, to make music, is to figure and refigure. You’re after not just the freedom to play, but a path to explore your interests, to probe and burrow, to alter and shuffle, to tack, to waffle, to recalibrate, to turn the corner.” His concept of the “word-palette” (a kind of brainstorming technique that makes connections between disparate elements) is particularly intriguing. Biespiel’s methods won’t feel right for everyone—they might suit woolgathering poets better than page-counting novelists—but his approach differs markedly from that of most writing guides. In a spirited foreword, Fight Club author Palahniuk, describes his own approach: “God bless interruptions. Any time my dog or my accountant takes me away from the task of writing, I feel irked, but I know I’ll return to work with a renewed passion for what might too easily become just a job.”
A provocative and anti-intuitive manual for making fresh art.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9827838-4-9
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Kelson Books
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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