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| Library status: currently open during regularly scheduled hours. |
American Creative Non-Fiction by
Several essays survey the critical conversation regarding American creative non-fiction, an interesting collection of memoirs, autobiographies, travel and nature guides and essays and explore the genre's cultural and historical contexts and offer close and comparative reading of key texts in the genre, including In Cold Blood, A Moveable Feast, The Big Sea, and Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ""Works Cited,"" along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources.
Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction by
Ever since the term "creative nonfiction" first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. This debate over ethics, however, has sidelined important questions of literary form. Bending Genre does not ask where the boundaries between genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from today's leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and David Shields. Each writer's innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.
Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction by
Contemporary discussions on nonfiction are often riddled with questions about the boundaries between truth and memory, honesty and artifice, facts and lies. Just how much truth is in nonfiction? How much is a lie? Blurring the Boundaries sets out to answer such questions while simultaneously exploring the limits of the form. This collection features twenty genre-bending essays from today's most renowned teachers and writers--including original work from Michael Martone, Marcia Aldrich, Dinty W. Moore, Lia Purpura, and Robin Hemley, among others. These essays experiment with structure, style, and subject matter, and each is accompanied by the writer's personal reflection on the work itself, illuminating his or her struggles along the way. As these innovative writers stretch the limits of genre, they take us with them, offering readers a front-row seat to an ever-evolving form. Readers also receive a practical approach to craft thanks to the unique writing exercises provided by the writers themselves. Part groundbreaking nonfiction collection, part writing reference, Blurring the Boundaries serves as the ideal book for literary lovers and practitioners of the craft.
A Companion to Creative Writing by
A Companion to Creative Writing comprehensively considers key aspects of the practice, profession and culture of creative writing in the contemporary world. The most comprehensive collection specifically relating to the practices and cultural and professional place of creative writing Covers not only the "how" of creative writing, but many more topics in and around the profession and cultural practices surrounding creative writing Features contributions from international writers, editors, publishers, critics, translators, specialists in public art and more Covers the writing of poetry, fiction, new media, plays, films, radio works, and other literary genres and forms Explores creative writing's engagement with culture, language, spirituality, politics, education, and heritage
Creative Writer's Style Guide: Rules and Advice for Writing Fiction and Creative Nonfiction by
This title provides the rules of grammar, punctuation and style as well as advice on effective writing. It arises out of 25 years of both writing fiction and teaching creative writing at university level.
Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America by
'A. Robert Lee dazzles us once again with his knowledge of many different literatures. He has set a high standard for those who are bound to one tradition. Designs of Blackness is a very cogent examination of 20th century African-American literature.' Ishmael Reed'This erudite compilation sets out to cover no less than the whole of what could be termed the Afro-American literary canon.' European Association for American Studies Newsletter'Lee is a remarkable writer, erudite and readable at once.' David Dabydeen, University of WarwickAcross more than two centuries, Afro-America has created a huge variety of literary self-expression. In examining the work of writers as diverse as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, LeRoi Jones/Imamu Amiri Baraka and Leon Forrest in the twentieth century, A. Robert Lee meets this abundant play of imagination head on, presenting an intertextual series of mappings of figures and forms in the making of African American literature.Designs of Blackness views this rich literary tradition in the context of a larger corpus of black arts which typically encompasses the cinema of Spike Lee, Bessie Smith's blues, Romare Bearsden's canvases, the photographic work of Gordon Parks, Martin Luther King's oratory, and Muhammad Ali's boxing athleticism and early sass. Professor Lee examines both high and popular black styles, from slave writing, through the diaspora and the Middle Passage as memory, to postmodernism and cultural styles like rap. Particular attention is given to the formative periods of black history - the early black feminism of the 1890s, the New Negro 1920s and the Black Power and Civil Rights of the 1960s. Despite so spacious a coverage Professor Lee keeps his focus sharp and in so doing provides a radical reassessment of the cultural history of Afro-America.
Language, Thought, Art and Existence: Creative Nonfictions by 
The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook by
Grand themes and complex plots are just the beginning of a great piece of fiction. Mastering the nuts and bolts of grammar and prose mechanics is also an essential part of becoming a literary artist. This indispensable guide, created just for writers of fiction, will show you how to take your writing to the next level by exploring the finer points of language. Funny, readable, and wise, this book explores the tools of the fiction writer’s trade, from verb tenses to pronouns to commas and beyond. Filled with examples from the best-seller lists of today and yesterday, it will help you consider the hows and whys of language, and how mastery of them can be used to achieve clarity and grace of expression in your own work. Here, you’ll find Encouragement and advice to face the big questions: Past or present tense? Comma or semicolon? Italic or roman? Should your dialogue be phonetically rendered, or follow standard rules of grammar? (And where does that pesky quotation mark go, again?) Warning signs of the betrayal of language, and ways to avoid it: Unwitting rhymes, repetition, redundancy, clich#65533;, and the inevitable failure of vocabulary How-to (and how-not-to) examples: The grammatical “mistakes” of Charles Dickens; ambiguous pronoun usage by Nathaniel Hawthor≠ the minefield of paragraph fragments found in one of today’s most successful authors.
The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry by
This highly politicized and intensely personal work bravely and eloquently argues for a reconceptualization of gender, sexuality, race, art, nationalism, and the politics of survival.
Milk and Honey by
There is a poem in As Far As I Can See (AUP, 1999) that imagines a future time: They gave me flowers and asked where I would go. To open the eyes of the soul, I said. There is a way but this is only the first gate. 'Milk and Honey' is a dance to the music of that future time. It looks back and remembers. It looks forward and tries to see what will happen next. Its theatre is the world turning round and what can be saved each day from a life of the imagination. It builds tentative structures from smaller parts that come and go like thought itself. It is a lamentation, the universe as circus. It is a pattern of doors opening. It counts and it listens. It is a series of border-crossings between light and dark, old world and new, history and desire, body and soul, life and death, yes and no. It is a attempt on happiness, another search for the oh of transformation. It is in three parts with a gateway at either end. It can be read from the front or the back and there is seriousness but also songs along the way. Why is it called milk and honey? Because of a song. Why are there two clowns on the cover? Because one morning they were front-page news.
Myths of Oppression: Revisited in Cherrie Moraga's and Liz Lochhead's Drama by
Inci Bilgin Tekin's study offers a comparative perspective on two very challenging contemporary female playwrights, Liz Lochhead and Cherrie Moraga, and their Scottish and Chicanese adaptations of myths - such as the Greek Medea and Oedipus or the Mayan Popul Vuh - which address ethnic, racial, gender, and hierarchical oppression. Her book incorporates postcolonial and feminist readings of Lochhead's and Moraga's plays while it also explores different mythologies on the background. Bilgin Tekin not only introduces an original point of view on Liz Lochhead's and Cherrie Moraga's plays as adaptations or rewrites, but also calls attention to the non-canonized Scottish, Aztec, and Mayan mythologies. Following an innovative approach, she discusses the question in which ways Lochhead's and Moraga's adaptations of myths are challenges to the canon and further suggests a feminist version of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.The study appeals to readers of mythology, drama, and comparative literature. Those interested in postcolonial and feminist theories will also gain valuable new insights.
Nonfiction by
This title examines the genre of nonfiction in Enchanted Air, Brown Girl Dreaming, Chasing Lincoln's Killer, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. It features four analysis papers that consider nonfiction, each using different critical lenses, writing techniques, or aspects of the genre. Critical thinking questions, sidebars highlighting and explaining each thesis and argument, and other possible approaches for analysis help students understand the mechanics of essay writing. Features include a glossary, references, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Our Very Own Adventure: Towards a Poetics of the Short Story by
Our Very Own Adventure demonstrates the main convention of the short story; specifically the heightened reader response that Carolyne Lee terms 'narratorial presence'. The intensity of the short story encourages readers to appropriate the fictive world, as rendered through one or more represented subjectivities in the narrative. Lee argues that this narratorial presence is the enabling effect of the tale's telling. Each chapter examines a group of stories (by authors such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ray Bradbury and Alice Munro) that share basic similarities, but where the narratorial presence differs due to differing techniques. Our Very Own Adventure reveals just how a story yields its meanings to a reader.
Reading U. S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature by 
Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek by
This addition to Rodopi Press's Dialogue Series presents a collection of essays solely dedicated to Woman Hollering Creek (1991), Sandra Cisneros's groundbreaking collection of short fiction stories and sketches. The emerging and veteran scholars who have contributed to this text approach Cisneros's work from varied perspectives, including negotiation of geographic and sociocultural borders, popular and material culture, and gender portrayals. Author dialogues, in which the scholars comment upon each other's research, constitute a unique, innovative feature of this particular volume. This book will be of interest to those engaged in Chicano/a literature and feminist/gender studies, as well as instructors of literary critical analysis.
The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook: Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci by
In this engaging creative writing workbook, novelist and poet Linda Lappin presents a series of insightful exercises to help writers of all genres--literary travel writing, memoir, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction--discover imagery and inspiration in the places they love. Lappin departs from the classical concept of the Genius Loci, the indwelling spirit residing in every landscape, house, city, or forest--to argue that by entering into contact with the unique energy and identity of a place, writers can access an inexhaustible source of creative power. The Soul of Place provides instruction on how to evoke that power. The writing exercises are drawn from many fields--architecture, painting, cuisine, literature and literary criticism, geography and deep maps, Jungian psychology, fairy tales, mythology, theater and performance art, metaphysics--all of which offer surprising perspectives on our writing and may help us uncover raw materials for fiction, essays, and poetry hidden in our environment. An essential resource book for the writer’s library, this book is ideal for creative writing courses, with stimulating exercises adaptable to all genres. For writers or travelers about to set out on a trip abroad, The Soul of Place is the perfect road trip companion, attuning our senses to a deeper awareness of place.
Studying Creative Writing - Successfully by
If you're studying creative writing at a university or college, or considering doing so, this book will: show you what to expect from your course of study, demystify the habitual practices of the field, help you maximize your learning (including online), and advise you on how to sustain yourself as a writer after graduation. It offers a practical guide through the creative writing landscape for both undergraduate and graduate studies. Chapters give guidance on everything from developing ideas to revising your draft, from how to 'read as a writer' to how to give a reading, and from the mysteries of grading and critical and reflective studies to the opportunities afforded by literary citizenship. Between them the eleven contributors have had well over a hundred years of experience in teaching and studying the subject. All scholars at American universities or colleges, their creative work spans poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Chapters and contributors: 1.Making the Creative Writing Major Work for You: Planning Now for the Best Outcome by Stephanie Vanderslice, 2. Studying Creative Writing at Today's College or University: What Should I Expect and What Skills Should I Bring? by Trent Hergenrader, 3. Reading as a Writer, Writing as a Reader by Tim Mayers, 4.Invention: Get Started and Keep Going by Travis Nicholson, 5. Revising Your Writing: Strategies for Improving your Work Draft by Draft by Mary Ann Cain, 6. Presenting Your Writing: How to Give a Reading by Garry Craig Powell, 7. The Critical and Reflective Study in Creative Writing: How to Write Them and Why by Dianne Donnelly, 8. Grading Creative Writing: How It's Done and Why by Julie Platt, 9.Learning Creative Writing in Cyberspace: Getting the Most out of an Online Writing Course by Joseph Rein, 10.Beyond Graduation: Sustaining Yourself as a Writer by Anna Leahy, 11. Literary Citizenship: How to Contribute to the Literary Community and Why You Should by Donna Steiner.
Telling True Stories: Navigating the Challenges of Writing Narrative Non-Fiction by
Explores the key challenges in writing narrative non-fiction, and shows how some of the best in the business do it - an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to tell true stories well.
To the Budding Creative Writer: A Handbook by
To the Budding Creative Writer: A Handbook is designed to help young writers come to grips with questions and problems relative to their creative efforts. The authors discuss a range of topics, providing guidelines on such issues as style, technique, point of view, characterization, poetic diction, figurative language, denotation and connotation, etc. They equally offer useful critical comments on some of the works of accomplished African writers whom they cite as models for beginning writers, fusing literary creativity with literary criticism. All along the co-authors stress the centrality, in imaginative writing, of both the 'what' and the 'how' or matter and manner, and how to combine both to good effect.
Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature by 
Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction by 
Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction by
Taking off from "The Creative WriterOCOs Survival Guide," John McNallyOCOsrelentlessly blunt, bracingly cheerful, and immensely helpful map to "being" a writer, "Vivid and Continuous"is an equally blunt, cheerful, and helpful map to "learning" to be a writer. While acknowledging that many fine books cover such essentials of fiction writing as point of view, characterization, and setting, McNally sets out in this new bookOCointended as a supplement to beginning fiction-writing classes or as the sole text for upper-level or graduate coursesOCoto solve the tricky second-tier problems that those books cover only in footnotes."Vivid and Continuous" takes its inspiration from John Gardner, whose essential truths in "On Becoming a Novelist" clarified McNallyOCOs goal of communicating a OC vivid and continuous dreamOCO with his own writing. In fifteen concise, energizing chapters, he dispenses advice gained from almost thirty years of studying, writing, and teaching. How do you avoid the pitfalls inherent in the most common subjects for stories? How do you create memorable minor characters? What about managing references to pop culture without distracting your readers, revising a story to bring its subtext into focus, or exploring the twenty most common craft-related quirks that lessen immediacy for your readers? How do you keep from overdosing on similes and metaphors or relying on too many flashbacks to provide necessary backstory? How do you learn to listen when your story tries to talk to you? Finally, how can you resist OC John McNallyOCOs Sure-Fire Formula for Becoming Funnier in 30 DaysOCO?McNally cites many novels and short stories as examples that best illustrate the lessons he wants to impart, the writerOCOs life, or the writerOCOs craft, as well as his own favorite authorsOCO novels and short story collections. Exercises at the end of each chapter reinforce its point and serve as practical catalysts for new writings and directions.Just blunt enough to get your attention but not blunt enough to crush you, challenging but not discouraging, personal but not ego-ridden, snarky but not mean, John McNally will prompt you to think more deeply about a variety of issues that will push you toward writing more meaningful, more accomplished work.a
Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood by
Cherrie Moraga, the celebrated Chicana lesbian writer, has crafted a jewel of a book in Waiting In The Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. This is the story of "one small human being's struggle for survival", the author's two-and-one-half pound premature baby boy. While the specifics belong to Moraga and her loved ones -- her large close-knit biological clan; her long-term partner; the child's father -- the tale is told in common with every woman who has experienced the wonder and terror of pregnancy, the trauma of a child's near-death. What is uncommon is that the mother is a lesbian, a writer, a Chicana -- all in the same breath of her storytelling. "Lesbians don't make babies with our lovers", she writes. "Our blood doesn't mix". What does mix in Waiting In The Wings are blood and queer relations, Mexican Catholicism and Indian ceremony, butch and femme, life and death -- creating the carne y huesos not only of a baby, but of a family. Familia the author holds to in the grip of labor, sister in one hand, lover in the other. Family whose history she sees written in the dried parchment that is a dying uncle's skin. "I am trying to write about the impossible. The ordinary beginning and ending of a life", Cherrie Moraga tells us. So ordinary, in fact, that perhaps Waiting In The Wings is not that "queer" after all.
A Writer's Guide to Fiction by
The second book in the Writer's Compass series from professional writing instructor Elizabeth Lyon offers both aspiring and established authors the fundamentals of writing and selling a great novel or short story. In addition to the basics of characterization, plot, pacing, and theme, A Writer's Guide to Fiction also features a plan for revising fiction, a guide to marketing, samples of cover and query letters, and methods of honing the writing craft.