The Miss Dennis School of Writing

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Editorial Reviews
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Overview

This first book by Pulitzer Prize Winner Alice Steinbach is an intimate, personal collection of essays, remembrances, and columns that follows in the creative non-fiction tradition of Anna Quindlen and May Sarton. While it recounts the experiences and observations of a divorced, working mother, it expresses hopes and fears universal to all women. Steinbach focuses on the big and small things of life: the bond between lifelong friends; coming to grips with loss; the quiet, everyday moments between parents and child; the spiritual connection to nature; the realities of being a single parent. She writes of the people who've touched her own life; the influential teacher; the worldly aunt; the writer hero; the woman sees regularly at a bus stop as both head to work. She offers us beautifully written lessons she's learned during a lifetime of changes and challenges.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In this collection of her essays and columns, Pulitzer Prize-winning Baltimore Sun journalist Steinbach seeks to "rescue from insignificance some of the small events that make up a life." These pieces thus explore, with quiet grace, the unexpected pleasures that are gleaned from an appreciation of the "ordinary"a sleeping cat, a blooming garden, a well-cooked meal. Such familiareven ostensibly mundanedetails of our lives, Steinbach maintains, play a far more important part in shaping our identities and our sense of our relationship to the world than do the "exotic encounters" or momentous events to which we attach much significance. Alternately poignant and humorous, sedately contemplative and bristling with emotional energy, Steinbach's various musings on the daily rhythms of her own moods and experiences transform "everyday life" into a rich and meaningful journey. Author tour. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Steinbach, a columnist and feature writer for the Baltimore Sun and 1985 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, presents in her first book an open, honest, charming, and witty collection of personal essays. Focusing on the familiar, Steinbach relates private thoughts and remembrances of people who influenced her, the loss of loved ones, childhood follies and fantasies, the ever-present continuing lessons from her deceased mother and grandmother, her single motherhood and relationship with two grown sons, romance, fashion, growing up, and parenthood. These essays reveal the influence of time and experience on memory, imagination, and reflection. Steinbach offers an inspirational book that will appeal primarily to women over 30 who will identify with the type of experiences and memories she describes. Recommended for public libraries and comprehensive women's studies collections.Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

Journalist Steinbach is a Pulitzer Prize winner, but the award was given for feature articles written for the Baltimore Sun, not for this motley assortment of reflections on "the small events that make up a life."

In the footsteps of other essayists and columnists—Erma Bombeck and Steinbach's hero E.B. White among them—Steinbach digs for the universal in the personal, and from time to time, she strikes pay dirt. Among her favorite, and more successful, subjects are her sons, her cats (in particular the charismatic Max), and her late mother. Tired and dated are observations on Gloria Steinem, Martha Stewart, and dieting. The essays are corraled into the usual categories, including relationships, raising children, childhood memories, work and growing older, with each section introduced by a brief commentary. The Miss Dennis of the title was the author's ninth-grade creative-writing teacher, who loved Emily Dickinson and directed her students to "pay attention" and to "find [a] unique voice." Steinbach clearly learned how to pay attention—she is, after all, an award-winning reporter—but she is still tuning her rather self- conscious voice. Nevertheless, there are some memorable turns of phrase here. Regarding wishing for the "world on a string" vs. small satisfactions like an uninterrupted supper hour, she says: "Small hopes . . . are a lot like dogs: They tend to come when they're called." There are also tender memories of her mother in the garden and her father on vacation. Steinbach's eye for eloquent detail is conveyed in only a few pieces here, among them "Pioneer Women."

Overall, Miss Dennis would not be happy. Resurrected from the newspaper morgue, these pieces tend to lose whatever punch they may have initially had.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780963124623
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Publication date: 8/28/1996
Pages: 307
Product dimensions: 6.32 (w) x 8.80 (h) x 1.13 (d)

Meet the Author

Alice Steinbach

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Alice Steinbach believes in following the advice of Japanese poet Basho: "To learn of the pine, go to the pine." From her debut travelogue about finding herself in Europe (Without Reservations) to her globe-trotting follow-up, Educating Alice, Steinbach invites readers on delightful vicarious adventures.

Good To Know

In our interview, Steinbach shared some fun and fascinating facts about herself:

"When I was 15 I took a summer job (after giving my age as 16) at a venetian-blind factory. I worked on an assembly line, stringing the cord that runs through the blind, opening and closing it. It was the hardest work I ever hope to do. Eight hours a day with two 15n-minute breaks from the line and a half hour for lunch. I hope one day to incorporate it into a story. The good part was that at the end of the summer, I quit, took the money and spent a week in Manhattan, visiting galleries, seeing plays, and writing down everything I saw."

"It seems as though my future as a ‘travel writer' was foretold. During the last weeks of my mother's life, when she was dying in the hospital, we talked of everything. And one day she told me this story: ‘Do you remember when you were eight years old, and your favorite game was to pretend you were going on a trip? She asked me. You would go to the basement and haul up an old suitcase, cut out a circle of white paper and write on it, PARIS, LONDON, ROME, then paste it on the side. Then you would go to your closet and take out all your clothes, remove them from the hangers and carefully pack the suitcase. You never tired of doing this.'

In the 20 years since my mother died, I have thought often of this, always with pleasure. What a gift to have time to say goodbye to my mother, and what a nice memory to have. If I close my eyes, I see myself again, an 8-year-old, removing my dresses from wire hangers and folding them into neat bundles, fitting them into an old striped suitcase."

"There are three things in life that have never let me down. I call them 'the three C's': children, cats, and coffee."

"I have no hobbies, really, but I do have interests. Collecting Japanese woodblock prints from the Edo period. Writing poetry. Traveling. Pursuing a project that entails writing biographies of a number of old passages in Paris. And, of course, my most intense interest and biggest fantasy: looking for an apartment in Paris."

1. Hometown:
  
  Baltimore, Maryland
1. Education:
  
  University of London, England

	Introduction	1
	The Miss Dennis School of Writing	5
	Women and Men	13
	An Old Flame	15
	Fathers	18
	He Said, She Said	21
	My Funny Valentine	24
	Crossing the Gender Gap	27
	Romance	30
	Women and Confusion	33
	All About Eve	36
	A Matter of Appearance	39
	Youth and Beauty	41
	Fashion: Sense and Non-Sense	44
	Charm School	47
	Losing It	50
	Hair Problems	53
	Fashion: More Sense and Non-Sense	56
	Raising Children	59
	Mother's Day	61
	Thanksgiving at the Holiday Inn	64
	Philosophers	67
	The World on a String	70
	Lost and Found	73
	Letters from Camp	76
	Land of Adolescence	79
	Parents are Forever	82
	The Solo Life	85
	To Wait or Not to Wait	87
	To Share or Not to Share	90
	At the Beauty Spa	93
	One of Us	96
	In the Garden	99
	Unpacking a Life	102
	The Working Life	105
	Having It All	107
	The Opera Singer	110
	Rejection	113
	Success and Failure	116
	Second Acts	119
	Still Betty After All These Years	122
	On Assignment	125
	Growing Up	129
	Counter Culture	131
	Camp Baltimore	134
	Sibling Rivalry	137
	Christmas	140
	Prom Night	143
	Piano Lessons	146
	Girls to Women	149
	The Mocking Birds	152
	Daily Pleasures	155
	One Moment in Time	157
	Camelot	160
	Mail Chauvinist	163
	News of the World	166
	Friends and Recipes	169
	Daily Afflictions	175
	Deconstructive Criticism	177
	Worrying	180
	Cats	183
	Now and Then	186
	Canceled Checks	189
	Perfectionists	192
	A Pain in the Back	195
	Martha Stewart and Me	198
	Role Models	201
	Lessons from a Wise Fox	203
	Well, Here We Are	206
	The Real Me	209
	Taught by Children	212
	Two Unusual People	215
	17 Years, 11 Months, and 13 Days	218
	Pioneer Women	224
	Anne Frank	229
	A Sense of Place	233
	Home	235
	Familiar Strangers	238
	Fifth Grade	241
	My Neighborhood	244
	Beyond Words	247
	The Geography of Hope	250
	As Time Goes By	253
	September Song	255
	Stars	258
	Spending Time	261
	Scents and Sensibility	264
	Signs of Life	267
	The Middle Ages	270
	Before Air Conditioning	273
	Better-Late-Than-Never Mail	276
	Departures	279
	The Girl Who Loved Cats and Flowers	281
	Homer: A Dog's Odyssey	290
	Elegy for Max	293
	Empty Nest	296
	Remembering E. B. White	299
	The Girl Who Loved the Wind	303
	About the Author

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The Miss Dennis School of Writing

Overview

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

Meet the Author

Alice Steinbach

Good To Know

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Rating Distribution

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4 Star

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

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