Writers and Their Notebooks

by Diana M. Raab, Phillip Lopate

Overview

A peek inside the writerly testing grounds of Sue Grafton, Kim Stafford, Maureen Stanton, and others

This collection of essays by well-established professional writers explores how their notebooks serve as their studios and workshops—places to collect, to play, and to make new discoveries with language, passions, and curiosities. For these diverse writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice, whether crafting fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Some entries include sample journal entries that have since developed into published pieces. Through their individual approaches to keeping a notebook, the contributors offer valuable advice, personal recollections, and a hardy endorsement of the value of using notebooks to document, develop, and nurture a writer's creative spark.

Designed for writers of all genres and all levels of experience, Writers and Their Notebooks celebrates the notebook as a vital tool in a writer's personal and literary life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781570038662
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	01/15/2010
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

An essayist, memoirist, and poet, Diana M. Raab is an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She is the author of three poetry collections, Dear Anaïs: My Life in Poems for You, The Guilt Gene, and My Muse Undresses Me, and the memoir Regina's Closet: Finding My Grandmother's Secret Journal—winner of numerous awards including the 2009 Mom's Choice Award for Adult Nonfiction and the 2008 Indie Excellence Award for Memoir.

What People are Saying About This

Phillip Lopate

I salute the editor of this valuable collection, Diana Raab, who has done such a sensitive job of gathering these diverse, eloquent, and experienced voices and encouraging their thoughtful, heartbreaking, rambunctious, free flights of testimony and speculation into being. Freedom is a frequent theme in these pages. The freedom to try out things, to write clumsy sentences when no one is looking, to be unfair, immature, even to be stupid. No one can expect to write well who would not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer's notebook is a safe place for such experiments to be undertaken.

Editorial Reviews

I salute the editor of this valuable collection, Diana Raab, who has done such a sensitive job of gathering these diverse, eloquent, and experienced voices and encouraging their thoughtful, heartbreaking, rambunctious, free flights of testimony and speculation into being. Freedom is a frequent theme in these pages. The freedom to try out things, to write clumsy sentences when no one is looking, to be unfair, immature, even to be stupid. No one can expect to write well who would not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer s notebook is a safe place for such experiments to be undertaken. Phillip Lopate, from the foreword

From the Publisher