The Muses Among Us
Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft
Publication Year: 2003
Informing The Muses Among Us are Stafford's own convictions about writing--principles to which he returns again and again. We must, Stafford says, honor the fragments, utterances, and half-discovered truths voiced around us, for their speakers are the prophets to whom writers are scribes. Such filaments of wisdom, either by themselves or alloyed with others, give rise to our poems, stories, and essays. In addition, as Stafford writes, "all pleasure in writing begins with a sense of abundance--rich knowledge and boundless curiosity." By recommending ways for students to seek beyond the self for material, Stafford demystifies the process of writing and claims for it a Whitmanesque quality of participation and community.
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Writing Daily, Writing in Tune
There was a physicist who played the violin. One morning he took his fiddle to the lab, wrapped it green with felt, clamped it gently in a vise, and trained the electron microscope close on the spruce belly, just beside the sound hole, where a steel peg was set humming at a high...

Scribe to the Prophet
She is dressed in simple gray before us. Into the meetinghouse without image or emblem, I have come with my friends, a group of touring writers. We call ourselves "The Forgotten Language Tour," and we have turned aside from our performance circuit through Iowa to visit...

Looking for Mr. Nu
When I conducted a writing workshop in Port Angeles, Washington, someone asked, "How do you write an essay?" That was our topic, and I was the visiting expert hired to know. But somehow the question stalled me. I couldn't explain. We went around the table and told something...

Personal Memory and Fictional Character
For years I have gone to class unprepared to teach. Please don't tell my dean. I don't want to live this way, and I'm sometimes stricken with guilt. But the world is such a busy place, and the phone rings, the inbox fills with mail I feel I must answer, and I'm so optimistic about...

Open Discovery in the Art of Creative Nonfiction
I have learned from a friend about a legal process called "open discovery." This requires the prosecutor and the defense attorney to hide nothing. Each clue one discovers is given to the other. When all clues have been shared, their work in court is to compose the strongest...

Writing in the Open
Where does your writing actually get done—in time, and in space? What have been the conditions that, perhaps unpredictably, produced your most interesting work? Are there places or times you would consider impossible to write? Are there places or times you believe would...

Selfish Pleasures in a Life of Art: A Speech to the Graduating Class
What is the speed of life? I remember two sensations from my youth. One, that I would last forever, a euphoria of eternity with the earth. Second, that I would suddenly end, that my whole long life would collapse into a moment...
E-ISBN-13: 9780820340364
E-ISBN-10: 0820323241
Print-ISBN-13: 9780820323244
Page Count: 152
Publication Year: 2003
OCLC Number: 835768316
MUSE Marc Record: Download for The Muses Among Us