Spotlight: Storyteller (Review)
A review of Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop by Kate Wilhelm
Tell me a story. Tell me a story about telling stories. Tell me about before there was the Internet, and people wrote with heavy machines that went clunk-clunk, and they wrote their dreams on paper, and then the papers got burned up. And then they started again and became famous.
Well, what you want to hear is Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop by Kate Wilhelm.
Storyteller is a 190-page story about telling stories, not a novel, not a biography, not a tutorial, not a reference. Just a story. It’s part memoir, part instruction guide. Kate Wilhelm tells of her days as instructor of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, from the days when she co-founded it, funding was non-existent, and they couldn’t even find a location that wanted to host the workshop, through thick and thick, reading manuscripts, learning to teach, mediating the frivolity that students found to release the pressure, rejoicing in it, then tearing out the hearts of her students with a red pencil, tutoring names that went on to become successful, well-known writers, editors, and teachers. These students fill out a vast array of personalities, no two alike, and I marvelled at the diverse approaches that worked for different people.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function tweetmeme() in /home/timk/bethestory.com/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()'d code on line 3 |