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The Next Draft: Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop
The Next Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop brings together a selection of the “morning talks” delivered by the renowned authors who teach at the prestigious Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. These morning talks are a highlight of the residencies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, featuring inspiring, innovative approaches to writing and literature across genres. For this collection, Brenda Miller has selected essays that feature diverse and illustrious writers such as Geffrey Davis, Marjorie Sandor, Barrie Jean Borich, Jenny Johnson, Oliver de la Paz, Lia Purpura, Kent Myers, Rebecca McClanahan, and others. Ranging from reading and writing in the Jewish tradition of midrash to the role of the writer as cultural critic in the 21st century, The Next Draft brings to life the kind of intellectual and creative excitement that underlies the intensive MFA experience at Pacific Lutheran University. Not only do these talks show innovative approaches to writing and literature across genres, they inspire the reader to think about how to read differently and thus bring their own work to a new level.
- GenresCrafts
226 pages, Paperback
Published March 19, 2024
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 5, 2024
While most of the 18 essays in The Next Draft are interesting, I thought Suzanne Berne's superior: "Why Write a Novel? Why Read a Novel? And Why Now?"
Edited by Brenda Miller, the book is subtitled "Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop." The workshop is the the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. The MFA is a three-year, four-residency program with emphasis in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students participate in a 10-day summer residency on campus, and work remotely one-on-one with a faculty member during the year. Every day during the residency begins with a teacher's "Morning Talk"—one of these essays.
I probably responded to Berne's essay so strongly because I'm writing my sixth novel, and it's a question that has nagged me. Dozens of answers to why write a novel come immediately to mind: To make money. (Ha!) To dramatize a point of view. To impress mother/father/significant other. To fill time. To obtain a degree. To add to the culture. (Ha!) To say something that can't be said any other way.
Why read a novel? For diversion. To occupy time. To experience different lives, different cultures. To learn how the world reality works—or doesn't work. To become a more empathetic human being.
Clearly there's no one reason to write or read a novel and Berne doesn't try. "My aim in part [in this essay] is to try to describe what it's like to write a novel—or what it can be like—and why I think that experience and novels themselves matter."
One answer to why spend years writing a novel, especially knowing it may not be published or, if self-published, may sink without a ripple, is that it "allows for something rare these days: the suspension of judgment." Writing a novel leaves room "for indecision. Even for disorientation. Not the kind of disorientation that makes you disbelieve what's right in front of you . . . but the kind that makes you suspect it may take a while to understand what is right in front of you."
Writing and reading a novel says Berne tends to be—or can be—or should be—a defamiliarizing process that requires "a lot of stumbling and searching, chiefly basking a series of questions that lead mostly to other questions. Writing a novel offers an extended experience of not getting the point. So does reading one."
The essay quotes Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Chekhov, Elena Ferrante, E.M. Forster (is it possible to write about the novel without mentioning Aspects of the Novel?), Henry James, Georges Simenon, James Wood, and Virginia Woolf. It is thought-provoking and, for someone like myself, reassuring. It's all right to digress in your novel. Everyone does it.
It's an essay I'll probably reread every year or so. Or when, unsure of what comes next or a work is rejected one more time, I'll read it to convince myself that the current work in progress is not a complete waste of time.
Edited by Brenda Miller, the book is subtitled "Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop." The workshop is the the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. The MFA is a three-year, four-residency program with emphasis in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students participate in a 10-day summer residency on campus, and work remotely one-on-one with a faculty member during the year. Every day during the residency begins with a teacher's "Morning Talk"—one of these essays.
I probably responded to Berne's essay so strongly because I'm writing my sixth novel, and it's a question that has nagged me. Dozens of answers to why write a novel come immediately to mind: To make money. (Ha!) To dramatize a point of view. To impress mother/father/significant other. To fill time. To obtain a degree. To add to the culture. (Ha!) To say something that can't be said any other way.
Why read a novel? For diversion. To occupy time. To experience different lives, different cultures. To learn how the world reality works—or doesn't work. To become a more empathetic human being.
Clearly there's no one reason to write or read a novel and Berne doesn't try. "My aim in part [in this essay] is to try to describe what it's like to write a novel—or what it can be like—and why I think that experience and novels themselves matter."
One answer to why spend years writing a novel, especially knowing it may not be published or, if self-published, may sink without a ripple, is that it "allows for something rare these days: the suspension of judgment." Writing a novel leaves room "for indecision. Even for disorientation. Not the kind of disorientation that makes you disbelieve what's right in front of you . . . but the kind that makes you suspect it may take a while to understand what is right in front of you."
Writing and reading a novel says Berne tends to be—or can be—or should be—a defamiliarizing process that requires "a lot of stumbling and searching, chiefly basking a series of questions that lead mostly to other questions. Writing a novel offers an extended experience of not getting the point. So does reading one."
The essay quotes Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Chekhov, Elena Ferrante, E.M. Forster (is it possible to write about the novel without mentioning Aspects of the Novel?), Henry James, Georges Simenon, James Wood, and Virginia Woolf. It is thought-provoking and, for someone like myself, reassuring. It's all right to digress in your novel. Everyone does it.
It's an essay I'll probably reread every year or so. Or when, unsure of what comes next or a work is rejected one more time, I'll read it to convince myself that the current work in progress is not a complete waste of time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review