First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft

by Joyce Carol Oates (Compiler)

Nearly thirty top writers from Canada and the United States discuss their influences, goals, and opinions about the purpose and skills of writing

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Leda Frost · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely dated (pub. 1983) but worth a perusal. The featured writers range from teachers to poets, and having that scope of view has been very illuminating. In particular I was drawn to the "woman writers," spearheaded by Joyce Carol Oates herself. As someone who grew up when the women's liberation movement was (arguably) over, it was very eye-opening to read works from female writers who were not taken seriously for simply the fact of their gender. Certainly makes me appreciate all the more what I have today. But if I had to pick one essay out of this anthology to encourage others to read, it would be the first one, John Updike's "Why Write?" It encapsulates it all.

[Ronald Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty-nine essays and interviews regarding the language arts, with about half focusing mainly on poetry and the others on fiction. Nearly all required a careful and thoughtful reading in order to appreciate them. Some didn’t seem to have much to offer, but that may have been more an indication of my willingness or ability to concentrate while reading them.

I found four of the essays especially intriguing and/or inspirational: “The Poetry of Everyday Life” by John Hollander; “Words into Fiction” by Eudora Welty; “Assays” by Dave Smith; and “The Pursuit of Suffering” by Daniel Halpern.