One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life

by Pat Carr

Pat Carr may be the only person in the United States who spent her childhood next door to a Japanese relocation camp in Wyoming in the 1940s, grew up to pass for black in 1950s Texas, started teaching college in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s, and crossed paths with scores of other authors over half a century’s journey as a professional writer. But universal truth is found in every writer’s singular experience, and Carr’s memoir illuminates the path for others who have chosen the writing life. “Everything we do, everywhere we’ve been, influences us,” Carr believes. Pacing her revealing memoir as a series of single-page episodes, she offers distilled glimpses of the people, places, and moments that made a lasting impression and provided the fabric and fuel of her writing. At the same time Carr’s pages reveal her attempts to find the authentic centers of her life: relationships with family, friends, lovers, fellow writers; struggles with racial and gender discrimination; and above all her writing identity.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2010

About the author

PAT CARR has a B.A. and M.A. from Rice, a Ph.D. from Tulane, and sixteen published books, including the Iowa Fiction Prize winner, The Women in the Mirror, and the PEN Book Award finalist, If We Must Die. She’s published over a hundred short stories in such places as The Southern Review, Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories. Her latest short story collection, The Death of a Confederate Colonel, a nominee for the Faulkner Award, won the PEN Southwest Fiction Award, the John Estes Cooke Civil War Fiction Award, and was voted one of the top ten books from university presses for 2007 by Foreword Magazine. She’s won numerous other awards, including a Library of Congress Marc IV, an NEH, the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award, an Al Smith Literary Fellowship, and a Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt Writing Fellowship in Lausanne, Switzerland. She’s taught creative writing and literature in numerous universities across the South, has conducted writing workshops from Santa Fe to New York, and in August, 2011, taught the Civil War novel at New York’s Chautauqua Institute. Her writing text, Writing Fiction with Pat Carr appeared from High Hill Press in 2010, and her memoir, One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life, also published in 2010 by Texas Tech University Press, was a finalist for both the Willa Cather Award and the PEN Southwest Non-fiction Award. Her novella, The Radiance of Fossils, is scheduled to appear from the Main Street Rag Press in the summer of 2012. She lives and writes on a thirty-six acre farm in Arkansas with her writer husband, Duane Carr, three dogs, a cat, and fifteen black chickens.

Reviews

[Kari Veenstra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I don't normally read memoir, but this was a fascinating look at the life of an equally fascinating woman and includes some great tips for current authors of fiction. Loved it.

[Readersaurus · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, I want to say that I like Pat Carr! And I didn't even know who she was before reading this!

Second, I LOVED the layout of this book. The typewriter motif. The way each page stood alone, its own independent snippet.

At first, Carr's life seems delightfully full of crazy people. Then, those crazy people get annoying and feel a little dangerous. I'm sorry she had to put up with them.

Her stories of being seen as white in some settings and black in others were riveting and disturbing.

Though this is a book about becoming and living as a writer, it also is a fascinating narrative of women in academia through the 50s and the women's movement of the 60s and 70s. An unanticipated bonus!

I just cried and cried at page 73. I ask anyone who thinks we can/should go back to outlawing abortion to please read that page.

[Talya Boerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this book by Pat Carr. The format is compelling with individual vignettes forming the complete story of her writing life. She creates fascinating imagery invoking all the senses. What an amazing life she has led so far! I hated to see it end.

[Hollie Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Review written in 2012)
I took a class with Pat Carr at the IWWG Writer's Conference. I liked her. She was tiny, feisty and adamant that she had stumbled upon one of the truest things about good writing - that one should NEVER ever write from a perspective one is not, or can not be. IE - a woman should never write from inside a man's head. A 20 year old white woman cannot tell us what is going on inside the brain of an 80 year old black woman. While some people say writers need to imagine this stuff and be it - she insists if it's not something you have been or could be that it will fall flat. There was much dissent about this stance at the writer's conference and I can see both sides of the issue. I tend to fall in line behind Pat because I think falsity is indeed flat. This book is her life from a writing stance. Many things important to a life are left on the sidelines here and we see only the steps important to Pat the writer. I love the premise of vignettes - purportedly one page a day - to tell the story but by the end of the book the breaks in the narrative seem arbitrarily assigned in order to fit the page a day format as opposed to being where a scene or anecdote ends. I mostly enjoyed the glimpses into her early life in an oil camp in Wyoming with her catty mother, insecure father and loving brother.

[Melissa Frye · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met Pat Carr at the Ozark Creative Writers conference in October and found her insights inspiring. I bought her memoir hoping her wisdom would flow into me, making me a better writer. What I discovered was a beautifully written and frank appraisal of the writing life.

Pat is a wonderful writer and she proves it with this book. Her command of language is beautiful and I did find inspiration, not from one thing in particular, but rather from her life as a whole. Within the pages of this book, she reveals how exhausting living with an alcoholic can be, shows the stigma of racism from an unusual point of view, divulges the thought processes of someone considering an extramarital affair and exposes the struggle that comes with choosing writing as your profession.

While she and I disagree on a few finer points of writing, her successes and failures have made her a force to be reckoned with in the writing community. One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life is an interesting and revealing book. If you want to learn about the craft of writing, this probably isn’t the book for you. However, should you desire to know your struggles aren’t in vain, that you aren’t alone in your journey, you’ll love reading about Pat’s colorful life.

[Meredith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I looked forward to reading this book because I know the author. I was actually married to her ex-husband, so part of my interest was in seeing how he was portrayed...which was with not only a lack of sympathy, but with condescension. He had problems and was difficult to be married to, as I well know...he was a serious alcoholic who also suffered from Tourette's Syndrome [which she fails to mention]...but he was also an intelligent, funny, talented and most of all, creative individual. I was most surprised by the intensity with which she denigrates his creativity. Pat is also intelligent and creative, but she comes off as incredibly self-absorbed in the telling of her story. Her children barely rate a mention. And as for the writing life...little in the book will generalize to aspiring writers looking for inspiration. I found the book disappointing, aside from the aspects that touched on Jack.