September 26, 2022
Poet Phillips (Then the War) offers a beautiful collection of essays on the writing life. Noting that “this book doesn’t claim to unveil any mysteries about writing,” Phillips instead offers thoughtful meditations on “how to live, as a writer.” “Silence” looks at how the absence of sound is “a lot like writing... relative, and private.” “Practice” covers routine and repetition, and “Ambition” investigates whether art is “necessary”: “I wrote... as a form of therapy, as I got closer to understanding the sexuality I was too afraid of, in myself, to confront otherwise.” “Stamina,” meanwhile, considers the “urgency” he felt while writing to resolve the “conundrum” of his “being a gay man,” while in “Community,” he recounts how he was dismissed from a writing workshop because his work was not “correctly ‘Black,’ ” and how an annual classicist conference sustained him during the lonely years he worked as a high school Latin teacher. Phillips’s reflections are as much about his personal development as they are a peek behind the curtain for budding writers, who will find a fair share of solid guidance: “Take praise when and if you can get it, but don’t forget that it was never the point.” This pensive account of the writing life delivers.
November 1, 2022
Devised as a book to teach creative writing students what they need to know, ""not in terms of how to write or to be a writer, but in terms of how to live, as a writer,"" celebrated poet Phillips (Then the War and Selected Poems, 2022) aims for portability and accessibility in these brief but generous essays. With the wisdom of experience and refreshing candor, Phillips offers seven cornerstones for living as a writer: ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, community. Each essay approaches its subject from an unexpected vantage, whether it's depicting ambition as ""a belief in art's ability to know"" or a musing on the politics of his own ""queering of language,"" as a Black gay man. Of course, the book is rich with Phillips' expert lyric ear. Defining silence as an absence of distraction, even with such natural sounds as ""wildlife, how the trees are a map of the wind's motion, what's left of a winter storm heading out to sea."" In all, the book constitutes a lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers.
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