MFA in a Box: A Why to Write Book
John Rember
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 098257942X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize Short List, and 1st Runner Up - Reference Category (2011)
Midwest Book Awards, Finalist - Reference Category (2011)
Nautilus Book Awards, Silver Winner - Writing/Creative Process Category (2011)
Part craft talk, part philosophical tome, part memoir, MFA in a Box is not so much a book about how to write as it is about whyto write. In chapters that explore the relationships between the writer and love, grief, place, family, race, violence, and other topics, Rember helps writers dive deep into their own writing. He tells them how they can breathe down there and how they can get back.
"A big part of writing involves grappling with the terrors and discouragements that come when you have writing skills but can't project yourself or your work into the future," says Rember. "My hope is that MFA in a Box will help writers balance the despair of writing with the joy of writing. It's a book designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor--but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny."
"More than an advice book with a catchy title...Rember engages his readers in some of the issues every writer faces...not as problems to be overcome but as issues to be understood. - The (Portland) Oregonian
"Witty, audacious, and wise." Robin Metz, author of Unbidden Angel, and winner of the Rainer Maria Rilke International Poetry Award
"The essential truths about excellent writing." -The Judges of the Hoffer Awards
Yeats. He dominated the literary conversation of the early twentieth century by intelligence, talent, and force of personality. Pound didn’t dominate anything while he was in Hailey. His parents moved to Philadelphia in 1887 when he was two. Even if he had wanted to stay and work in central Idaho’s mines instead of becoming a successful poet and Nazi cheerleader, he yet lacked the words to mount an effective argument for a dangerous and ill-paid life underground. It’s difficult to remember
be raised in the faith. Then the girls both died of appendicitis in the midst of prayer sessions, a year apart. When Joe tried to take the second girl to the hospital for an appendectomy, Mary’s father stood in the doorway and would not let him pass. A few years later, Kenny came down with appendicitis and when Mary got on the phone to her father for a prayer session, Joe put the boy in the car and took him to the Hailey Hospital. When the old man and a few of the Follower faithful came to the
years after Moby Dick he wrote “Bartelby the Scrivener,” whose enduring line is, “I would prefer not to.” It’s maddening to read “Bartelby,” because of Bartelby’s refusal to do anything but refuse. It’s maddening to read any of Melville’s post-Moby Dick works, because of Melville’s refusal to approach the depths that he reached with Ahab. Instead he turned more and more toward Christian salvation and epic poetry, which might have been good for him as a person, but it wasn’t good for him as a
and demystifies and makes absurd its object. Story is an improvement on metaphor, especially when it preserves the complexity and mystery of the thing it’s about. Turning story into metaphor almost always kills the story. June Cleaver deprived of the thin sitcom storyline becomes a Stepford Wife, and in that movie the story line is only the predictable working out of a wife-as-zombie metaphor. That’s not the direction we want to go as writers, but it’s sometimes hard to resist the forces that
away. He tried to catch up, but his body was exhausted, his life force was spent, he could no longer run like an animal, as he had before. He turned back to Shamhat, and as he walked he knew that his mind had somehow grown larger. He knew things now that an animal can’t know. In any other story, this passage would be the great transforming image of the book. But once Shamhat’s job is done, the story ignores her. She is dismissed, and it’s Enkidu who dismisses her. He does it first by cursing