Jane Anne Staw

I've had this book for years and I read it when I first bought it, but on this reread I realized I don't remember much at all from it. I found it extremely valuable this time around, and I've copied the "Try This" pages at the end of each chapter to put into my academic writing binder.

Staw is a psychologist as well as a writer, and in this book she takes a therapist's approach to understanding and working on writer's block. As she points out, not all writer's blocks are the same. Some people can't write anything, while others can write certain kinds of material but not others. I'm in the latter category. I write every day but I'm blocked on one or two particular types of writing.

Staw emphasizes the importance of writing as practice and she suggests free writing as a way to get back into a rhythm. She advises starting with as little as 15 minutes a day, until you are comfortable with what you are doing. And at the end of the book she reminds the reader that learning to like yourself and your writing, and being comfortable with the product, is something that takes a lot longer than you might think. The book is both encouraging and bracing. It more like talking to your therapist than to a self-help guru, and she uses a lot of examples from her own experience, which I think make the book more valuable.

Highly recommended.… (mais)

Pleasant assortment of interviews, with more "southern" Midwesterners (Missouri) than I expected from the title. I like all the direct quotes, how friendly the gardeners were in opening their homes to the authors. I was surprised by the number of people interviewed who could remember farming with hourses, or who grew up in families that expected the kids would work hard doing family chores. Seems like it's been a long time since that was the standard way of life in the US. The book was published in 1990, so there may have been a number of elderly people who lived thru the depression still alive.
There are some young gardeners interviewed--primarily one woman who developed multiple chemical sensitivities from her ag farming exposures and had to turn to organic gardening just to find food she could tolerate.
After a while, tho, I started to get bothered by the way each person's movements would be described--jiggling a foot, brushing hair off his/her face, wiping his forehead with a folded handkerchief. When the same action is re-described several times it became intrusive and seemed to turn the people into caricatures of themselves.… (mais)