The third edition of a comprehensive writing guide that has been a game changer for thousands of writers.From writing the virtuoso sentence to structuring your story, essay, or book, The Writer’s Portable Mentor offers deeply craft-oriented guidance to writers at all levels, from beginner to advanced. Readers of this new edition will find thoroughly revised chapters on structure and two new structures, the enumeration and the abecedarian; new model sentenc...

Designed to mentor writers at all levels, from beginning to quite advanced, The Writer’s Portable Mentor offers a wealth of insight and crafting models from the author’s twenty-plus years of teaching and creative thought. The book provides tools for structuring a book, story, or essay. It trains writers in observation and in developing a poet’s ear for sound in prose. It scrutinizes the sentence strategies of the masters and offers advice on how to publish. This second edition is ...

Master of the essay form and master of the sentence, Priscilla Long combines memoir and science to explore the spaces we live in, the spaces we go to in our imagination, and the colors that surround us.In On Spaces and Colors,Priscilla Long reflects on the spaces we inhabit and the colors that surround us. The essays occur in threes: space (such as a garden, an alley, a living room); color (does pink really stink?); and gallery (a type of space we enter vi...

A practical handbook for the artist or writer—experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Miró.

Dancing with the Muse in Old Age uses current science to present old age as a potentially happy, creative, and productive time. Numerous models-including many elders active in the arts-illustrate the possibilities.

Heres what National Magazine Award-winning writer Priscilla Long always wanted to ask our distant cousins about love and death, sorrow and dinner.

The questions that drive Priscilla Long’s Fire and Stone are the questions asked by the painter Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897 painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? These questions look beyond everyday trivialities to ponder the essence of our origins.Using her own story as a touchstone, Long explores our human roots and how they shape who we are today. Her personal history encompasses childhood as an identical twin on a dairy fa...

The Brain, wrote Emily Dickinson, is wider than the Sky, since it contains both Sky and You. National Magazine Award winning writer Priscilla Long meditates and shares the latest research - on her brain, her mind, and her grandfather, a reporter who lost his memory along with all of his writing. Its a book we should all keep in mind.

A special 10th anniversary edition of Roy Peter Clark's bestselling guide to writing, featuring five bonus tools.Ten years ago, Roy Peter Clark, America's most influential writing teacher, whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing. In the past decade, Writing Tools has become a classic guidebook for novices and experts alike and remains one of the...

This updated edition of the classic, comprehensive guide to creative writing features new topics and writing prompts, contemporary examples, and more.A creative writer's shelf should hold at least three essential books: a dictionary, a style guide, and Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction. This best-selling classic is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and for decades it has helped hundreds of thousands of students learn the craft. Now in it...

A peek inside the writerly testing grounds of Sue Grafton, Kim Stafford, Maureen Stanton, and othersThis collection of essays by well-established professional writers explores how their notebooks serve as their studios and workshops—places to collect, to play, and to make new discoveries with language, passions, and curiosities. For these diverse writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice, whether crafting fiction, nonfiction,...

Mark Doty brings the vitality and imagination that illuminate his own work to his selections for the twenty-fifth volume in the Best American Poetry series. He has chosen poems of high moral earnestness and poems in a comic register; poems that tell stories and poems that test the boundaries of innovative composition. This landmark edition includes David Lehman’s keen look at American poetry in his foreword, Mark Doty’s gorgeous introduction, and notes from the po...