5/24/2023 0 Comments Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner![]() He praises the virtues of his own education in academic philosophy and daily journalism, while defending the possibility that writing programs can rigorously and unsentimentally improve an author’s technique. ![]() Johnson has spent three decades as a teacher of writing at the University of Washington, though he himself had no such training, and he has fascinatingly conflicted thoughts on the teaching of creative labor. Johnson describes his study’s curated clutter, his nocturnal working rhythms and the intense labor of his revisions, alongside a careful outline of a theory, reminiscent of both Aristotle and Henry James, of how plots emerge from a “ground situation.” There is a winning sanity here: Johnson wants his students to be “raconteurs always ready to tell an engaging tale,” not self-preoccupied neurotics. ![]() ![]() Ethelbert Miller, is a piecemeal meditation on the daily routines and mental habits of a writer. Johnson’s book, the record of a single year’s email correspondence with his friend E. ![]()
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