The Left-Handed Story: Writing and the Writer's Life by Nancy Willard

I first read The Left-Handed Story: Writing and the Writer’s Life a few years ago, but it’s one of those books that I can pick up when feeling stuck and find a few sentences that make me smile again. Nancy Willard writes poetry and fiction for both children and adults, and these essays show how some kind of magic is often part of her creativity. Though most of her magic has a foot or finger in the real world. In “The Back Burner” she writes of cooking as magic. Not, perhaps, what’s on the front burner, where you might follow a set plan. But the back burner, which welcomes this and that and the other thing, and simmers. In “Crossing the Water” she traces the evolution of a poem from a childhood memory of swimming lessons: the metaphors and theme emerged with time.



In “The Muse Goes Greyhound” Nancy Willard discusses inspiration, and wonders if it was the rhythm of the oars that set free the mind of Lewis Carroll when he began first telling a young neighbor about Alice and Wonderland. She’s also quick to point out that inspiration is not all a writer needs, referring to Charles Dickens’s manuscript of A Christmas Carol, which was published in facsimile by the Morgan Library: “the first page is so crossed out and written over than one can hardly find the first sentence, which sounds so right and inevitable.”

Just in case you’re not already set to find this book, or Telling Time, another great essay collection, let me tell you how this poetry professor at Vassar ends her classes, which she describes in the last short essay. She buys fortune cookies, pulls out the old fortunes with tweezers, and replaces them with lines typed from poems the students wrote during the course. “They go out into a violent world with good fortunes in their pockets: the blessings they gave each other.”