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Show & Tell: Writers on Writing
Newly revised and expanded, the sixth edition of this collection features stories, memoirs, and poems by award-winning faculty, visiting writers, and alumni of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. An essential guide for novice writers and readers, Show & Tell has wide application in the classroom as well as for personal study, as a point of entry for beginning writers or a useful review for the more experienced. Contributors have been anthologized in the Best American and Pushcart Prize series and include a finalist for the National Magazine Award. It features new stories by Clyde Edgerton, Nina de Gramont, and Derek Nikitas; new essays by Wendy Brenner, David Gessner, and Brad Land; new poems by Mark Cox, Sebastian Matthews, and Sharan Strange.
422 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 15, 2010
Insular and pedantic.
A few of the essays were insightful—those from Dana Sachs, Peter Trachtenberg, Clyde Edgerton all stood out—but mostly they seemed like essays cast off (i.e. rejected) from outside publications. Exemplary perhaps for why MFA programs are filled with teachers who never quite made it as writers (hmmm... the better essays are by those who have extensive bibliographies; how curious). The subject of the essays seem to be localized so that students can visualize them better without having to use that most dreaded of tools... imagination!
For those who wish to write fiction/nonfiction/poetry that will adhere to the standard of homogenized creative writing programs, this is a fine quality book that will help to achieve that goal.
For anyone wishing to write on a different level than that, skip this book in favor of ones by Gardner, Leonard, King, even Judy Reeves has one more adequate to evolving a writer's skill (A Writer's Book of Days), and Self-editing for Fiction Writers is decent for examining your own work with an objective critical eye.
A few of the essays were insightful—those from Dana Sachs, Peter Trachtenberg, Clyde Edgerton all stood out—but mostly they seemed like essays cast off (i.e. rejected) from outside publications. Exemplary perhaps for why MFA programs are filled with teachers who never quite made it as writers (hmmm... the better essays are by those who have extensive bibliographies; how curious). The subject of the essays seem to be localized so that students can visualize them better without having to use that most dreaded of tools... imagination!
For those who wish to write fiction/nonfiction/poetry that will adhere to the standard of homogenized creative writing programs, this is a fine quality book that will help to achieve that goal.
For anyone wishing to write on a different level than that, skip this book in favor of ones by Gardner, Leonard, King, even Judy Reeves has one more adequate to evolving a writer's skill (A Writer's Book of Days), and Self-editing for Fiction Writers is decent for examining your own work with an objective critical eye.
May 14, 2020
I got what I wanted out of it in my slow journey to become a non-fiction writer. Had to return it to the library so didn't read every page. Will probably pick this up again in the future to finish it.
July 15, 2019
3.5/5 stars
Recommended for people who: are taking creative writing at UNCW
I liked the book well enough, and there were enough things that I liked for me to give it four stars, but I've also read better writing advice books.
The book starts each section--fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry--with a series of essays from the writers on how to write. I liked some of the essays, but there were a great deal of ones I didn't like and didn't agree with; one essay on poetry suggested language in poetry shouldn't actually be poetic , and none of the fiction essays focused on non-contemporary fiction, it was all set in the 'real world' and didn't focus at all on fantasy, sci-fi, or even historical fiction. Of all the essays, the nonfiction ones were perhaps the most useful and least disagreeable of the bunch. The poetry essays were alright as well, but they felt rather repetitive and didn't cover as much as the other sections covered.
All of the selected fiction pieces were just plain weird , which is fine, I like stories as much as the next person, but when there are nine or ten short stories/flash pieces that are just as strange, and sometimes even stranger, than the next? That's when you start to lose me. The one piece in the fiction portion that I genuinely liked was the last piece, My Refugee which deals with an unreliable narrator and Holocaust allegory, and is also the least weird of them all.
I liked a handful of the nonfiction stories. Brenner's, Gerard's, and Colbert's pieces were my favorites of the bunch. Brenner had a piece taken from an essay she wrote about a man who owned--owns?--a serpentarium in Wilmington, NC, and learning a bit about his life and the humorous way he set up the serpentarium was interesting. I liked Gerard's piece about a summer playing hardball because the style he uses to describe the setting and people reminds me of Neil Gaiman a little. Colbert's piece about being a kid in the Depression provided a new take on a story that, from my experience at least, usually drifts toward either Grapes of Wrath depressive-Depression or Kit Kittredge keep-your-head-up-Depression.
I also liked quite a few of the poems they chose to include. Each author either had 3 or 5 poems put into the book so reader's could get a breadth of how the author wrote and what they wrote about. The poems were, I think, a significantly better collection overall than the other two writing collections. Each author could chose to write about different things or their poems could have a theme, and then their 'afterword' was generally about one specific poem and how it came to them. Terry's poems, for instance, were based on Civil War photographs of dead soldiers, while Mörling's poems ranged from travel to dreams to happiness. Most of the poems were in typical stanza form, one or two were in prose-poetry form, and I think it would've been nice to see other arrangements, especially with the amount the writers discussed form in their essays.
The last section was on how to use workshop and editorial criticism. This section was another mixed bag. The first essay, Bass', focused rather minutely on how to make sure your work is as grammatically perfect as possible before sending it in to anybody. The second covered what to do with workshop criticism, and mostly came down to 'do what feels right' and 'readers are influenced by their moods and subconsciousness and therefore you can ignore them if you really want,' which is perhaps a bit unfair of me to say about the essay I liked the best in the section, but I still found it didn't provide much insight. The last two essays both seemed like general run-of-the-mill stuff you'd hear about editing. Again, not much insight.
Overall, I'd say you can find better books on writing advice elsewhere and that you really should only read this book if you're taking the Creative Writing 201 class at UNCW.
Recommended for people who: are taking creative writing at UNCW
I liked the book well enough, and there were enough things that I liked for me to give it four stars, but I've also read better writing advice books.
The book starts each section--fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry--with a series of essays from the writers on how to write. I liked some of the essays, but there were a great deal of ones I didn't like and didn't agree with; one essay on poetry suggested language in poetry shouldn't actually be poetic , and none of the fiction essays focused on non-contemporary fiction, it was all set in the 'real world' and didn't focus at all on fantasy, sci-fi, or even historical fiction. Of all the essays, the nonfiction ones were perhaps the most useful and least disagreeable of the bunch. The poetry essays were alright as well, but they felt rather repetitive and didn't cover as much as the other sections covered.
All of the selected fiction pieces were just plain weird , which is fine, I like stories as much as the next person, but when there are nine or ten short stories/flash pieces that are just as strange, and sometimes even stranger, than the next? That's when you start to lose me. The one piece in the fiction portion that I genuinely liked was the last piece, My Refugee which deals with an unreliable narrator and Holocaust allegory, and is also the least weird of them all.
I liked a handful of the nonfiction stories. Brenner's, Gerard's, and Colbert's pieces were my favorites of the bunch. Brenner had a piece taken from an essay she wrote about a man who owned--owns?--a serpentarium in Wilmington, NC, and learning a bit about his life and the humorous way he set up the serpentarium was interesting. I liked Gerard's piece about a summer playing hardball because the style he uses to describe the setting and people reminds me of Neil Gaiman a little. Colbert's piece about being a kid in the Depression provided a new take on a story that, from my experience at least, usually drifts toward either Grapes of Wrath depressive-Depression or Kit Kittredge keep-your-head-up-Depression.
I also liked quite a few of the poems they chose to include. Each author either had 3 or 5 poems put into the book so reader's could get a breadth of how the author wrote and what they wrote about. The poems were, I think, a significantly better collection overall than the other two writing collections. Each author could chose to write about different things or their poems could have a theme, and then their 'afterword' was generally about one specific poem and how it came to them. Terry's poems, for instance, were based on Civil War photographs of dead soldiers, while Mörling's poems ranged from travel to dreams to happiness. Most of the poems were in typical stanza form, one or two were in prose-poetry form, and I think it would've been nice to see other arrangements, especially with the amount the writers discussed form in their essays.
The last section was on how to use workshop and editorial criticism. This section was another mixed bag. The first essay, Bass', focused rather minutely on how to make sure your work is as grammatically perfect as possible before sending it in to anybody. The second covered what to do with workshop criticism, and mostly came down to 'do what feels right' and 'readers are influenced by their moods and subconsciousness and therefore you can ignore them if you really want,' which is perhaps a bit unfair of me to say about the essay I liked the best in the section, but I still found it didn't provide much insight. The last two essays both seemed like general run-of-the-mill stuff you'd hear about editing. Again, not much insight.
Overall, I'd say you can find better books on writing advice elsewhere and that you really should only read this book if you're taking the Creative Writing 201 class at UNCW.
December 17, 2009
So, obviously I'm biased because I know and like almost everyone in here, and because when they write about Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach I can picture it and that makes me happy, and I can hear their literal voices and imagine them telling me the stories. But I think it's probably really good even without all of those aids. It's just fun to read, not to mention helpful and insightful in terms of craft and commentary. I'm happy to teach it and happy to read it. Hooray pub lab!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews