Quotes from Linda Anderson

Herbert's And now in age I bud again After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain and relish versing.

It's like that moment when, often early in the morning, perhaps in a strange house, you pass before a mirror you hadn't known would be there. You see a glimpse of someone reflected in that mirror, and a moment passes before you recognize that that person is yourself. Literature exists in moments like that.

we still expect a biography to give an account of a person's life, and times too.

creativity and imagination are as crucial to the life writing project as they are to fiction and poetry. We'll explore, and attempt, both autobiography and biography in Part 4, and in activities you'll be able to form your writing into poetry and/or prose.

The word stanza comes from the Italian for 'room': stanze (which is why I set that subject for the sonnet). Rooms are part of a larger structure, and this notion of the poem as house, as something habitable, is probably the most important lesson form teaches us.

the beginning of David Copperfield, a novel by Charles Dickens. It may be fiction, but it raises issues crucial to the exploration of life writing and how it works. One of those issues concerns fact versus fiction, because how can anyone prove what they have only been told? Another is to do with the function of memory: incomplete memory doesn't prevent Copperfield from writing about himself.

all anybody is doing when engaging in life writing is giving a narrative shape to a story of a life.

hunting down those moments that unintentionally tip the reader out of the dream.

your job is to be honest and to try not to be too boring. However, if you must choose between being eclectic and various or being repetitious and boring, be repetitious and boring. Most good poets are, if read very long at one sitting.

It's a useful exercise to forbid yourself the use of keynote words such as 'fury' or 'jealous' when dramatizing an emotional condition.

Sometimes the discovery of something we can classify as our voice coincides with a weariness with that voice, and the struggle begins to create a new voice.

tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High

When editing begins it is on 'large chunks' – paragraphs or a series of related paragraphs perhaps – and their relationship to one another. She moves them around as a way of answering her structural questions. More specific editing processes are involved too, like those we saw in the example from Woolf's work: deletion, insertion, and attention to repetition and abstraction

withholding it and disclosing it. The writer is always doing one or the other – either keeping things unknown or drip-feeding the reader with details.

Pamphlets can consist of anything from around twelve to about thirty poems. They allow us to select and reject pieces, to space out main themes, to consider the dynamics of sub-sections or sequences, and to decide on opening and closing poems. Like individual poems, they require titles and possibly epigraphs, which makes us contemplate the most important impression we wish to give from this grouping of our work.

Why remember? Because remembering honors. Remembering heals. Remembering forgives. Remembering creates appreciation and gratitude — two of the most wondrous salves for your sorrows.

Poetry as an art form invites us to go beyond our preconceptions, to invent, to be truly imaginative. One reason for this is because that action, of going beyond ourselves, is an effect of the form itself: the poem is a structure which helps us to think differently, and one of the ways it does this is through its focus on imagery, encouraging us to think through our images in rational or irrational patterns.

What significant details do you remember about how you met your special animal? Why do you think this animal came into your life at the time he or she did?

Forced to weigh your words, you find out which are the styrofoam and which are the heavy gold. Severe cutting intensifies your style, forcing you both to crowd and to leap.

Leaving Inishmore' by Michael Longley, from Selected Poems (1998, p.22). What

You came into my life in a way that unmistakably told me to bring you home. But I think we chose each other. This was one of the best decisions I ever made.

In revision, as a rough rule, if the beginning can be cut, cut it. And if any passage sticks out in some way, leaves the main trajectory, could possibly come out — take it out and see what the story looks like that way. Often a cut that seemed sure to leave a terrible hole joins up without a seam. It's as if the story, the work itself, has a shape it's trying to achieve, and will take that shape if you'll only clear away the verbiage.