My Trade Is Mystery:Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

by: Carl Phillips (Author)

Publisher: Yale University Press

Publication Date: 2022/11/1

Language: English

Print Length: 112 pages

ISBN-10: 0300257872

ISBN-13: 9780300257878

Book Description

An invaluable companion for any writer seeking to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture “Illuminating, deeply endearing essays.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post   “A lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers.”—Diego Báez, Booklist   In these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has leaed about the writing life, an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered.” Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community.   In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their jouey. Phillips’s book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.

About the Author

An invaluable companion for any writer seeking to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture “Illuminating, deeply endearing essays.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post   “A lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers.”—Diego Báez, Booklist   In these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has leaed about the writing life, an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered.” Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community.   In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their jouey. Phillips’s book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.