Best Books for Writers

In this collection of essays, lectures, and reviews gathered from several decades, award-winning poet and professor Major Jackson reveals an intimate look at what it means to be a poet in our times and the social function of the art of poetry amidst political unrest and inner conflict. Exploring subjects such as the necessity of language as freedom, the historical poem, the relationship between music and poetry, and the making of a “lyric self,” Jackson also surveys a range of poets who challenge the intellectual and sonic possibilities of the art form, including Ai, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Frank Bidart, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Terrance Hayes. Both intellectually rigorous and readable, this installment of the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press and edited by Amor Kohli allows readers to marvel at the known wonders of poetry and the power unleashed through song.  

Written in the intimate style of a personal journal, this short volume from the collection of William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University captures Maxine Hong Kingston’s journey from celebrated memoirist and novelist to poet. “I have almost finished my longbook,” she writes. “Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.” Kingston reflects on the lives of her late parents, her travels to the U.K. and Hawaii, daily events, and advice from her contemporaries such as Clayton Eshelman, Tess Gallagher, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder while exploring the struggle of embarking on something new with her attempts to write verse. “The Poet truly lives the happening moment, and gives the very bodily feeling of it to whosoever would read. To put myself into the state of poetry, I need to learn the habit of living constantly within the present moment,” writes Kingston. To Be the Poet not only offers a glimpse into the mind of a great American thinker but an exploration of a writer moving into the world of poetry.   

“This book is not a primer, a how-to guide, or a handbook of forms: there are plenty of those out there already,” writes Don Paterson in the preface to this collection of craft essays on the inner workings of poetry. “The Poem is essentially a treatise, consisting of three long essays.” Titled “Lyric,” “Sign,” and “Metre,” the three sections explore fundamental, personal, and theoretical ideas about how poems operate. The award-winning poet, professor, and poetry editor draws from his experience as well as from literary analysis, cognitive science, linguistics, and metaphysics to investigate subjects such as the music and sound patterns of poetry; the theories surrounding metaphor, metonym, and symbol; and poetry’s relationship to time and the rhythms of speech. For those seeking an insider’s view of poetry, this book is sure to challenge, instruct, and deepen what you know about the art form and its many elusive properties.  

Rachel Friedman, author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure, follows up with a memoir meets writer’s guidebook addressing the realities of an artist’s life. Friedman looks back to her childhood fantasies of being an artist and consults with former classmates from Interlochen Arts Camp, a prestigious summer music and arts camp she attended as an eleven-year-old in Michigan, to find out how their early creative ambitions translated into adult careers, relationships, and lifestyles. Featuring playful chapter titles such as “On ‘Making It,’” “Never Compromise! (But Definitely Compromise),” and “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time,” Friedman combines personal conversations with critical, practical advice on how to build a sustainable life as an artist, illustrating the many forms creativity can take. “We can broaden our notion of achievement—not in the Instagrammable, ‘look at me having it all’ sort of way,” writes Friedman. “This is not magical thinking. It’s simply embracing the whole range of experiences, not just the heightened or overly artistic ones. It’s being a curious, observant traveler in your own life.”   

In this collection of five lectures delivered for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, Cedar Sigo traces the literary and cultural influences that form his poetic voice. Through criticism, poetic analysis, and personal narrative, Sigo discusses his relationship to poetry through the works of writers such as Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, Joanne Kyger, and Audre Lorde. “Poetry is never simply a set of words living alone upon the page. It exists as a perennial light in the mind, a tool of recognition that we must press into the hands of others,” Sigo writes in the opening piece “Reality Is No Obstacle: A Poetics of Participation.” In this intimate and intellectually stimulating collection, Sigo writes from the intersections of his identity as a queer Suquamish poet to chart new possibilities for what is understood as poetic craft in the western world.   

“When I was twenty, I decided to dedicate myself to the study of art and literature. It would be as if I were an apprentice in some religious practice,” writes award-winning poet and scholar Garrett Hongo in “The Mirror Diary,” the title essay of this collection in which he tracks the emergence of his poetic voice through a secret diary he kept as a child filled with invented stories and memories about his ancestors. The essay sets the backdrop for this installment of the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press, which includes personal and craft essays such as “In the Bamboo Grove: Some Notes on the Poetic Line,” “The Activity of the Poet,” and “Homage to Lost Worlds: Where I Write, Why I Write There.” Hongo considers the multitude of perspectives and approaches to writing that he has inherited as he writes about his literary antecedents, including the poets of China’s T’ang Dynasty, American poets Charles Olson and Walt Whitman, and his contemporaries David Mura and Edward Hirsch. Hongo’s essays remind poets and readers of poetry to consider their own histories and draw inspiration from the wealth of literary traditions in the world when approaching the page.  

“I wrote six unpublished novels between 1970 and 1972 before my debut novel, Faith and the Good Thing,” writes National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson in this book of craft essays on the life and practice of writing. The novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist shares personal stories and experiences gathered over decades of writing and teaching creative writing at the University of Washington in Seattle. Across six sections that move through the writing process to the writing life, Johnson offers utilitarian approaches to understanding dialogue, plot, and storytelling, and shares writing exercises from his classroom that help with word choice, sentence structure, and narrative voice, as well as lessons on being a writer in the world. The book serves as a guide for writers and offers a glimpse into the probing mind of a groundbreaking writer and scholar, inspiring readers to pick up the pen and tell their own stories.  

In this collection of essays on the craft of writing fiction, Charles Baxter reflects on a life of writing, thinking through such topics as charisma, narrative urgency, how request moments function in a story, the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of fabulist writers, and the plausibility of dreams. As with Baxter’s other nonfiction books, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext, the longtime teacher and celebrated author offers his unique observations and lessons on what makes good fiction come to life in these craft and personal essays. “Many of our models for writing and for thinking about plot and plot construction go back to common questions: What does this character want? Or: What is this character afraid of?” writes Baxter in the introductory essay. “Partial truths can quickly turn into rule-of-thumb conventions and then into clichés. Literature doesn’t always work through simple desires and fears because real life doesn’t always work that way.”   

“Words have power. If we don’t tell our own stories, then the historical ‘gaps,’ the ‘silences’ become ripe for someone else’s lies, distortions, half-truths,” writes Jewell Parker Rhodes in this guide to writing fiction which celebrates Black authors and storytelling. In each chapter, Rhodes offers a step-by-step introduction to the fundamentals of writing, including advice on how to begin a journaling practice and emotionally prepare before writing, the importance of reading, creating character and plot, and knowing when to stop revising. Rhodes fills the book with writing prompts and inspiring passages from authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Randall Kenan, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker, illustrating what powerful and skilled writing looks like. There is also a reading list, writing resources, and a glossary of essential fictional terms in the last section of the book. Rhodes encourages writers to investigate, study, and keep going: “Good writers probe themselves and their world; good writers laugh and cry; good writers observe; good writers don’t just talk about writing, they write.”  

“You need at least two skills to be a fiction writer. You have to be able to write and you have to be able to tell a story. Telling a story is the harder skill to master,” writes John Dufresne in the introduction to this guide to writing fiction, illustrated by Evan Wondolowski. The book emphasizes the importance of revision and the chaos that can come along with the writing process. The four chapters, “The Fiction Writer,” “The Fiction Writing,” “The Plot,” and “The Revision,” along with the playful illustrations and infographics offer writers a manual for the building blocks of fiction, which include showing how traditional plots rise and fall on a graph and comparing a story to an iceberg—10 percent living above the surface and 90 percent below the surface. Ideal for writers of all levels, this guide also includes original prompts and exercises that walk writers through the daunting prospects of the blank page.  

“Writing about writing is one way to grasp, hold, and give added meaning to a process that remains one of life’s great mysteries,” writes the late bell hooks in the preface to this seminal collection of essays on the joys of reading and writing, and the power of the written word. In her essays “Writing Without Labels,” “Writing Autobiography,” and “Class and the Politics of Writing,” the trailblazing author, cultural critic, and professor offers a response to those that “find my (a Black woman writer) passion for the written word suspect.” The collection also includes deep readings of the works of writers such as Emily Dickinson, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston, women writers who influenced and shaped the author’s own voice by going against the grain. Through moving reflections and sharp language, this essay collection is ideal for any writer seeking a model for what the life of a working writer can look like and the ways in which writing can go beyond an expression of oneself. As hooks writes: “I have not yet found words to truly convey the intensity of this remembered rapture—that moment of exquisite joy when necessary words come together and the work is complete, finished, ready to be read.”  

This anthology edited by Wyatt Prunty, Megan Roberts, and Adam Latham collects craft talks about the writing process delivered at the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference held on the campus of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. The essays by noted authors—Richard Bausch, Mary Jo Salter, Randall Kenan, William Logan, Alice McDermott, and Christine Schutt, among others—cover topics such as narrative structure, characterization in fiction and nonfiction, writing a plot in poems, revision, and the fundamentals of a metaphor. Catered for writers at all levels of experience, the essays are written in response to questions generated by the process of writing by, as the editors write in the introduction, “masters of a craft candidly reporting issues they confront as they begin, pause, worry, resume, stop, despair, resolve, revise, finish. Revise again.”