My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing
by Carl Phillips
Publication Date: Aug 08, 2023
List Price: $15.00
Format: Paperback, 112 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780300274141
Imprint: Yale University Press
Publisher: Yale University Press
Parent Company: Yale University
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 learned 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 journey. Phillips’s book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.