Writing Workshop » Writing

Throughout history, writers have led interesting lives, with a lifestyle that offers room for exploration and adventure. These creative types often have a history of drug or alcohol abuse, tumultuous relationships, and even mental instability. Lovers of literature may enjoy learning about the interesting lives of writers that created the books they love, and we’ll explore a few of them here.

Ernest Hemingway: One of the members of the “Lost Generation,” Hemingway was an ambulance driver during World War I, bull runner, a heavy drinker all of his life and an American expatriate in Paris. He married four different women, and was almost killed in two different plane crashes while on safari in Africa. He ended his life by shooting himself with his favorite shotgun, and it’s believed that he had a genetic disease that causes mental and physical deterioration over time.
Sylvia Plath: Sylvia Plath is said to have been obsessed with death and deterioration, and it’s not surprising, given that her father died when she was eight, sparking her first attempt at suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. When she was 30 years old, she finally succeeding in killing herself by gas oven.
Oscar Wilde: Oscar Wilde’s life is most often noted for his notorious homosexuality, which was extreme in the Puritanical Victorian era. He was taken to trial three times for homosexuality, and was accused of sodomy, but acquitted, only to be sentenced to two years of hard labor at a new trial. At that point, his marriage Read more by Erin Lenderts

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Writing Toward Home with Georgia Heard at the IUS Writing Project

David Stoner — Fri, 06 May 2011 10:16:36 +0000

My NWP Writing Project (http://iuswp.com) is hosting Georgia Heard this June 22nd at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, IN.

[This] is a book for the writer hidden or not so hidden in us all…It is a book for any age, to be read in little bits or all at once, and to be reread regularly.

Here is a personal and compassionate book for everyone writers, poets, teachers, lovers of life, and especially those seeking to find their writing voices again or for the first time. It is an autobiographical travelogue moving from a volcano in Hawaii to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and places in between, with writing at its heart.Writing Toward Home offers practical advice on overcoming some of the obstacles writers of all ages face: writer’s block, fear of rejection, confronting silencing critics in your head, finding the time to write. Each short chapter speaks to the larger truths about writing and how to truly live the writer’s life: how to become more of a risk taker, how to excavate the past as a source, and how to become an acute observer of the world.Writing Toward Home is a book that will remind you-and help you remind your students-that the true source of writing is the creative self. In this fast culture when most people have so little time to do anything but menial tasks, it will jumpstart you, it will awaken to you the journey within, it will make you want to write.