“AS WE WERE SAYING: SEWANEE WRITERS ON WRITING,” edited by Wyatt Prunty, Megan Roberts and Adam Latham (Louisiana State University Press, 261 pages, $35).
The 18 essays in “As We Were Saying” are gleaned from recent craft talks delivered at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, which is held each summer on the campus of the University of the South. In his introduction to the book, Wyatt Prunty, founding director of the conference, describes the annual gathering as appearing to be a house party when in fact the writers in attendance “are not present for parties but for each other by means of workshops, close line-by-line responses to texts, readings, talks, individual meetings over manuscripts and formal and informal opportunities to meet editors, agents and publishers looking for new talent.”
Prunty, along with co-editors Megan Roberts and Adam Latham, has compiled a diverse cast of writers who explore an array of topics, from Alice McDermott’s thoughts on folktales to Mary Jo Salter’s consideration of the life and mindset of the late poet Mark Strand to Dan O’Brien’s meditation on his revelatory journey into the world of playwriting. Some of the writers offer a close analysis of one or two authors, while others focus on a particular technique in writing or storytelling.
McDermott delves into an Irish folktale about a man in search of water for his dog, contrasting her analysis of the narrative to real-life distractions that can pull a reader away from a story. McDermott, for example, often judges the worth of a story by whether it causes her to linger on the walk from her mailbox to her front door where her labradoodle Rufous waits to be taken out for his walk. “More than once I’ve entertained the notion that the fiction editors at The New Yorker should be informed each week of how well the opening paragraphs of the current short story have withstood Rufous’ brown-eyed charm,” writes McDermott.
Andrew Hudgins examines the importance of word selection in his essay on Robert Frost’s “Out, Out -.” Through experimenting with the effect of word replacement, Hudgins demonstrates the importance of craft, while also sharing his love for Frost, whose poem “reached out, snagged my attention and changed forever my ideas about what poetry could be.”