Winding Roads

Description

Written by an award-winning author and Fulbright Scholar, Winding Roads:  Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction, a new first edition, offers exciting and challenging exercises to help focus your creative nonfiction writing.  The numerous exercises set simple tasks, enabling you to practice your technique and develop your existing skills.  The author believes that the greatest question you will face as a writer is how you cast or shape your piece.  Thus, the process of beginning with small pieces that allow you to progress to larger endeavors makes writing easier to manage and helps you learn to isolate each element of your piece.  Active lessons with prompts will have you writing day after day.

 

Other titles written by Diane Thiel include Crossroads:  Creative Writing in Four Genres and Open Roads:  Exercises in Writing Poetry.  You may purchase copies by going to http://www.mypearsonstore.com. 

 

WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN THIS EDITION

• An extensive anthology of essays serves as models for your own writing.
• Text includes a very strong section on revision, helping you to consider alternative ways of shaping your essay.
• Numerous exercises address each element of writing creative nonfiction separately, helping you to understand all the elements included in creating an effective piece of writing.
• Various approaches to writing creative nonfiction are clearly examined, followed by extensive practice of each specific technique.

 

Visit us at www.ablongman.com

 

Diane Thiel is the author of six books of poetry, nonfiction, and creative writing pedagogy: Echolocations (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 2000),

Writing Your Rhythm (2001), The White Horse: A Colombian Journey (2004), Resistance Fantasies (2004), Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres (Longman, 2005) and Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry (Longman, 2005). Her work appears in major journals including Poetry, The Hudson Review,The Sewanee Review, Best American Poetry 1999, among numerous others, and is reprinted in more than 30 major anthologies, including Twentieth Century American Poetry (McGraw Hill, 2004) and Contemporary American Poetry (Longman, 2005). Thiel received her BA and MFA from Brown University and has traveled and lived in various countries in Europe and South America. She has been a professor of creative writing for more than 15 years. A recipient of numerous awards including the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers Awards, and a recent Fulbright Scholar, she is on the creative writing faculty at the University of New Mexico.

 

Winding Roads:  Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction offers exciting and challenging exercises with accompanying models which help focus student writing and allow instructors to address specific elements of writing creative nonfiction. The numerous exercises set simple tasks, enabling students to practice their technique and develop existing skills.  The process of beginning with small pieces that allow writers to progress to larger endeavors makes writing easier to manage and helps them learn to isolate each element of the piece. 

Written by an award-winning author Diane Thiel, Winding Roads:  Exercises in Composing Creative Nonfiction offers exciting and challenging exercises with accompanying models which help focus student writing and allow instructors to address specfic elements of writing creative nonfiction.  Vital examples in an extensive selection of readings serve as models and exercises address each element of writing creative nonfiction separately, while building towards an understanding of all the elements which go into creating an effective piece of writing. 

                From Memory to Memoir

                Biographical Sketch: Researching a Life

                Personal Opinion Essay: Taking a Stand

                Living Sources: Gathering and Using Information

                Reflective Writing:  Reflecting on the World

                Writing About Place

                A Piece of History

               

Exploring Frequent Concerns of Creative Nonfiction

 

                Finding the Emotional Truth

                Writing Between the Lines:  Subtext

                Time-lines and the Larger Context

                The Passage of Time

                Mapping Your Memory

                Vignettes

                Writing Inside the Story: Meta-writing

 

 

IV.  A Collection of Creative Nonfiction

 

            Diane Ackerman, “The Truth about Truffles”

            Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me”

            Rudolfo Anaya, “Why I Love Tourists: Confessions of a Dharma Bum”

            Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods”

            Philip Brady, “Myth and Uncertainty” from To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigration and the Afterlife

            Bruce Chatwin, from In Patagonia

            Wayson Choy, from Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood

            Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Silent Dancing”

            Fred D’Aguiar, “A Son in Shadow”

            Edwidge Danticat, “Westbury Court”

            Rhina Espaillat, “Bilingual/Bilingue”

            Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Splendor and Squalor” from Among the White Moon Faces:  An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands

            Dana Gioia, “Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader’s Childhood”

            Joy Harjo, “The Flying Man”

            Jamaica Kincaid, “Biography of a Dress”

            Barry Lopez, “Landscape and Narrative”

            Naomi Shihab Nye, “Three Pokes of a Thistle”

            Hilda Raz, “Looking at Aaron” from What Becomes You

            Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination”

            Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”

            Diane Thiel, “Crossing the Border” from The White Horse: A Colombian Journey

            Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

            Alice Walker, “Am I Blue”

            Anthony Walton, from Mississippi

            Terry Tempest Williams, “Peregrine Falcon,” from Refuge

 

 

V.  Writers About the Art of Creative Nonfiction

 

                Margaret Atwood, “Nine Beginnings”

                Lee Gutkind, “The Creative Nonfiction Police”

                Tracy Kidder, “Making the Truth Believable”

                Brett Lott, “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction”

                Gregory Martin, “Other People’s Memories”

                John McNally, “Humor Incarnate”

                Sue Miller, “From a Lecture on Revision”

• Clear, concise discussions of particular techniques of writing creative nonfiction are followed by practice of these individual techniques. 
• The book also contains an extensive anthology of essays to use as models, when students write their own essays or parts of exercises.
• Text includes a very strong section on revision, helping students to consider alternative ways of shaping their essay.
• Numerous exercises address each element of writing creative nonfiction separately, helping students to understand all the elements included in creating an effective piece of writing.
• Various approaches to writing creative nonfiction are clearly examined, followed by extensive practice of each specific technique.

Additional information

Dimensions	0.80 × 6.30 × 9.10 in
Imprint	Pearson
Format	gen
ISBN-13	09780321429896
ISBN-10	0321429893
Author	Diane Thiel
Subjects	Literature, english, Creative writing, higher education, Language Arts / Literacy