Comforts of the Abyss: The Art of Persona Writing
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- € 12,99
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- € 12,99
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A vivid, intimate, and inspiring exploration of how to write through persona, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning founder of an influential writing school.
Throughout his growth as a writer, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz has battled with the dark voice in his head—the “shitbird,” as his late friend the poet Ralph Dickey termed it—that whispers his insecurities and questions his ability to create. Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomplished writers, offers him imaginative distance and perspective on his own negative inclinations.
In this candid and generous book, Schultz reflects on his early life in an immigrant neighborhood of upstate New York, his first writing experiments inspired by Ernest Hemingway and John Keats, his struggles with dyslexia, and the failures he witnessed in his father’s life and his own. Through surprising, sometimes humorous, and encouraging encounters with the writers who influence him—including Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer—as well as moving experiences of loss, Schultz learns how to fashion personas out of pain.
Perceptive, enlightening, and profound, Comforts of the Abyss reveals how persona writing can be used as a tool for unlocking a writer’s own story, the philosophy on which Schultz founded The Writers Studio in 1987.
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Poet Schultz (My Dyslexia) delves into the written expression of real emotion in this eloquent guide to "persona writing," or developing a narrative voice and viewpoint different from one's own. Doing so, he writes, makes it possible to articulate difficult feelings and can provide a shield from the "shitbird," Schultz's term for one's sense of doubt and self-hatred. Key to his program is understanding that "making a successful poem or story is a process of trial and error, and that disappointment and confusion are important parts of the process" and doing "exercises in selfhood" such as writing a letter to one's "most pronounced antagonist." His tips are solid, and much of the book consists of rich anecdotes about writers he knew: Schultz recounts the time he played a game of chicken with Norman Mailer to see who would come closest to jumping off a cliff (Schultz won; Mailer grabbed him at the last minute and pulled him back), and there's a story about Elizabeth Bishop cutting a paper bird out of newspaper at a party in San Francisco, setting it on fire, and watching it fly through the air. This intimate account is sure to satisfy writers in the making.
