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How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience
January 6, 2016
How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience is based on the series of “How I Write” public conversations with faculty and other advanced writers conducted by Hilton Obenzinger at Stanford University since 2002. These conversations explored the nuts and bolts, pleasures and pains, of all types of writing with prominent novelists, poets, historians, physicists, critics, playwrights, philosophers, anthropologists and neuroscientists. How do writers get ideas? How do they launch into a project? Fashion arguments? Create images? Craft stories? What do they do when they get blocked? What are their strategies for revising their work? How We Write celebrates a craft that delights and dismays each of us.
"How We Write unravels the mysteries of how we write with grace, wit, humor, and perfect pitch. Filled with insights into the writing process that are surprising, eloquent, riveting—and remarkably useful, this unique, beautifully written book bubbles with ideas and inspiration that have real practical value. Hilton Obenzinger’s investigation of the varieties of a practice that can be solitary or social—and a source of pleasure or pain—is simultaneously charming, poignant, playful, and profound. It is also a delight to read." —Shelley Fisher Fishkin, author of Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of American Studies, Stanford University
Hilton Obenzinger teaches “Stand Up Comedy and the ‘Great American Joke’ Since 1945” in the American Studies Program. He writes fiction, poetry, history, and criticism. His books include Busy Dying, Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust by Zosia Goldberg, Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco, and American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. New York on Fire, a history of the fires of New York in verse, was selected by The Village Voice as one of the best books of the year and was nominated by the Bay Area Book Reviewer’s Association for its award in poetry. Obenzinger, who received his doctorate in the Modern Thought and Literature Program at Stanford University, directed honors and advanced writing from 1998 to 2010 at what is now Stanford’s Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. In addition to American Studies, he’s taught in the English Department and Continuing Studies at Stanford. He is currently Associate Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford.
Please join us for Hilton's talk:
January 27th, 2016
12:00-1:00 pm
Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (460-426)
