Priscilla Long

"The Writer's Portable Mentor will: Help you acquire the habits and practices of virtuoso creators ; Guide you in structuring your book, story, or essay ; Open the door to the sentence strategies of the masters ; Give you the tools to develop a poet's ear for sound ; Train you in observation skills honed by visual artists ; Help you complete more works that are more accomplished ; Provide more effective approaches to getting published ; Guide you in creating a writer's life that is more productive and more rewarding" --Cover, p. 4.

A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life

The Writer's Portable Mentor

A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, Second Edition

Minding the Muse is a practical handbook for the artist or writer--highly experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Miro. Beginning with the first sparks of artistic creation--"Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing"--Long moves through the various stages to "Completing Works" and "Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing." Every creative worker will find something here to take to heart and into the studio or workroom. "

A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators

Minding the Muse

Long’s work begs to be read aloud in order to savor the rich language and rhythm she instills in each poem. She explores the beauty of specific bridges while employing them as a metaphor for crossings to death (a sister’s suicide), eros, and art. Part elegy, the book also explores living, remembering, and celebrating.

Poems

Crossing Over

The questions that drive Priscilla Long's Fire and Stone are the questions asked by the painter Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897 painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? These questions look beyond everyday trivialities to ponder the essence of our origins. Using her own story as a touchstone, Long explores our human roots and how they shape who we are today. Her personal history encompasses childhood as an identical twin on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; the turmoil, social change, and music of the 1960s; the suicide of a sister; and a life in art in the Pacific Northwest. Here, memoir extends the threads of the writer's individual and very personal life to science, to history, and to ancestors, both literary and genetic, back to the Neanderthals. Long uses profoundly poetic personal essays to draw larger connections and to ask compelling questions about identity. Framed by four distinctive sections, Fire and Stone transcends genre and evolves into a sweeping elegy on what it means to be human.

Priscilla Long

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