The Answers are Inside the Mountains Meditations on the Writing Life

In this posthumous collection of his meditations on writing and the writing life, William Stafford's lifelong refusal to separate his work from the task of living responsibly -- "What a person is shows up in what a person does" -- rings clear. Stafford kept a journal for nearly half a century and produced over 20,000 poems -- a treasure trove of writing still being uncovered long after his death. The book begins with the words "To overwhelm by rightness," a phrase evoking the two demands Stafford made on himself: to write well, and to live uprightly. This book lives up to those deceptively simple ethics. In his words William Stafford lives on as a voice for our times -- a bright light in a clouded age. William Stafford, who died in 1993, authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose during his lifetime, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation, You Must Revise Your Life, and Traveling Through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. In this posthumous collection of his meditations on writing and the writing life, William Stafford's lifelong refusal to separate his work from the task of living responsibly -- "What a person is shows up in what a person does" -- rings clear. Stafford kept a journal for nearly half a century and produced over 20,000 poems -- a treasure trove of writing still being uncovered long after his death. The book begins with the words "To overwhelm by rightness," a phrase evoking the two demands Stafford made on himself: to write well, and to live uprightly. This book lives up to those deceptively simple ethics. In his words William Stafford lives on as a voice for our times -- a bright light in a clouded age. William Stafford, who died in 1993, authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose during his lifetime, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation, You Must Revise Your Life, and Traveling Through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.