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The most subversive book on writing I have ever encountered — and the most important.
Herbie Brennan,
New York Times best-selling author of Faerie Wars
Stephen Harrod Buhner has produced a manifesto and guide to bring
American writing back from the cages of the academy and release the power of language into the streets and wildernesses where
the wild things live. If you love to read, if you like to write,
you have finally come to the right place.
- Charles Bowden, author of Murder City, recipient of the Lannan
Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman award.
Ensouling Language is a fierce and generous meditation on the
writer's life. Fierce, because Stephen Buhner goes right at prevailing
commercial and academic assumptions about literature. For him, writing
is above all a portal into vividness, compassion, and discovery.
Generous, because he weaves his own quest as a writer into his
reflections about the art of nonfiction. Books, in both the reading
and the writing, have absorbed him for a lifetime. And the connections
he conveys here are always arresting, sometimes extravagant in their
intensity, and very often funny. As a writer and a teacher, I've
learned more from Buhner's book than from anything I've read about
writing since the works of John Gardner and William Stafford. I'm
truly grateful to him for having written it.
- John Elder,
Instructor Breadloaf Writers Conference, Professor
Middlebury College, Author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run
Stephen Buhner’s Ensouling Language invites you to sit down for 23 cups of coffee
and talk about the mystic journey of the writer, the solitary pilgrim, the witness
yearning to tell the world indelible stories that cannot be known by any other voice
than yours If you are a teacher, a writer, a friend of a writer, this book will offer
companionship in this life quest. Filled with chapters in a writer’s learning, insight,
stories of the craft, manifestoes, rich contradictions, and diatribes all to be savored,
considered, and made your own, this book harvests lessons from a writer and helpless
lover of books who is old in experience but young in perennial devotion. Would you
want an expert of any other kind, as you set out to become a writer?
-Kim Stafford, Director, Northwest Writing Institute and William Stafford Center,
Lewis & Clark College, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening
and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft
Ensouling Language is Stephen Harrod Buhner at his most spellbinding and enchanted.
Every sentence is infused with a livingness that is rare in today’s nonfiction.
More than simply a book about writing, it is about wielding the power - and responsibility –
of language itself. Stephen encourages us to breath the Breath of Life into the words we write,
to call forth such a deep richness of meaning that it transmits feeling from the writer to the reader
like some otherworldly telepathy. If you can feel you can write, write in this way, turning otherwise
empty leaden words into golden Ensouling Language.”
- Daniel Vitalis
I can't easily imagine a more useful book on the craft of writing.
Covering all the steps -- from glimpsing a first, furtive idea
foraging in the mind's brambles to tracking that idea and coaxing it
to unfurl on the page, from finding the right words to securing the
right publisher -- this volume also, in the process, transforms your
take on the universe. For Buhner brings all his inspired lunacy to
bear, illustrating his passionate insights with lively stories and
poems and with glimmering nuggets from other authors, fashioning this
instructive, how-to book into a breathing compendium of word magic.
- David Abram, author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and
The Spell of the Sensuous, winner of the Lannan Literary
Award for
Nonfiction
In an age of sound bites and high decibels, Ensouling Language urges
a return to self-study, contemplative practice, and disciplined
revision. If Lao-Tzu and Emerson could have a dialogue on writing,
they would welcome the company of this remarkable book.
- William Howarth, Professor of English, author of Walking with Thoreau
If you want a kind of deep ecology for nonfiction writing, a
practical guide ingrained with the spirits of William Stafford and
Federico García Lorca too, Ensouling Language is your book. Its
pages,
studded with samples and suggestions, come via the author’s
fresh and liberating voice, opening up the “imaginal world” we cannot
do without.
- John Felstiner, Professor of English, Stanford University,
winner of the Truman Capote award for literary criticism,
author of Can Poetry
Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor,
Jew, and Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu.
Stephen Harrod Buhner has counted beacoup coups in penning
Ensouling Language. As history almost unanimously attests, writing
well about writing is at best a rarity, perhaps mythic, a yeti of
sorts. But Buhner's flair, sage advice, and most of all his passion
for writing touches
every sentence. The book brings writing to life,
and will add life to any author's own words.
-David Cremean, Past President, Western Literature Association
Stephen Buhner writes with passion and perception about the entire range of
the writer's experience. He shows us in detail how to write, issues of
craft and art, but also how a writer
lives--the commitment, the dreaming,
the business, the way a writer uncovers secrets on many levels, even how a
writer loves and hates.
- Rachel Pollack, author of Godmother Night,
recipient of the World
Fantasy and the Arthur C. Clarke awards.
Buhner's book describes how any writer, even one writing about, say, adobe
walls, can achieve the sense of expansion--of traveling into larger worlds--that
has always marked the best art. And although the subject is nonfiction, what
Buhner has to say applies to serious writing of any kind.
- Akshay Ahuja, The Occasional Review, May 2010
Stephen Buhner’s new book makes an extremely important contribution to
the gradually changing intellectual culture which is beginning to take
place in science, economics and other disciplines. The writings of
Michael Polanyi (science), Herman Daly (economics), David Abram
(Philosophy) all point to similar conclusions. Our centuries-long
delusion that we could reduce everything to mechanistic, objective,
quantifiable descriptions of reality, have deprived us of the rich
experiences of life
and deep understanding of the world in which we
actually live. Now Buhner helps us to apply the same insights to art,
especially the art of writing non-fiction. And he is quick to point
out that he has not written the book so much for the benefit of
professional writers and critics, as for “all the children who stayed
up late, covers over their heads, flashlight on, reading when they
were supposed to be sleeping. What a delight!
- Frederick L. Kirschenmann, Professor of Philosophy, Iowa State
University, Distinguished Fellow Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays
from a Farmer Philosopher.
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