Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Workbook: Memos & Dispatches on Writing

Workbook: Memos & Dispatches on Writing

Heighton, Steven

Paperback

Letters & EssaysWriting Instruction

Publisher Price: $16.95

ISBN10: 1550229370
ISBN13: 9781550229370
Publisher: Ecw Pr
Published: Oct 1 2011
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.00 Depth: 6.80
Language: English
Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of The Afterword, Steven Heighton's memos and dispatches to himself -- a writer's pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing -- have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that's as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life.

I stick to a form that bluntly admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both things, Heighton writes in his foreword, a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I'm going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater's initial be-it-resolved. At other times it's a meditation in the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other selves -- readers -- as well.

It's in these very aspirations, reaching both back into and forward in time -- and, ultimately, outside of the pages of the book itself -- that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest, most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of the modern world.

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