As a lawyer, Allen Mendenhall asks questions. As a writer, he’s interested in the craft. Combine these two and you get this, a collection of writers discussing writing. Writers on Writing: Conversations with Allen Mendenhall is an anthology of penetrating interviews with prominent and diverse authors who discuss arts, literature, books, culture, life, and the writing process with Allen … Mendenhall, editor of Southern Literary Review and associate dean at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law. Featuring the telling insights and sage advice of novelists, historians, poets, professors, philosophers, and more, Writers on Writing is not just an informative guide or a useful resource but a fount of inspiration. Readers will find in these pages authentic voices, frank exchanges, and unique perspectives on a wide variety of matters. Aspiring and established writers alike will learn from this book.
more
I was excited to learn about this collection when my dear friend and colleague, Johnnie Bernhard, posted about it online a few months ago. Johnnie’s one of the featured writers, along with a few other authors I’ve met at conferences. Some I only know online. The attractive cover of a manual typewriter lured me right in. I cut my writing teeth typing stories on a manual typewriter for my hometown newspaper. Call me old-school, but there’s something romantic or nostalgic about seeing the image of a typewriter that sparks my imagination.
The day my copy arrived in the mail, I ran my hand over the cover and immediately wanted to tap into the creative energy I felt stirring within me. I took my time with this book although you can easily read it cover to cover in a couple of days. I wanted to savor each interview, let each writer’s process sink in. When I read about other writers and how they get their work done, or the challenges they face, I don’t feel so alone.
Allen Mendenhall’s collection exposed me to a wide variety of writers, some I’d never heard of until I opened the book and scanned the table of contents. As a writer, I’m always eager to read about other writers, especially now days when so many newspapers and magazines have scaled back on running book reviews and author interviews. Even small-town newspapers are running less “local author” feature stories.
What’s missing in this book are “author bios” at the end of each interview. I came to appreciate this early on as it prompted me to look up each author online and read more about their work. If a bio had appeared at the end of each section, I might have easily scanned over it and moved on.
My takeaway from Writers on Writing can best be summed up in the words of David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident, where he states on page 197 in Allen’s book, “There’s always a lot of important writing that isn’t canonized.”
In other words, a lot of writers have written stories that are worthy to be read, but for whatever reason, the book reading public has never heard of them. As a writer who yearns to have more readers, this speaks to my heart.
I highly recommend Allen Mendenhall’s book to other writers, even if you aren’t from the south.
“Writers on Writing: Conversations with Allen Mendenhall” (Red Dirt Press 2018) is a thoughtful, insightful, and intelligent book. Mendenhall has crafted a fascinating collection of interviews with writers, and this is a book writers and readers alike can dive into and reap rewards. It’s educational, it’s entertaining, and its broad scope is sure to offer something on point for every reader’s specific interest.
“Writers on Writing” is filled with interviews of modern authors, some famous and some not-so-famous. The eclectic collection of interviews in the book are not formulaic Q & A’s, but something deeper, more revealing, often quite personal, and endlessly fascinating. And that’s part of what makes the book such a source of discovery and delight.
As Professor Robert West, author, reviewer and poet, says in his foreword, “Here are interviews centering on recent novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, historical studies, and literary studies.” As West observes, there is “a delightful egalitarianism here.” Indeed, part of the great appeal of this collection is, as West notes, the broad-minded universality and welcoming of diversity in the collection.