Jump Start: How to Write from Everyday Life » (New Edition)

Robert Wolf is Executive Director of the Free River Press. He is a writer and teacher who has lived and worked in many regions of the country and now runs private seminars and workshops. He is the author of An American Mosaic: Poetry and Prose by Everyday Folk (OUP, 1999). He lives near Lansing, Iowa.

For years, Robert Wolf traveled around the Midwest and the South teaching small town folk, farmers, and homeless individuals to write about their lives through poems, essays and fiction. Through his own small publishing company, Free River Press, Wolf published these stories of the forgotten parts of America. In 1999, Oxford published an anthology of his students' works in a volume entitled American Mosaic: Poetry and Prose by Everyday Folk.

Now, we have Jump Start--a concise guide that offers Wolf's writing techniques from his Free River Press workshops across the country. Rooted in the oral tradition, Wolf's methods include storytelling, visualization, spontaneous prose composition, and sketching. Useful for both the individual and groups as well as for beginning or practiced writers, his concrete techniques are flexible enough to be applied towards any form (poetry, composition, non-fiction, plays, etc.). With the inclusion of writing samples from past workshop participants, Wolf's main emphasis is that people from all walks of life, even with no previous background in writing, may produce meaningful and memorable work.

KLIATT

Robert Wolf traveled throughout the American South and Midwest teaching people who may never have envisioned themselves as writers how to use their life experiences to generate poems, essays, and fiction. In this compact volume, Wolf uses many examples from the workshops he conducted to introduce students to a broad spectrum of writing techniques. Topics include such skills and strategies as sketching with words, the importance of observation, recording dreams, the story as internal movie, the use of dialogue and dialect, the value of rewriting, and the art of writing memoirs. Each section of the book includes numerous practical exercises for students to use both individually and in groups to practice their newly acquired skills and techniques, with the entire last chapter devoted to group activities that will be of great interest to writing classes and workshops. Although Wolf offers a great deal of useful information to aspiring writers, his presentation—based on workshops that were geared primarily toward farmers, homeless people, and other adults whose focus was presumably quite different from that of most teens—is not really aimed at YA readers. Those with the patience to work their way through Wolf's sometimes-dense prose, however, will find many valuable strategies in these pages. Category: Literature & Language Arts. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Oxford Univ. Press, 156p. bibliog., $13.95. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Jeffrey Cooper; Writer/Editor, Long Island, NY SOURCE: KLIATT, March 2002 (Vol. 36, No. 2)