Writing Alone and with Others »

Pat Schneider is Founder and Director of Amherst Writers & Artists and editor at Amherst Writers & Artists Press. An adjunct professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeleley, California, she has taught independent writing workshops nationally and internationally. Her pioneering work using creative writing as a means of empowering low-income populations is the subject of an international award-winning documentary, Tell Me Something I Can't Forget, by Florentine Films. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Peter Elbow is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and author of Writing with Power and Everyone Can Write.

For more than a quarter of a century, Pat Schneider has helped writers find and liberate their true voices. She has taught all kinds—the award winning, the struggling, and those who have been silenced by poverty and hardship. Her innovative methods have worked in classrooms from elementary to graduate level, in jail cells and public housing projects, in convents and seminaries, in youth at-risk programs, and with groups of the terminally ill.
Now, in Writing Alone and with Others, Schneider's acclaimed methods are available in a single well-organized and highly readable volume. The first part of the book guides the reader through the perils of the solitary writing life: fear, writer's block, and the bad habits of the internal critic. In the second section, Schneider describes the Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method, widely used across the U.S. and abroad. Chapters on fiction and poetry address matters of technique and point to further resources, while more than a hundred writing exercises offer specific ways to jumpstart the blocked and stretch the rut-stuck. Schneider's innovative teaching method will refresh the experienced writer and encourage the beginner. Her book is the essential owner's manual for the writer's voice.

Library Journal

Drawing on her many years of working with writers and would-be writers in workshops, Schneider has authored a useful and comprehensive text for the creative writer seeking to find his or her own voice and authority. Starting with the need to overcome the fear, anxiety, and nagging of the relentless self-critic within us, Schneider provides some practical exercises to get the writing process started (again) and to avoid the pitfalls of internal and external criticism. Citing the experience of the hundreds of writers she has read and worked with, Schneider counsels writers to privilege their own writing despite the distractions they face, to keep a writing journal, and to participate in a writing community with other writers. More than motivational or purely experiential, this very sensible yet practical text provides scores of proven exercises to help encourage the writer in each of us. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Herbert E. Shapiro, Empire State Coll. of SUNY, Rochester Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.