Untitled Document
Central Illinois has many writers’ groups
— I can easily name six in Springfield. Some have died: Women Writes
waxed awhile, and so did the Snotty Little Writers Group. Some are lying
fallow; surely some, like gas clouds in a star nursery, are forming as I
write. Add all of the unorganized who say they want to write or already
have half a memoir or a secret stash of poems, and I think we’d count
half the population. Well, do I have a book for you: Virginia Woolf
herself, this famous and sympathetic author, giving a writers’
workshop. It’s an ingenious idea. Danell Jones, a Woolf scholar,
author, and writing teacher, has gathered into seven workshop sessions what
Woolf, in her voluminous diaries, essays, and letters, has to say about
writing. Woolf’s actual words — a remarkable lot of them
— are given in quotes, with semi-imagined bridges of her thoughts as
she speaks to her class, to us. She starts with “Practicing.”
You have to kill a destructive creature called the Angel in the House, who
puts everyone else’s needs before her own, thinks her own work
unimportant. “Mine died hard,” says Woolf. On
“Working” she explains what she really means by a room of
one’s own and 500 a year: “The habit of freedom and the courage
to write exactly what we think . . . it stands for the power to
contemplate, that lock on the door means the power to think for
oneself.” Then “Creating,” next “Walking”: “It feeds me,
rests me, satisfies me . . . It gives you space to spread your mind
out.” “Reading”: “The only advice one person can
give another is take no advice . . . follow your instincts . . . each of us
has an appetite that must find for itself the food that nourishes
it.” “Publishing” and “Doubting” finish the
sessions. After each class are “Writing Sparks” —
Woolf’s term — things to do, think about, write, suggested by
the topic. These are imaginative, stimulating, and fun. The workshop fills
half the book; you leave Woolf inspired but with regret. What follows,
however, after a bit on suggested further reading, is a whole fireworks
display of sparks: exercises to get you and keep you going. These are
divided into genres: fiction, biography, memoir, poetry. The fiction is
subdivided into beginnings, structure, scenes, conflict, and more, and all
are filled with Woolfian examples and references. There’s also a
bibliography, notes on where to find Woolf’s quotes, and index. Nowhere is a mention of grades, syllabi, just what it
is you want, how long it should be, when it is due. Nowhere to be found are
the bugaboos that turn the creators we basically are into writing-haters,
from the destructive elementary-school five-paragraph essays right through
most college classes I know of, which are mostly more of the devastating
prescriptive writing. What Woolf offers is the joy — and the joy of
the work. What Jones adds are myriad Woolfish ideas to get one’s
juices flowing. It’s a winning combination.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times, is a professor emerita of English at the University of Illinois at
Springfield.
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 5, 2008.
