Frank’s personal journey is wonderfully told, so that what in these essays is particular becomes useful and universal.īack when I was a writer myself in the 1990s, I tended to have a low tolerance for those who assigned too much preciousness to the actual act of writing - I and my friends instead tended to look at it as just a job like any other, with a certain amount of time you need to dedicate to it each day, and a certain amount of pages to get finished, no matter what your mood or what the circumstances or whether you were doing that on a yellow legal pad on the bus on the way to your soul-killing day job, etc etc. Her subjects range widely, from the “boot camp” conditioning of marketing work to squaring off with rejection and envy from sustaining belief in art’s necessity to the baffling subjectivity of literary perception and the magical books that nourish writers. Original, witty, and practical, Frank ably steers us through the journey of her own life as a writer, as well as through the careers and work of other writers. Her insights about 'thinking on paper' are never dogmatic or pontifical rather, they are cordial and intellectually welcoming.

Frank offers what she has learned as a writer not only to other writers, but to those to whom good writing matters. Frank’s aim is to form a coherent vision, one that may provide some communion about realities of the writer's vocation that have struck her as rarely revealed.

Part memoir, part handbook, part survey of the contemporary literary scene, Joan Frank’s Because You Have A Writing Life is a collection of essays that, taken together, provide a walking tour of the writing life.

The wishing year by noelle oxenhandler