{"product_id":"9780826209924","title":"Writing the World","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn a series of passionate, profound, often humorous, observations, Kelly Cherry explores the art of writing, its relationship to place, and its importance in our lives.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"I have never written a 'travel essay,'\" Cherry says, but her travels inform her poetry and fiction. Now, seeking to understand what it means to write from any particular place, she charts a course in creative nonfiction prose. From Cleveland to Yalta, Wisconsin to Latvia, England to the Arizona desert or the Philippines, she writes as a way of knowing the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlong the way we become acquainted with the author herself, whose parents were string quartet violinists. They didn't go to church and, caught up in a rehearsal, sometimes forgot to put dinner on the table, but there was always music in the house (or the tenement flat). Cherry recalls warmly the stories of her childhood: \"I don't know whether or not there's a God,\" her mother would say, \"but I know there was a Beethoven, and that's good enough for me.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd always there was writing. As young writers do, Cherry earned her living at a variety of jobs—creating fictional histories of overseas orphans for their U.S. sponsors; editing and writing religious textbooks; a stint as a visiting professor in southwest Minnesota, where, in order to live in the dormitory, the only housing practicable for someone without a car, she had to enroll simultaneously as a student (she took astronomy). And in the evenings, the mornings, and other stolen moments, she wrote—as she does now—to create beauty from a specific kind of knowledge, the knowledge we acquire by creating beauty. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCherry explores what it means to be a Southern writer and a woman writer, and discusses the changing face of the profession of writing. \"To be a writer in America is to be marginal,\" she notes, adding that perhaps the best place for a serious writer to reside is \"on the edge, outside looking in.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou seek to know what it means to be living where you are, and that search is, for a writer, a searching out of language. That quest is, for a writer, a questioning. For a writer, beauty and knowledge begin in the same place. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith its brilliant insights and beautiful language, Writing the World is an eloquent meditation on what it means to be a writer. Like Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, Cherry's Writing the World will be a lasting inspiration for anyone who has ever dreamed of being a writer. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Missouri Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47015505395952,"sku":"9780826209924","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780826209924_p0.jpg?v=1763756979","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780826209924","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}