Sarah Kanning

This week, I’m recommending a book to all those tired and bedraggled writers who are now more than two-thirds of the way through National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). If you need balm for your weary souls, this is it: If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. This book was first published in 1938, [...]

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Is it Tuesday already? Right-o. Here’s a book I’ve kept handy for several years now: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood (Cambridge UP, 2002), based on a series of lectures she gave at Cambridge on the process of writing and her ideas about identity and the writer.

Part memoir, part literary [...]

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I was talking to my mom the other week, and mentioned a teenager I know who was agonizing over a college admissions essay. Some things never change, and yes, students still have to provide some written proof of their essential humanity and worthiness to study at whatever institution of higher learning to which they are [...]

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Up this week is The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. This book has been around since 1996 (first publised in the UK, now available from Penguin the US through their Firebird imprint) and has been justly lauded and reviewed LOTS of places, so I’ll be brief.
The Guide is arranged as an A-Z [...]

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Wicked Plants is particularly of note to writers because of its focus on plants that are poisonous and/or noxious in some way, which makes it a nice supplement to herbal guides that focus on edible and medicinal plants, or more general field guides. Murder mystery writers in particular will find much to love here.

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