 |
|
 |
|
|
    
From Conversations: Reynolds Price and William Ray (The MVC Bulletin, Memphis State University, Memphis, Tennessee, 1976 A novel is, alas-- for better or worse, a function of experience and maturity. Why are there almost no good novels written by people in their early twenties or in their teens? There are almost none. It's one of the great problems of teaching writing to young people-- you find talented young people, eighteen or nineteen years old; you try to teach them some skills; you try to teach them some awareness, some craft and discipline. But you are also aware that you're getting them all dressed up with no place to go for about ten years, because they've got to wait until they've settled into their own characters and into their own lives, until they know something in their lives; and then their good fiction, their good narrative, will begin to come out of them in their middle and late twenties-- I believe often not until their late thirties. Fiction by Reynolds Price: The Honest Account of a Memorable Life : An Apocryphal Gospel |
Reynolds Price
at Goucher College, October 25, 2000 Teaching Notes on Reynolds Price: Learning a Trade, "A Chain of Love"
Published in 1957, Reynold's Price's first novel, A Long and Happy Life, was the winner of the William Faulkner Award. Thirty years later, his novel Kate Vaiden won the National Critics Circle Award. The later novel marked in some ways a return to the roots of the first: the small-town and country Southern society which Price, along with Eudora Welty and others, has claimed as his literary milieu. He has rendered this world, and the changes it has undergone since World War II, with a fidelity, clarity, and lyrical nuance which few living writers can rival. In the first four decades of his career, Price has published several dozen titles in many different genres: fiction, poetry, drama, and several categories of nonfiction. Most recently, he has become a well-known commentator on the Scriptures and has published several titles in this field. This focus on Religion was inspired in part by a brush with death by cancer. Partially paralyzed by a spinal tumor, he believes that his life was saved, and his illness healed, by divine intervention. His book about this experience, A Whole New Life : An Illness and a Healing , won him a whole new audience when it first appeared in 1994-- and one of best-selling proportions. A Rhodes Scholar in the mid-fifties, Reynolds Price is as distinguished in the academic world as in literary circles. For most of his career he has taught at Duke University, where he now holds the James B. Duke Professorship of English. Among the many well-known writers who began their careers as his students at Duke are Fred Chappell, Taghi Modaressi, and Ann Tyler. Forty years worth of Price's working notes and extraordinarily meticulous observations on the craft of writing have recently been collected in Learning a Trade : A Craftsman's Notebooks, 1955-1997.
This page is under construction. watch for developments. Source Images for A Long and Happy Life Conversation with Reynolds Price (interview by Marsha Barber) A Reynolds Price Bibliography by Stuart Wright Reynolds Price (article by David Templeton) "Strengthened by a Pale Green Light" (essay by Reynolds Price) |
From Learning
a Trade : A Craftsman's Notebooks, 1955-1997
...I felt my now-thick notebook shift beneath the weight of my daily
stints of advancing the longest narrative I'd attempted. The many strata of
speculations about character, plot, incident, point of view, and dialogue rapidly yielded
their contents to the texture of my story as the months clocked by. But the ongoing
process likewise transformed itself; the notes I made while actually writing the story
largely ceased being random thoughts and snatches of the dialogue. ...(the largest problem most young writers face is how to pursue a full-time but solitary job with no looming taskmaster in sight; most cases of writers' block, early or late, are the result of a failure to understand one's personal creative metabolism and how to maintain it, even-keeled, for long periods of time in the absence of any exterior goad). (from Learning a Trade : A Craftsman's Notebooks, 1955-1997 ) p. xii (More on unconscious
mind in writing) Poetry, drama, and nonfiction by Reynolds Price A Whole New Life : An Illness and a Healing Letter to a Man in the Fire : Does God Exist and Does He Care? |
goucher college creative writing program |
