Betwixt-and-between Essays on the writing life

This erudite, incisive collection of 19 essays from creative writing professor Boully (Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them) blends the personal with the instructive. While discussing the writing process, Boully opens the door to more intimate topics, such as growing up with a multiracial background, falling in love, and coping with post-breakup heartbreak. Interested in the limits of genre, she writes that she is "sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet," suggesting that such classifications are inadequate to describe a writer or her process. Throughout, she exposes the mind of a writer at work, capturing moments both of inspiration and of gnawing doubt. In "On Writing and Witchcraft," Boully compares her teenage fascination with witchcraft to her present craft, which can demand psyching herself up into a mindset that makes her feel creative: "staging a certain sacredness before the sacredness can start." In "On Beginnings and Endings" she writes about her love for beginnings and her fear of endings, both in literature and in life, stating, "the importance of the beginning is to make possible the love affair; the importance of the ending is to make impossible the love affair." Fellow practitioners of literary nonfiction will find Boully's writing relatable and charming. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A poet and essayist likens writing to witchcraft, love, and "the craft of getting someone to love me."As a teacher, Boully (Creative Writing and Literature/Columbia Coll. Chicago; of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures, 2012, etc.) was visited by a textbook representative who offered her many books to help teach her students the craft of poetry or nonfiction writing. Horrified, she recalled the exercises she had encountered as an undergraduate, which resembled "therapy: confronting an experience with the goal of moving beyond it to free oneself from buried trauma." For Boully, the process is far different, rooted in a philosophical journey for meaning, sincerity, and, not least, love. "I expect my students to essay fiercely and obsessively," she writes. In her own work, an essay "may begin with a suspicion. I follow that suspicion until it gives me something I might have been searching for." The pieces in this captivating collectionversions of which were previously published in literary journalsreflect Boully's discomfort with genre: some are prose poems, some collages of fragments, bits of "veiled memoir," and evocative digressions. "It seems to me," she writes ruefully, "that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary discrimination." The author's prose is reminiscent of Lydia Davis'spare, elliptical, unexpectedand sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of Gertrude Stein's. In the literary world, Boully confesses, her genre-bending often causes consternation. "I may look like an essay, but I don't act like one," she writes. "I may look like prose, but I don't speak like it." She may look like a poet, too, or a fiction writer: "The need to write fictions," she offers, "arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another.Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.