World Enough & Time

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Christian McEwen

Bauhan, Peterborough, NH, 2011, English

Nonfiction, General

ISBN: 9780872331464

From the Publisher. Over the course of ten years training teachers to write their own poems in order to pass the craft along to students, McEwen realized that nothing comes easily when life is conducted at a high rate of speed. She draws not only on personal experience, but on readings ranging from literary anecdote and poetry to Buddhism, anthropology, current news, and social history, all supplemented by interviews with contemporary writers and artists. This is a real reader's book, one that stands up as both sustained narrative and occasional inspiration.

McEwen espouses the pleasure to be found in slowing down, both for the ease and comfort of the thing itself (taking time to go for a walk, to write down one's dreams, to read, to talk, to pray), and for its impact on creativity. There are chapters on walking, talking, drawing, dreaming, on "making space," on pausing/praying, on telling stories. World Enough & Time is aimed at the educated general reader, could be used as a creative primer, and will be of interest to creative writing students and artists in every genre.

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Temple St. Clair

On Temple St. Clair’s Current Reading list

—December 2013. A godsend of a find that I stumbled upon recently in a bookstore in Northampton, Massachusetts. Wonderful examples are given from writers, musicians, and painters demonstrating that creativity requires “slow time.” Deliberate effort is so necessary to capture the time it takes for creativity to brew.

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