Stephen Harrod Buhner - Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writers Life

For the ones who taught me: John Dunning, Robert Bly, John Gardner, and William Stafford

And for all those who come after illigitimi non carborundum

Ensouling Language

Stephen Harrod Buhner has produced a manifesto and guide to bring American writing back from the cages of the academy and release the power of language into the streets and wildernesses where the wild things live. If you love to read, if you like to write, you have finally come to the right place.

CHARLES BOWDEN, AUTHOR OF MURDER CITY, RECIPIENT OF THE LANNAN LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION AND THE SIDNEY HILLMAN AWARD

Stephen Buhners Ensouling Language invites you to sit down for 23 cups of coffee and talk about the mystic journey of the writer, the solitary pilgrim, the witness yearning to tell the world indelible stories that cannot be known by any other voice than yours. If you are a teacher, a writer, a friend of a writer, this book will offer companionship in this life quest. This book harvests lessons from a writer and helpless lover of books who is old in experience but young in perennial devotion.

KIM STAFFORD, DIRECTOR OF NORTHWEST WRITING INSTITUTE AND WILLIAM STAFFORD CENTER, LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE, AND AUTHOR OF THE MUSES AMONG US: ELOQUENT LISTENING AND OTHER PLEASURES OF THE WRITER'S CRAFT

Ensouling Language is a fierce and generous meditation on the writers life. Fierce, because Stephen Buhner goes right at prevailing commercial and academic assumptions about literature. For him, writing is above all a portal into vividness, compassion, and discovery. Generous, because he weaves his own quest as a writer into his reflections about the art of nonfiction. Books, in both the reading and the writing, have absorbed him for a lifetime. And the connections he conveys here are always arresting, sometimes extravagant in their intensity, and very often funny. As a writer and a teacher, Ive learned more from Buhners book than from anything Ive read about writing since the works of John Gardner and William Stafford. Im truly grateful to him for having written it.

JOHN ELDER, INSTRUCTOR AT BREADLOAF WRITERS CONFERENCE, PROFESSOR AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, AND AUTHOR OF READING THE MOUNTAINS OF HOME AND THE FROG RUN

I cant easily imagine a more useful book on the craft of writing. Covering all the stepsfrom glimpsing a first, furtive idea foraging in the minds brambles to tracking that idea and coaxing it to unfurl on the page, from finding the right words to securing the right publisherthis volume also, in the process, transforms your take on the universe. For Buhner brings all his inspired lunacy to bear, illustrating his passionate insights with lively stories and poems and with glimmering nuggets from other authors, fashioning this instructive, how-to book into a breathing compendium of word magic.

DAVID ABRAM, AUTHOR OF BECOMING ANIMAL: AN EARTHLY COSMOLOGY AND THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS, WINNER OF THE LANNAN LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION

If you want a kind of deep ecology for nonfiction writing, a practical guide ingrained with the spirits of William Stafford and Federico Garca Lorca too, Ensouling Language is your book. Its pages, studded with samples and suggestions, come via the authors fresh and liberating voice, opening up the imaginal world we cannot do without.

JOHN ELDER, INSTRUCTOR AT BREADLOAF WRITERS CONFERENCE,PROFESSOR AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, AND AUTHOR OFREADING THE MOUNTAINS OF HOME AND THE FROG RUN

Stephen Buhner writes with passion and perception about the entire range of the writers experience. He shows us in detail how to write, issues of craft and art, but also how a writer livesthe commitment, the dreaming, the business, the way a writer uncovers secrets on many levels, even how a writer loves and hates.

RACHEL POLLACK, AUTHOR OF GODMOTHER NIGHT, RECIPIENTOF THE WORLD FANTASY AND THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARDS

Stephen Harrod Buhner has counted beacoup coups in penningEnsouling Language. As history almost unanimously attests, writing well about writing is at best a rarity, perhaps mythic, a yeti of sorts. But Buhners flair, sage advice, and most of all his passion for writing touches every sentence. The book brings writing to life and will add life to any authors own words.

DAVID CREMEAN, PAST PRESIDENT, WESTERN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION

Thanks are extended to the following publishers and authors for granting permission to reprint:

For Freckle-Faced Gerald from The Essential Etheridge Knight,by Etheridge Knight, copyright 1986. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Robert Bly, for permission to reprint from American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Harper and Row, copyright 1990 by Robert Bly, as well as his translations of two poems of Machado, one of Jiminez, and one of Rilke.

Samuel Delany, excerpts from The Einstein Intersection, copyright 1967 by Samuel Delany and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan Press.

From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Ranier Maria Rilke, translated by M. D. Herter Norton. Copyright 1949 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Renewed 1977 by M. D. Herter Norton Crena de Iongh. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner. Copyright 1983 by the Estate of John Gardner. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the Estate of John Gardner.

William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright 1960, 1998 by William Stafford and the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Laura Mara Agustn, Sex at the Margins, copyright 2007 by Laura Mara Agustn. Reprinted by permission of Zed Books, London & New York, www .zedbooks.co.uk.

From The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, copyright 1984 by the Estate of John Gardner. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

From One Way to Spell Man by Wallace Stegner. Originally published in Saturday Review, August 1958, copyright 1958, 1982 by Wallace Stegner. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

From Habitations of the Word, Cornell University Press, Copyright 1985 by William Gass. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

The First Draft, Revision, Clarity, and Refinement

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

We must ask ourselves:
Who benefits when the gods disappear from the world.

JAMES HILLMAN

Before Buying This Book

The still small voice of reason is what I keep trying to protect in myself and cherish in others. Dont tell me what forensic speakers have forced on you. Relax, forget them. Tell me quietly, here in this room, what you really think.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

I am a barbarian; it is only polite to tell you that up front. You should keep that well in mind before you decide to buy this book. And, though I have been dressing myself since my early twenties, I am not really housebroken, not really civilized. That especially applies to my writingand my opinions, observations, and advice about the craft.