One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life

Adhering to Eudora Welty's adage that "writing is bad when ‘it isn't honest,' " creative writing teacher Carr (The Women in the Mirror) recalls her lifelong love of words, from her childhood storytelling days to years spent juggling teaching assignments, family obligations, and her fiction career. Beginning with her 1940s early childhood in a rural Wyoming oil camp—where her father worked for Standard Oil—and later in Texas, where she eventually got her B.A. and M.A. at Rice University (where a young James Dickey was teaching), the memoir is arranged as a series of page-long vignettes. The choppy format does a disservice to a fascinating life—which includes a grandmother whose own life was full of tall tales—but Carr's easy style smooths out most of the clunkiness. In addition to voicing her own strong ideas about fiction writing—particularly the notion that women should never write from inside the head of a female character (and the same for men)—she shares her personal experiences with numerous outstanding writers of the last half-century, including Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, and Dickey. Carr has truly lived a writer's life and readers will appreciate her journey. (Nov.)