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More about the Author
Marge Piercy and Ira Wood
Most people take the So You Want To Write workshop
because they’ve heard that it’s one of the
best ways to jump start their writing, but there’s
always a percentage who show up just to spend a weekend
with an author whose books have changed their lives.
Marge Piercy knows this and makes it a point to be available
to her students all through the weekend; in fact, one
of the first things she asks is that participants please
not treat her like a ‘teacher’ at all, but
feel free to hang out and talk to her throughout, especially
to join her at meals. If they’re surprised at this
accessibility, it’s only the first of many things
that shock them about the famous novelist/poet.
Although she has lectured, taught or performed at well
over three hundred universities, Piercy chooses the
workshop format because she has never wanted to be a
full time academic. Growing up in a working class family
in Detroit, she received a scholarship to the University
of Michigan, where she distinguished herself by winning
four prestigious Hopwood awards. But after receiving
her Masters she decided against a doctorate and moved
to Chicago, worked part time jobs and began to write.
Struggling writers rarely fail to be inspired by a woman
who chose uncertainty over a promising university career,
wrote seven books before her first was accepted, and
then went on to publish fifteen novels and fifteen books
of poetry, win international critical acclaim and see
her work translated into sixteen languages.
What her students experience in a weekend with Marge
Piercy is a distinguished woman of letters who does
not romanticize the writer’s life. Always in search
of the source of Piercy’s amazing productivity
(her thirty-sixth book, Sleeping with Cats, a memoir,
is forthcoming from William Morrow in January, 2002)
her students are somewhat disappointed to hear that
she does not view writing as a divine agony or wait
for inspiration to strike, but sits down to a day of
work like everyone else. "The real writer is one/
who really writes," she says in her poem, ‘For
the young who want to,’ "You have to/ like
it better than being loved." People around the
world have been inspired by her verse. The Moon is Always
Female has sold almost one hundred thousand copies (of
poetry!). One of Alfred A. Knopf’s best-selling
poets, Piercy's Circles on the Water, her selected poems,
is in its fourteenth printing.
But just as many Piercy fans don’t give a lick
for poetry, and know her only as the author of best-sellers
such as Gone to Soldiers and The Longings of Women;
or classics that embodied the awakening ideas of an
entire generation of women, such as Small Changes and
Woman on the Edge of Time; or the futuristic environmental
cyber-punk novel He, She, and It, winner of the Arthur
C. Clarke Award for Best Speculative Fiction in the
United Kingdom.
The New York Times has called Piercy’s wide-ranging
oeuvre "breathtakingly ambitious" and indeed
she is a writer who refuses to be categorized. Is she
a mainstream fiction writer? A nature poet? A historical
novelist? A science fiction writer? A feminist theorist?
A writer of liturgy? How do you square Fly Away Home,
a domestic thriller (and a New York Times Notable Book
of the Year) with the avowedly political Dance the Eagle
to Sleep or The Art of Blessing the Day, a book of spiritual
poems used in the services of many different religions.
Don’t try. The subjects of her books are as diverse
as her fans.
Another surprise for workshop participants is Ira.
They came for the main show, to work with Piercy. They
read his The Kitchen Man and laughed their butts off;
they read Storm Tide—and constantly ask how two
married people can possibly write a novel together.
But what can he bring to the table?
What they discover is a natural teacher and a writer/publisher
who has identified the various craft as well as personal
issues holding many writers back and how best to approach
them. As managing editor of one of the new breed of
entrepreneurial independent publishing companies —According
to The Boston Globe, "The
pulse of what’s hot in the book publishing world
… a small press with national distribution, bursting
onto the scene with rare success."—Ira fills
a gap left open in many writers’ workshops. He
explains first-hand what a publisher is looking for
in a manuscript, how to read the sub-text of rejection
letters, how a writer must partner with a publisher
in order to insure a book’s success.
Ira is not shy about his own tough times in publishing
(29 rejections and 3 different agents for his first
novel The Kitchen Man before
he sold it himself to an independent press and garnered
stunning reviews, a movie option/screenplay deal with
Universal, and a mass paperback sale to Random House),
to which all his writing students can relate. And, as
a writer who has a mastered a new profession for every
one of his books (A school bus driver during court-ordered
busing in South Boston for The Last White Class; A gourmet
waiter for The Kitchen Man; A
software game designer for Going Public; an elected
government official for Storm
Tide) he’s a great example of how to make a
go at the writing profession in the long haul.
Reviews for their last collaboration Storm
Tide came up with the same word over and again,
‘seamless,’ to describe a book in which the
personalities of two writers melded into one strong
voice. Those who experience either their workshops or
their new book, So You Want to Write come away
with the impression of two highly energetic professionals
who enjoy sharing unique insights gained in over seventy
years of combined experience in all aspects of the publishing
world and don’t shy away from their mistakes (Note
page 176: Piercy’s embarrassment in sending the
same work twice to a prestigious literary journal and
receiving a letter back that said: "We did not
care for these poems the first time we saw them and
our opinion has not changed with time.")
Piercy and Wood live in a small fishing village on
Cape Cod. Besides writing, teaching workshops, making
personal appearances, and running a publishing company,
they love organic gardening and have about an acre in
cultivation. One of Piercy’s most famous poems
is ‘To Be of Use’, which states in part, "The
pitcher cries for water to carry/And a person for work
that is real." It’s a poem in praise of hard
work; an activity rarely glorified but one in which
both these writers find some of their greatest pleasures
and satisfaction. Find out more about Marge Piercy and
her work at her website www.margepiercy.com.
back to:
So You Want To Write
PUB DATE: August, 2001
CATEGORY: Writing / Self Actualization & Self Help
/ Reference
PAGES: 224
TRIM: 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-9679520-2-6
PRICE: $14.95 / Paperback Original
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