Learning a Trade: A Craftsman's Notebooks: 1955-1997

By Reynolds Price

Book Overview

From Reynolds Price, much acclaimed author of award-winning novels, plays, poems, stories, and essays, comes a work that is unique among contemporary writers of American literature. For more than forty years, Price has kept a working journal of his writing life. Now published for the first time, Learning a Trade provides a revealing window into this writer's creative process and craftsman's sensibilities. Whether Price is reflecting on the rhythm of his day-to-day writing process or ruminating about the central character in what would become, for instance, Kate Vaiden --should she be a woman, what would be her name, why would the story be told in the first person?--he envelops the reader in the task at hand, in the trade being practiced. Instead of personal memoir or a collection of literary fragments, Learning a Trade presents what Price has called the "ongoing minutes" of his effort to learn his craft. Equally enlightening as an overview of a career of developing prominence or as a perspective on the building of individual literary works, this volume not only allows the reader to hear the author's internal dialogue on the hundreds of questions that must be turned and mulled during the planning and writing of a novel but, in an unplanned way, creates its own compelling narrative. These notebooks begin in "that distant summer in dazed Eisenhower America," a month after Price's graduation from Duke University, and conclude in "the raucous millennial present" with plans for his most recent novel, Roxanna Slade . Revealing the genesis and resolution of such works as The Surface of Earth , The Source of Light , Kate Vaiden , Clear Pictures , and Blue Calhoun , Learning a Trade offers a rich reward to those seeking to enter the guild of writers, as well as those intrigued by the process of the literary life or captured by the work of Reynolds Price.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822321122
• ISBN13: 9780822321125
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

On Price's Learning a Trade

This is a great book to have around, and to dip into as you progress through Price's works -- which is definitely worth doing. It is not meant to be read through, start to finish; I have been reading the sections devoted to certain works after reading the works themselves. Pages devoted to a given work are quite specific; a familiarity with the work is very important, almost necessary. I had hoped the book would be a bit more generic about the craft, the writers Price has read, the perils of publishing, etc.; instead, the book is comprised of straight excerpts from the notebooks of a working writer, focusing on the naming of characters, motivation, structure and so on. The design of the book allows for Price's comments on his own notes -- sometimes written much later -- to appear on the facing pages, as they do in his actual notebooks. And the pages are chock full of gems such as this: writer's block is nothing more than "the writer's failure to understand his or her creative metabolism." And the book will lead you to other Price works, among which I heartily recommned Roxanna Slade,The Promise of Rest and Price's harrowing account of surviving spinal cancer, A Whole New Life. Price has a voice that is warm and distinctive, wonderfully southern, and he is not afraid to address life's larger issues -- rare among writers today.