David Biespiel cracks open the creative process as he candidly tracks his own development as a writer and challenges traditional assumptions about writing that can stifle creativity. The liberating message: Working past the brink of failure--being free to try and discard and try again--is what allows the creative process to playfully flourish, keeping the spirit open to unexpected discoveries. Both beginning and experienced writers—as well as artists, musicians, dancers, and anyone else on a creative path—will benefit from this elegant, surprising, and fresh perspective.
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"Finally, an anti-bullshit book on creativity!"
— James Marcus
"Does for the creative process what Strunk and White did for our approach to grammar and style. Indispensable."
— Marjorie Sandor
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"Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces instead of the advice de rigueur, is a well-spring of ideas for how to jump start the creative process, valuable examples of athletic and visual artists who exercise this proposed method, and, perhaps most importantly, oodles of empathy for the writer and artist who is battling their own stuck process and potentially self-doubt or frustration."
— Hazel & Wren
Pilgrims & Beggars
Limited Edition
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This is the book in which David Biespiel first introduced his innovative, 9-line American sonnets.
These poems roll out across the page like darkly luminous highways, and bring his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough.
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"In his smart and surprising poems, David Biespiel circumnavigates the English language with wit and nerve. His short, sophisticated poems dance to chewy and diverse vocabularies. This Magical Mystery Tour dazzles, but always in the service of genuine experience, emotion, and reflection."
— Judith Taylor
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*****
Pilgrims & Beggars
Portlandia Books
2002