Writing Alone and With Others

For more than a quarter century Pat Schneider has helped writers from allwalks of life to find and liberate their true voices. She has taught allkinds-the award winning, the struggling, the tenured but nonetheless frustrated,and those who have been silenced by poverty and hardship. Her innovative methodshave worked around the world in classrooms at all levels, in jail cells andpublic housing projects, in convents and seminaries, in youth at-risk programs,and with groups of the terminally ill. Schneider's pioneering work has even beenthe subject of an international award-winning documentary.Now, in Writing Alone and with Others, Schneider's internationallyacclaimed methods are available in a single well-organized and highly readablevolume. It's a book rich in resources, rich in craft and in the encouragementvital to the writing life. The first part of the book guides the reader throughthe perils of the solitary writing life: fear, envy, writer's block, and the badhabits of the internal critic. In the second section Schneider describes theAmherst Writers and Artists workshop method that has provided an alternative totraditional creative writing classes across the U.S. and abroad. Chapters onfiction and poetry address matters of technique and point to further resources,while more than one hundred writing exercises offer specific ways to jumpstartthe blocked and stretch the rut- stuck.Schneider's innovative teaching method, targeting both the solitary writer andthe workshop, will help even the most timid to discover the writer that lieswithin them. Her book is the essential owner's manual for the writer'svoice.

Pat Schneider is Founder and Director of Amherst Writers & Artists and Editor at Amherst Writers & Artists Press. An adjunct professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, she has taught independent writing workshops nationally and internationally. Her pioneering work using creative writing as a means of empowering low-income populations is the subject of an award-winning documentary, Tell Me Something I Can't Forget, by Florentine Films. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Peter Elbow is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and author of Writing with Power and Everyone Can Write.