Reading Li's memoir was a unique experience, or perhaps one so rare I can't remember the last time I had it. It challenged me to think not only about her as a writer and reader, but about myself as a writer and reader. I highlighted tons of passages, brief and long. I read the book slowly because I frequently needed to pause and evaluate Li's notions of self, writing, and reading, often all essentially the same thing, against what I believe or thought I believed.

Early on, Li notes that she does not like using first person. It is unavoidable in this type of work, but she uses "one" elsewhere, as in, "One hides something for two reasons: either one feels protective of it or one feels ashamed of it. And it is not always the case that the two possibilities can be separated." I found that it functioned much like second person ("you") where it assumes the reader's agreement. Having read the book, I can't think that was Li's intention, but it created an at times adversarial stance from which I judged her obviously personal claims. This isn't a critique, only an observation of the sort I don't make often. In a way, then, it's a compliment.

Because Li in part is writing about writing, I put it on a mental list of texts I'd love to assign in a creative writing workshop. Though my genre is poetry (and fiction after that), its insights apply to any genre. "To write," she says, "betrays one’s instinct to curl up and hide." Upon that I can easily agree.

Going to the ends of the earth (in this case, the Falklands) to write a novel in isolation, with no distractions, sounded like the kind of thing I might do (except for the novel part), which is why I was interested in reading Bleaker Island. Despite a charming start and some genuinely laugh out loud moments, I wasn't consistently invested in Stevens's account of her writing (and romantic) life. I don't read many contemporary memoirs because they can feel self-indulgent, and there's been such a boom in them that it makes me wonder whose lives warrant a whole book. Though Stevens is, in the end, self-aware about her self-indulgence, it doesn't make the book more appealing to me. 

In addition, I didn't understand why she included a few of her short stories. The novel excerpts made more sense, though I felt they might have been integrated better, perhaps in smaller chunks?

Like Louise Gluck's poetry, her prose in these essays on poetry are concise, insightful, crisp and deeply intelligent. Each one offered me something useful as a poet, teacher, and/or person. There's the spark of recognition in what she has to say about her own process as a writer and in her interpretations and close readings of particular poems and poets. She can be brave, too, in making cases for the usually (or temporarily) spurned, like impoverishment/passivity and sincerity (versus truth).

There's nothing like reading a great book/collection on craft and feeling re-energized and compelled to write. This book did that for me.

Sometimes I think I've read all the major arguments that can be made in support of women and their intelligence and creativity, and then, of course, I read someone like Virginia Woolf and this text I should have encountered long ago. I don't agree with all her arguments as I understand them upon a first reading, but her setup is clever, her writing as always is sharp and beautiful, her voice engaging and regal and personable at the same time. I'll definitely return to this, and it's a must read for feminists, writers, and Woolf fans.

I can't say enough about Hass's prose and his approach to poetry: this series of columns from his laureateship is a wonderful, enlightening read for poets, teachers of poetry, and those with little knowledge or experience with poetry.