Why write? / John Updike -- The lesson of the master / Cynthia Ozick -- Some questions and answers / Saul Bellow -- A diarist on diarists / Gail Godwin -- The poetry of everyday life / John Hollander -- A conversation with Bernard Malamud -- Words into fiction / Eudora Welty -- A memoir of John Berryman / William Heyen -- From Pushing around the pantheon / Hortense Calisher -- A conversation with Margaret Atwood -- Lies: notes on craft / Ned Rorem -- When we dead awaken: writing as re-vision / Adrienne Rich -- An interview with Howard Nemerov -- The parable of the cave or: in praise of watercolors / Mary Gordon -- Love across the lines / Roynolds price -- A trap to catch little birds with: an interview with John Hawkes -- Still just writing / Anne Tyler -- Assays / Dave Smith -- (Woman) Writer / Joyce Carol Oates -- An interview with Theodore Weiss -- Recitations / Maxine Kumin -- The tradition of total experience / William Stafford -- The pursuit of suffering / Daniel Halpern -- Politics and the mode of fiction: a conversation with E.L. Doctorow -- I write for revenge against reality / Francine Du Plessix Gray -- The question of poetic form / Hayden Carruth -- A conversation with Mark Strand -- Why I write / Alice Adams -- And a great amount of joy in the thing / Grace Schulman
Summary
"Twenty-nine ... North American writers" discuss the craft of writing
