Who's Writing This?

Fifty-five Writers on Humor, Courage, Self-Loathing, and the Creative Process

Dan Halpern

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061892066
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Who is really controlling the pen?

Editor Daniel Halpern was profoundly curious about the creative process—so he asked fifty-five world-renowned writers to briefly muse on "the fictional persona behind the scenes, " the alter(ed) ego who takes over when there is true literary work to be done. And the writers responded in a myriad of ways. Margaret Atwood, Frank Conroy, William Gass, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Sontag, James Michener, Joyce Carol Oates, and others offered snap-shot reflections on the process, some thoughtful and deep, others downright silly. (Edward Gorey, for one, anagrammed his name to introduce all his secret selves, including the inimitable "Ogdred Weary.") Many provided self-portraits, included within.

Joyous and wondrous, revealing and surprising, remarkable and ridiculous, Who's Writing This? is an unmitigated delight—an eloquent celebration of self-knowledge and artistic expression that uniquely bares the writer's soul.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Why Who?—A Preface
• Borges and I
• Diane Ackerman and I
• ALBEE
• Borges and I10
• Me, She, and It
• R(&I)
• Borges and I
• Blount, Borges, and I
• Bowles and It
• The One Who Writes
• There’s a Black Man Imprisoned in Me
• Who Is the Reader in That Ring of Light?
• Butler and I
• Me and Conroy
• Keeping Time
• The J.R. Fowles Club
• Path
• Pierre Menard and Me
• The Girl in the Basement
• A Penchant for Pseudonyms
• The Fertile “We” of One Chaste “I”
• Squaw Gulch
• Hawkes and Hawkes
• Helprin and I
• Labrador Retriever Wishes He Could Tell All
• a/k/a and I
• Me and Ed
• Diane Johnson and I
• Disappearing
• Just and unJust
• Klíma and I
• My Appendage
• What Elmore Leonard Does
• On My Name
• The Complaint
• Mayle and I
• Michaels Writing
• Michener and I
• Arthur Miller
• My Double
• My Persona and Me
• My Better Half
• “JCO” and I
• Who Is Writing This
• The Break
• Smokescreen
• She and I…and Someone Else
• The Interlocutor
• We Two
• Mitty and Me
• Borges, JCO, You, and Me
• Singleness
• Me and My Book
• Young Him and Me
• Updike and I
• The I of Writing
• About the Editor
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher