Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer's Life
Provocation is Buhner’s mission in this unusually passionate and delving writer’s guide. The author of books about plants, healing, indigenous culture, and the environment, Buhner not only tackles the art of writing with conviction, vigor, expertise, and a touch of devilry but also outspokenly advocates for the maligned form of “genre nonfiction.” Who says a how-to book can’t be a work of literature? It’s what you bring to the subject and to the page that make a book vital and significant. A book about plumbing can be just as revelatory as a poem if the writer marshals her feelings, the wellspring of meaning. Buhner sagely covers technical matters and the pragmatic business of book proposals and such, albeit not without lambasting corporate publishing. But his is a heroic view of writing. Quoting his mentors Raymond Chandler, John Gardner, and Robert Bly, Buhner offers liberating exercises and ardent, even wild exhortations to help writers tap into their dreaming mind and “inhabit” every word, just as he does in this inspiriting call to creative intensity. To sing the book electric. --Donna Seaman