Letters to a Young Artist: Building a Life in Art
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Letters to a Young Artist: Building a Life in Art Details
From Publishers Weekly It's a good thing the young poet to whom Rilke famously wrote didn't have novelist, playwright and poet Cameron (The Artist's Way, etc.) for a mentor, or he would have given up on the idea of being a poet. Smug, arrogant and unimaginative, Cameron's combative letters ("You might enjoy Plexiglas cubes for tables for all I know") reveal little in the way of helpful instruction for a budding writer. Addressing herself to an imaginary young writer who seems like a caricature ("wearing black makes [X] feel more like an artist"), Cameron counsels that "creativity is like electricity": the artist merely plugs into the current and acts as a conduit. In this way, she observes, "a lot of masterpieces were made in passing" when the artist was less worried about the quality of the art than getting it down on canvas or paper. Yet she simultaneously insists on the importance of craft. Midway through their correspondence, she declares simplistically, "it is fun to make art." These letters can never substitute for the deeper insights of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist or even Bret Lott's new and insightful Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life. Agent, Elizabeth Winnick at McIntosh & Otis. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist Cameron approximates the one-on-one mentoring she provides via written correspondence in this epistolary guide, but it is a one-on-one minus one since she presents her responses to letters from "X," but not X's letters. She does, of course, frame her replies so that the general idea of the inquiries and the aspiring artist's concerns are clear. And her fans will no doubt flock to this treatise as much as they have to her past titles, happy to hear more of her "Just do it!" dictum, and her advice to lay "a certain amount of track" every day. It must be said that Cameron's signature bluntness and no-nonsense approach do veer toward scornfulness and mockery here, which can be a turnoff, but mostly she is courteous and generous to X, whose blossoming success includes securing a grant, the sort of recognition Cameron's readers seek. Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more About the Author Award-winning writer Julia Cameron is the author of twenty books, fiction and nonfiction, including The Artist's Way, Walking in This World, The Vein of Gold, The Right to Write, and The Sound of Paper, her bestselling works on the creative process. A novelist, playwright, songwriter, and poet, she has extensive credits in theater, film, and television. Read more
Reviews
Bought as gift to new artist. Just loved it when I read it.