One writer's life

Ellen Gilchrist, now 87,  has never written that one book that might have made her a big name in literary circles. Just the same, novels such as The Annunciation and The Anna Papers and short story collections such as In the Land of Dreamy Dreams and Victory Over Japan have been satisfying discerning readers since the 1980s. Her 2005 book The Writing Life gives us a look at the woman reflected in her fiction.

The book's brief essays, often repetitive, are divided into three overlapping categories: her life, her writing and her teaching. The latter — she had been teaching creative writing at the University of Arkansas for four years at the time this book was published — seems to have been its trigger. It was inspired by young people, she says, another way for her to help young writers become better writers.

So devoted has she become to teaching writing that she confesses her own writing has suffered as a result. Although "Writing Is Rewriting" is a slogan she impresses on her students again and again, she admits she has lost patience with rewriting. She insists she prefers her original drafts, and if they don't please her editor, so be it. She has come to the point in her career where she takes more pleasure in her students' successes than her own.

Gilchrist herself was taught by Eudora Welty, whose work she adores. She also has high praise for such writers as William Faulkner and Larry McMurtry, and the collected advice of Ernest Hemingway, On Writing, is something she always recommends to her students. Her favorite Sunday afternoon pursuit has for years been reading Shakespeare's plays aloud with a group of friends.

Well short of being an autobiography, On Writing nevertheless shows us a great deal about Gilchrist's eccentric life, her many marriages, her devotion to her sons and her grandchildren and her almost parental love for her students. The book was written over a period of years, which helps explain why she repeats herself so much. Only a few of the essays have been published elsewhere. The essays, rarely more than three or four pages each, never fail to entertain and, if the reader is another writer, inform.