Christian McEwen – författare

In her new book, In Praise of Listening, Christian McEwen reflects on listening (silence, music, nature, prayer, &c.) in a series of thoughtful chapters, each one focused on a different theme. When an athlete speaks of “listening to his body,” or a gardener describes herself as “listening to the land,” when writers and artists explain that they are “listening” to their work-in-progress, they are using the word as she chooses to use it here—as an extended metaphor for openness and receptivity, rippling out from the self-centered human to the farthest reaches of the non-human world. In Praise of Listening is a kind of sister or first cousin to McEwen’s earlier, timely, and very popular, World Enough & Time (Bauhan Publishing, 2011), with the same emphasis on creativity and slowing down. As McEwen says: Most of us think of listening in fairly literal fashion: human beings listening (or not listening) to one another;the pleasure of attending to a familiar piece of music. But listening can have a far broader and more capacious meaning, moving out beyond the small apparatus of the ears to the hands or belly or enveloping spirit/mind.

More than twelve years ago, over the course of ten years training teachers to write their own poems in order to pass the craft along to students, McEwen realized that nothing comes easily when life is conducted at a high rate of speed.In this updated, second edition, she reflects on the experience of publishing World Enough & Time in 2011. In addition readers and the public comment on the impact World Enough has had on their lives. McEwen draws not only on personal experience, but on readings ranging from literary anecdote and poetry to Buddhism, anthropology, current news, and social history, all supplemented by interviews with contemporary writers and artists. This is a real reader's book, one that stands up as both sustained narrative and occasional inspiration.McEwen espouses the pleasure to be found in slowing down, both for the ease and comfort of the thing itself (taking time to go for a walk, to write down one's dreams, to read, to talk, to pray), and for its impact on creativity. There are chapters on walking, talking, drawing, dreaming, on making space, on pausing/praying, on telling stories. World Enough Time is aimed at the educated general reader, could be used as a creative primer, and will be of interest to creative writing students and artists in every genre.