Linda Anderson – författare

Writing Fiction offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities, making use of insightful, relevant readings from well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. This volume makes use of new versions of key chapters from the recent Routledge/Open University textbook Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings for writers who are specializing in fiction. Using their experience and expertise as teachers as well as authors, Linda Anderson and Derek Neale guide aspiring writers through such key aspects of writing as: how to stimulate creativitykeeping a writer’s notebookcharacter creationsettingpoint of viewstructureshowing and telling. The volume is further updated to include never-before published interviews with successful fiction writers Andrew Cowan, Stevie Davies, Maggie Gee, Andrew Greig, and Hanif Kureishi. Concise and practical, Writing Fiction offers an inspirational guide to the methods and techniques of authorship and is a must-read for aspiring writers.

If every writer necessarily draws on their own life, is any writing outside the realm of ‘autobiography’? The new edition of this classic guide is fully updated to include:developments in autobiographical criticism, highlighting major theoretical issues and concepts different forms of the genre from confessions and narratives to memoirs and diariesuses of the genre in their historical and cultural contextsmajor autobiographical writers including St Augustine, Bunyan, Boswell, Rousseau and Wordsworth, alongside non-canonical autobiographies by womentwentieth-century autobiography including women's writing, black and postcolonial writing, and personal criticisma new chapter on narrative and new material examining recent trends in autobiography such as blogs, the popularity of literary memoirs and recent developments in theory on testimonial writing. Combining theoretical discussion with thought-provoking readings of major texts, this is the ideal introduction to the study of a fascinating genre.

If every writer necessarily draws on their own life, is any writing outside the realm of ‘autobiography’? The new edition of this classic guide is fully updated to include:developments in autobiographical criticism, highlighting major theoretical issues and concepts different forms of the genre from confessions and narratives to memoirs and diariesuses of the genre in their historical and cultural contextsmajor autobiographical writers including St Augustine, Bunyan, Boswell, Rousseau and Wordsworth, alongside non-canonical autobiographies by womentwentieth-century autobiography including women's writing, black and postcolonial writing, and personal criticisma new chapter on narrative and new material examining recent trends in autobiography such as blogs, the popularity of literary memoirs and recent developments in theory on testimonial writing. Combining theoretical discussion with thought-provoking readings of major texts, this is the ideal introduction to the study of a fascinating genre.

A new reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s work ranging across archival, historical and theoretical materialsLinda Anderson explores Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, from her early days at Vassar College to her last great poems in Geography III and the later uncollected poems. Drawing generously on Bishop’s notebooks and letters, the book situates Bishop both in her historical and cultural context and in terms of her own writing process, where the years between beginning a poem and completing it, for which Bishop is legendary, are seen as a necessary part of their composition. The book begins by offering a new reading of Bishop’s relationship with Marianne Moore and with modernism. Through her journeys to Europe Bishop, it is also argued, learned a great deal from visual artists and from surrealism. However the book also follows the way Bishop came back to memories of her childhood, developing ideas about narrative, in order to explore time, both the losses it demands and the connections it makes possible. The lines of connections are both those between Bishop and her contemporaries and her context and those she inscribed through her own work, suggesting how her poems incorporate a process of arrival and create new possibilities of meaning.Key FeaturesDraws on archival and historical materialProvides readings of Bishop’s major poetry and prose in contextDraws on psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theoryConnects the poems with their process of composition

A New York Times bestseller!2012 Outstanding Book Award from the American Association of Journalists and Authors (ASJA).Allen and Linda Anderson adopted a traumatized one-year-old cocker spaniel who had been abandoned. Soon, the troubled dog they named “Leaf” turned their home into a war zone. Although Leaf and Allen were forging a friendship with visits to dog parks and bonding time, Leaf’s emotional issues overwhelmed the couple. Shortly after Leaf’s arrival, Allen, who had spent eight years as a big city police officer and survived so many close calls that Linda called him “Miracle Man,” received a diagnosis from his doctor that made him think his luck had finally run out. Allen had an unruptured brain aneurysm that could be fatal, and the surgery to repair it might leave him debilitated. Having seen his father live for years with the effects of a massive stroke, he dreaded that the worst fate might not be death. What Allen didn’t know is that he and Leaf, like comrades facing the ultimate battle, would be there for each other with the miracle of this man and this dog coming together at exactly the right time..

Points to the many ways in which the study of autobiography can contribute to the theory, practice, and politics of women's studies as curriculum, and to feminist theory more generally.Women's Lives/Women's Times reflects the growing interest in life-writing as a basis for both feminist theorizing and women-centered education. It discusses the many ways in which the study of autobiography can contribute to the theory, practice, and politics of women's studies as curriculum, and to feminist theory more generally.This volume is concerned with the application of theory to text-particularly with the assumptions and discourses of postmodernism-but also in exploring how general theories of the subject do not always fit comfortably with the specifics of autobiographical writing. It also recognizes the challenge women's autobiography offers to theory, taking us, in its complex weave of the personal, the political, and the theoretical, beyond the usual generic and disciplinary boundaries.

Writing Fiction offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities, making use of insightful, relevant readings from well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. This volume makes use of new versions of key chapters from the recent Routledge/Open University textbook Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings for writers who are specializing in fiction. Using their experience and expertise as teachers as well as authors, Linda Anderson and Derek Neale guide aspiring writers through such key aspects of writing as: how to stimulate creativitykeeping a writer’s notebookcharacter creationsettingpoint of viewstructureshowing and telling. The volume is further updated to include never-before published interviews with successful fiction writers Andrew Cowan, Stevie Davies, Maggie Gee, Andrew Greig, and Hanif Kureishi. Concise and practical, Writing Fiction offers an inspirational guide to the methods and techniques of authorship and is a must-read for aspiring writers.

A new reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s work ranging across archival, historical and theoretical materialsLinda Anderson explores Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, from her early days at Vassar College to her last great poems in Geography III and the later uncollected poems. Drawing generously on Bishop’s notebooks and letters, the book situates Bishop both in her historical and cultural context and in terms of her own writing process, where the years between beginning a poem and completing it, for which Bishop is legendary, are seen as a necessary part of their composition. The book begins by offering a new reading of Bishop’s relationship with Marianne Moore and with modernism. Through her journeys to Europe Bishop, it is also argued, learned a great deal from visual artists and from surrealism. However the book also follows the way Bishop came back to memories of her childhood, developing ideas about narrative, in order to explore time, both the losses it demands and the connections it makes possible. The lines of connections are both those between Bishop and her contemporaries and her context and those she inscribed through her own work, suggesting how her poems incorporate a process of arrival and create new possibilities of meaning.Key FeaturesDraws on archival and historical material Provides readings of Bishop’s major poetry and prose in context Draws on psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory Connects the poems with their process of composition

Explores critical and creative responses to the contemporary poetry archiveProvides an innovative new dialogue between critics and creative writers on the value and practice of the literary archiveExpandes the scope for understanding perspectives on, and the opposition between, creative and critical relations to archival materialsOpens up a new cross-disciplinary agenda for thinking the archive as both a source for scholarship and a source of inspiration for creative practiceThese 13 newly commissioned chapters examine the impact of archival poetry collections on both literary scholarship and poetic practice. They examine what we can learn from the drafts, notebooks and personal libraries left behind by poets and look at the ways in which the growth of poetry archives has changed the way poets think about their work. The contributing poets and scholars – including Susan Howe, Sean O’Brien and George Szirtes – present an in-depth account of the significance of poetry archives for contemporary literature. The collection provides a new cross-disciplinary agenda for thinking about the archive as both a source for scholarship and inspiration for creative practice.

Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021Linda Anderson's much anticipated first collection travels across time and space, employing a range of voices, including historical ones. At the heart of the collection, though, is always the moment of encounter, the moment when things appear strange, before they settle into a pattern or become known. This is as true of the explorer Charles Kingsley, awed by the Caribbean landscape, as it is of the poet herself, confronted with moments of vision or almost vision, either in her own travels, or in the ordinariness of a domestic life. Nothing is quite secure in this collection: memory destabilizes with its resurrections; seeing has many angles and cannot be taken for granted; borders fluctuate and crossings abound. And although not afraid to draw on ideas from many sources, these poems often explore how thinking masks a fragility, the knowledge of our mortal selves. What are the fragments that make a poem, the book asks? How are they held within a form? And how do we negotiate the multiple memories, ideas, sights, meetings, and losses which constitute us and our complex selves.

At the heart of Linda Anderson’s second collection is an exploration of time and of ageing. Time is pressing, urgent, in relation to both the individual and the planet. However, underneath, there is also something unfinished, whether that be in relation to memory’s ability to revise the past and take on different shapes and meanings, or in relation to writing itself which has a materiality which links it to the body of the writer. The collection contains an interrogation of the poet’s notebooks where chance and randomness have an important part to play, forging surprising links, and directing attention to the surrounding bloom of uncertainty, the ‘diaphanous, unwritten poem’ that lurks behind any finished poem. The fragility of the body also undermines certainty, and while much of the collection draws on visual imagery, derived particularly from the natural world, the loss of sight is folded into acts of careful observation, making seeing itself both more problematic and more precious.This collection ranges restlessly across forms and voices connecting the poems to artists, writers, and musicians such as Stanley Spencer, Frédérick Chopin and Elizabeth Bishop. Yet words also repeat across different poems, like musical motifs, forming a fragile net for the collection. There are moments too when silence takes over and we are asked to wait, to discover a different meaning in hesitancy.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. When she died in 1979, she had only published four collections, yet had won virtually every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize. She maintained close friendships with poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and her work has always been highly regarded by other writers. In surveys of British poets carried out in 1984 and 1994 she emerged as a surprising major choice or influence for many, from Andrew Motion and Craig Raine to Kathleen Jamie and Lavinia Greenlaw. A virtual orphan from an early age, Elizabeth Bishop was brought up by relatives in New England and Nova Scotia. The tragic circumstances of her life - from alcoholism to repeated experiences of loss in her relationships with women - nourished an outsider's poetry notable both for its reticence and tentativeness. She once described a feeling that 'everything is interstitial' and reminds us in her poetry - in a way that is both radical and subdued - that understanding is at best provisional and that most vision is peripheral. Since her death, a definitive edition of Elizabeth Bishop's "Complete Poems" (1983) has been published, along with "The Collected Prose" (1984), her letters in "One Art" (1994), her paintings in "Exchanging Hats" (1996) and Brett C. Millier's important biography (1993). In America, there have been numerous critical studies and books of academic essays, but in Britain only studies by Victoria Harrison (1995) and Anne Stevenson (1998) have done anything to raise Bishop's critical profile. "Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery" was the first collection of essays on Bishop to be published in Britain, and draws on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop conference, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Jamie McKendrick, Deryn Rees-Jones and Anne Stevenson. Academic contributors include Professor Barbara Page of Vassar College, home of the Elizabeth Bishop Papers.