Wislawa Szymborska 
How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers [EPUB ebook] 

At once kind and hilarious, this compilation of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s advice to writers is illustrated with her own marvelous collages

In this witty “how-to” guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories, ” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave—anonymously—for many years in the well-known Polish journal
Literary Life.
      She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. “I sigh to be a poet, ” Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. “I groan to be an editor, ” Szymborska responds.
      Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry’s “prosaic side”: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?” This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike.
      
Perhaps you could learn to love in prose.

About the author

Winner of the NBCC in criticism, Clare Cavanagh is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Her translations include Wislawa Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems, with Stanislaw Baranczak, and Adam Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration.