Topic Sentence: A Writer's Education

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. This new book from 2005 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize winner Stan Persky is a generous reader gathering selections from his long writing career, ranging from essays written in the early 1970s to to brand-new pieces about Robert Creeley, Oscar Wilde, and New York. "A first clue to how this book is going to work lies in the book's TOPIC SENTENCE. In the title story, written in 1970, Persky took on the two questions that dog every artist in the What is the subject matter, and how can it be articulated? Since both questions are unanswerable, Persky twists How am I supposed to isolate the subject matter from the myriad of things in which it is lodged, and how do I elude the distortions of conventional exposition and its self-serving selectivity? How do I make what I write as alive and dynamic as the things I write about?"—from the Introduction