Reclaiming the Right to Write – “One Year To A Writing Life” by Susan Tiberghien

This review of Susan Tiberghien´s book was published in Bookarazzi when it first came out in 2007. Susan is the woman who showed me that I had the right to write. Now that I´m no longer able to participate in her workshops in Genveva, I am happy to have her book which I consult regulary for my own writing and for my workshops. [First published in the October 2007 issue of Inkwell Newswatch (Freelance Writing Organization International)]
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My first reaction to Susan Tiberghien’s One Year To A Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art And Craft was to say out loud, “This is the next best thing to attending Susan’s workshops in person.”

Most attendees of the Geneva Writers’ Group were expats, many bi- and even trilingual, and not all were writing in their mother tongue. Some of us had come to writing much later than others.

I was forty, and wondered if I would be able to write a real story, if I even had the right to do so after years of having neglected my mother tongue, English. Susan gave me the confidence to try things out in my own voice.

On reading Susan´s book, I heard her voice again and relived the ten-year-and-more nurturing experience of the teaching, that was so important for my own way as a writer.

Many of us in the Geneva Writers’ Group used to say, “Write a book about all this, Susan.” And now she has. This book contains her workshops, to revisit again and again.

Through her unique perspective as an American expat writer and teacher based in Geneva, Switzerland, the twelve lessons blend organically from one to the next, but can also be taken as stand-alones on journal writing, personal, opinion and travel essays, short stories, dreams and writing, tales, poetic prose, mosaics, memoir, the building blocks of dialogue, and rewriting. The final lesson, appropriately, deals with “Writing The Way Home” where “home” is your centre as a writer in today’s world.

The book contains samples by writers as diverse as Atwood and Capote, Galeano, Rilke, and Woolf, and the host of eclectica in between and beyond. The lessons also contain exercises and are deepened by separate bibliographies and page references to encourage further reading and understanding. And practicalities are not neglected. For example, Lesson Eleven gives valuable advice on Rewriting and includes a checklist, as well as suggestions for marketing and publishing.

With drawings and diagrams in Lesson One (Journal Writing), Lesson Five (Dreams And Writing), Lesson Nine (The Alchemy Of Imagination), and in Lesson Twelve (Writing The Way Home), Susan encourages you to think out of your box as you play with mandalas, moodling, and meandering.

Not only is this book a companion for both beginning and more seasoned writers, it is also a Reader. By providing small tastes of good writing from different parts of the world and from different epochs, it adds its light to the writing life.

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Follow Sylvia Peter at Mblobs on Twitter. Visit Sylvia Petter’s website. Subscribe to Sylvia’s Blog. Check out her book – Back  Burning. Sylvia’s first guest post on Women Writers, Women Books was How the Day Job Saved My Writing Life.

 

Tags: book review, Books on writing by women, expat writers groups, expatriate life, how to become a writer, how to start a writing life, international writers groups, Swiss writers groups

Category: Australian Women Writers, Book Reviews, On Writing