Creative Writing Faculty Member Gina Frangello Recommends Two Books on the Craft of Writing

I recently had the opportunity to read Emily Rapp Black’s new craft book, I Would Die if I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth Telling, and I am definitely shouting about it from the rooftops. With a surprisingly light touch and plenty of humor—both subversive and a goofy—Rapp Black does here what she does best in drawing on a wide array of philosophy, literature, theology, art, and pop culture to illuminate the ways in which the act of creation saves us, and the ways in which we can reclaim meaning though taking ownership of our own narratives…a theme also explored in depth, actually, by Lidia Yuknavitch in her recent hybrid memoir/craft book Reading the Waves.

Both Rapp Black and Yuknavitch are familiar with thorny and complex grief, and their work is implicitly directed at others who have…well, been through some shit. These are not your grandfather’s “craft books,” full of pronouncements from on high and “how tos,” but rather explorations of how we navigate the deepest and murkiest waters through storytelling. While Yuknavitch’s Reading the Waves skews more memoir than craft book, Rapp Black’s skews more toward craft, though it also includes plenty of personal material (including the death of her young son from Tay-Sachs and the experience of growing up with a visible disability, subject to annual surgeries throughout most of her youth as she progressively lost her left leg and—even more invasively at times—to the constant scrutiny of others who wanted to know “What happened to you?” often resulting in such statements as “I would die if I were you!”)…a narrative Rapp Black soundly rejects and reclaims through the title of the book.

Rapp Black has called I Would Die if I Were You a craft book for “sad, funny people,” of whom—especially right now—there are legions. This is not the craft book you turn to if you’re concerned with writing crowd-pleasing stories full of nothing but inspirational, perky, flawlessly “likable” characters, but rather a craft book for the rest of us: those who have suffered profound losses, whose bodies and lives have been unruly, who have been saved over and over again by art, and who believe from our cores in the old adages that we write to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed and less so to be understood by the reader than so the reader might feel understood, and hence feel less alone.

I Would Die if I Were You and Reading the Waves are great companion works by two of the best writers working today both in terms of their finely tuned attentiveness to language, and also in no small part because they are the opposite of “precious” and utterly impossible to shock, having both been there and done that—which gives the reader the courage to dive in too, not for the purposes of trauma porn but for empowerment, community, story, love (both books are absolutely full of love’s many sacred varieties) and the eternal conversation literature offers us between the living and the dead.

Rapp Black’s book is also full of excellent, unique prompts and generative writing ideas, and Yuknavitch’s is full of deep explorations of the sensory and natural world (I’ll never look at the color yellow the same way). You will emerge from reading these two books changed. Reading the Waves is on shelves now and I Would Die if I Were You drops in May from Counterpoint.

Gina Frangello teaches fiction and nonfiction workshops for SPS’s MA & MFA in Prose & Poetry program and is author of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, and Elena Ferrante: The Neapolitan Novels