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chillcox15's review against another edition
3.0
Individually some of these essays sang, but they were often a bit too twee for me.
jortsmanor's review against another edition
5.0
In her book Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, Jenny Boully describes the tools that exist to writers as taught and seem to be
wholly unfit to contain concepts of love within and brings into focus new ways to approach those concepts, with sincerity, with a deep and dark honesty that sometimes feels like dying. A collection of essays on craft are really forays into dream and daydream, into the hardest parts of life: an illness, a pregnancy, depression, a relationship, but also none of these, but also all of these things at once, and the haze through which the reader finds these threads is illuminated by the sporadic landscapes of dream and daydream, and the immediate anchoring in what we know is reality by its sharp point: “I know the look of a cracked landscape, winter in black and white, flat and finite with a sunset on the horizon like a red heartbeat suffering there,” she writes. “It will take me longer each morning now to go out and face it. The CAT scan has been scheduled
for Wednesday” (12). Each essay in the collection has a unique lesson on craft but Boully's approach never makes these lessons feel tedious. It's a beautiful approach to talking about craft, as it involves what all writers do, write what they know, but does so through example, and involving the reader in a larger story about existing a person as well as a writer.
wholly unfit to contain concepts of love within and brings into focus new ways to approach those concepts, with sincerity, with a deep and dark honesty that sometimes feels like dying. A collection of essays on craft are really forays into dream and daydream, into the hardest parts of life: an illness, a pregnancy, depression, a relationship, but also none of these, but also all of these things at once, and the haze through which the reader finds these threads is illuminated by the sporadic landscapes of dream and daydream, and the immediate anchoring in what we know is reality by its sharp point: “I know the look of a cracked landscape, winter in black and white, flat and finite with a sunset on the horizon like a red heartbeat suffering there,” she writes. “It will take me longer each morning now to go out and face it. The CAT scan has been scheduled
for Wednesday” (12). Each essay in the collection has a unique lesson on craft but Boully's approach never makes these lessons feel tedious. It's a beautiful approach to talking about craft, as it involves what all writers do, write what they know, but does so through example, and involving the reader in a larger story about existing a person as well as a writer.
ellephuonglinhnguyen's review against another edition
4.0
Everyone is dying. I must remember this always but especially whenever I am on the phone with my mother and she is telling me that her mother has died. I must begin to treat everyone I meet and visit as if they are, very soon, going to die. I too am dying. I need to begin believing this, especially whenever I have a goal of spending the day in my study concentrating on nothing but my writing and do not spend the day in my study writing. I need to begin treating my thoughts, observations, and inclinations, that find themselves manifested as rhythms, that then suggest words and paragraphs and landscapes of syntax, as if they too are dying and will not be remembered again, will never again present themselves with the opportunity to be written down. In order to be a better writer and better reader, I need to believe in my own death and in the death of others.
kjboldon's review against another edition
3.0
I didn't feel this cohered as a collection. I loved the essays and parts on writing. The other essays on the ends of love affairs didn't work as well for me.
allison_eck's review against another edition
4.0
This is a lovely and bold book in many ways, and some parts of it even felt life-changing. Other sections didn’t hold my attention, but I think that’s why I need to re-read it.
jackieeh's review against another edition
3.0
Gorgeously written. I didn't connect with it on any particular level, but that wasn't the book's fault. It was the fact that I read it on a plane after a long delay, and also that I think I was in the specific mood for something either deeper or more surface-y and less...betwixt-and-between.
charitza's review against another edition
5.0
This book ended up to be more about how I misread its title when picking it up at a bookstore, essays about writing of life, instead of the writing life. Jenny Boully is such a beautiful writer, that even though some of the essays threw me off, at the end I managed to get something out of them.
Can’t wait to read more of her work.
Can’t wait to read more of her work.
bookishcassie's review against another edition
You have to read it with your poetry brain, by that I mean make your head a sky, and damn, so worth it. SO MANY WORTHY SENTENCES.