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A review by jortsmanor
Betwixt-And-Between: Essays on the Writing Life by Jenny Boully
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.