Writing Your Rhythm

Award-winning poet Thiel here documents her favorite teaching methods, focusing on topics like nature, form, storytelling, and myth making. Thiel takes passages from many well-known works and some from classes she has taught as samples of what doesn't work and what does and, more importantly, why. The last section, "Myth-Making," crosses over into writing narrative, as Thiel notes that even poetry is storytelling. She doles out ideas generously, and some of them seem more likely to strike sparks "tell an outrageous lie" than others "describe the color blue." The focus may be on writing poetry, but she calls on narrative, journalism, and simply wandering the library as sources for inspiration and for structure. A useful text for poets and would-be poets alike, this is appropriate for advanced high school or undergraduate poetry courses.

— Robert Moore, Library Journal

As if Joseph Campbell composed a "how to" book on writing, the exercises in Writing Your Rhythm are designed to free the imaginative writer in everyone.  Divided into five main sections, the book relates the act of writing to our understanding of nature, the way culture shapes expression, form itself, and the enduring role myths play in creativity.  Fun and useful to classrooms of all levels and to the solitary writer engrossed in his or her heroic act.

— Story Line Press