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Brenda Miller’s most recent book is A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form. She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir, and she is the recipient of six Pushcart Prizes. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University and Associate Faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

• Preface IntroductionBreaking the SilenceThe Ram in the Thicket: Midrash and the Contemporary Creative WriterDaVinci’s Helicopter, Michelangelo’s Marble: Imagination and CreativityInside the Conch ShellWriting and/as Art: The Long/Wide ViewRadical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the UncertainOn Imagistic EnduranceOn EnchantmentTime and the ImaginationThe Fault Lines of Memory: Embracing Imperfect Memory in Creative NonfictionLost in the Woods of Brooklyn and Belgrade: The Transformative Possibilities of DisorientationWhat if I Just Let Go? Risk and the Creative Process in Zong!Community or Craft? Unpacking the Genre DebateRadiant Topographies: Borders, Conduits, and CarriersWriting Without End: On Suspending the Need for ClosureWhen Life Interrupts the WritingCreative Responses to Worlds Unraveling: The Artist in the Twenty-First CenturyWhy Write a Novel? Why Read a Novel? And Why Now?Playing Backward on the TrainAcknowledgementsWorks CitedAuthor Bios

“I am that kind of nerd for whom the best part of any creative writing program, conference, journal, etc., are the craft talks. Brenda Miller takes the model of the collected Warren Wilson craft lectures coedited by Voigt and Orr and applies it to 20 years of the cross- and inter-genre offerings of the Rainier Writing Workshop. Our community (especially creative nonfiction) has hungered for this, and the result is a celebratory feast.”