Being a Minor Writer

by Gail Gilliland

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0877454868
• ISBN13: 9780877454861
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 9.7" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

The experience of being a minor writer.

Gilliland gives an excellent commentary on the experience of being a minor writer. Basically, she does two things. First, she enumerates what she doesn't like in the prevailing ethos of literary criticism. True, the assumption the reader is likely to make is that the author feels that the bad tendencies of the arbiters of what constitutes major writing are in some sense responsible for her being minor. However, most of those tendencies are connected by her to these arbiters either being famous powerful writers or pandering to such, so in fact her theoretical discussion of literary criticism is inescapably relevant to the question of what it means to be a minor writer, even if it also largely answers, to be more blunt and impolite than Gilliland, why literary critics can be immoral idiots. To greatly simplify, and at the risk of putting words in her mouth, famous non-minor writers tend (at least in comparison with the minor writers who are their competition) to be jet-set powerful males whose money and power enable them to live a life full of gain and remarkable out-of-the-way experiences that are in their self-interest (and the self-interest of currying critics) to glorify, and so notwithstanding that writings about ordinary, minor life are most worthy, such writings get little if any of the acclaim they deserve. She also bravely argues for moral purpose in writing, which she distinguishes from puritanical excess. In her criticisms, Gilliland is very polite, being careful to be respectful, and not letting anger influence her arguments much. The second thing she does is to illustrate her experience as a minor writer by introducing numerous anecdotes illustrating various themes of that experience. These stories and her skill at using them to illustrate her points make for the most interesting part of the book; Gilliland is a great short-story writer and in talking about herself less needs to feel the need to frame matters obliquely or in terms of technical language (portions of the book were apparently presented as papers at academic conferences). However, the dance she does (especially in the beginning of the book) in order to avoid giving offense to the academic literary criticism establishment, though it does make the book somewhat longer and more difficult than ideal, is mostly rather amusing in the skillfulness of its execution. And the book is intelligent like a good book should be.