Priscilla Long

Dancing with the Muse in Old Age uses current science to present old age as a potentially happy, creative, and productive time. Numerous models-including many elders active in the arts-illustrate the possibilities.

Designed to mentor writers at all levels, from beginning to quite advanced, The Writer's Portable Mentor offers a wealth of insight and crafting models from the author's twenty-plus years of teaching and creative thought. The book provides tools for structuring a book, story, or essay. It trains writers in observation and in developing a poet's ear for sound in prose. It scrutinizes the sentence strategies of the masters and offers advice on how to publish. This second edition is updated to account for changes in the publishing industry and provides hundreds of new craft models to inspire, guide, and develop every writer's work.

The questions that drive Priscilla Long’s Fire and Stone are the questions asked by the painter Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897 painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? These questions look beyond everyday trivialities to ponder the essence of our origins.Using her own story as a touchstone, Long explores our human roots and how they shape who we are today. Her personal history encompasses childhood as an identical twin on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; the turmoil, social change, and music of the 1960s; the suicide of a sister; and a life in art in the Pacific Northwest. Here, memoir extends the threads of the writer’s individual and very personal life to science, to history, and to ancestors, both literary and genetic, back to the Neanderthals.Long uses profoundly poetic personal essays to draw larger connections and to ask compelling questions about identity. Framed by four distinctive sections, Fire and Stone transcends genre and evolves into a sweeping elegy on what it means to be human.

Minding the Muse is a practical handbook for the artist or writer--highly experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Mir . Beginning with the first sparks of artistic creation--"Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing"--Long moves through the various stages to "Completing Works" and "Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing." Every creative worker will find something here to take to heart and into the studio or workroom.

Long’s work begs to be read aloud in order to savor the rich language and rhythm she instills in each poem. She explores the beauty of specific bridges while employing them as a metaphor for crossings to death (a sister’s suicide), eros, and art. Part elegy, the book also explores living, remembering, and celebrating.