Dyslexia saves the writer
Lost for what to do after my first mystery manuscript received eight nice rejection letters from crime editors and my agent decided to get her MBA and enter venture capital (I still wonder if it was my writing that caused this), I enrolled in the Writer’s Studio back in 1997. Joining the New York-based workshop run out of an elementary school in the Village was the best thing I could have done. In three years, I learned many things, but the most important lessons were about the big three: voice, tone and mood.
The studio was founded by Phil Schultz, who went on to win the Pulitzer for poetry in 2008. In Sunday’s New York Times, he wrote of how his disability made him into a writer, and informed the approach he would teach to the rest of us. If you’re looking for a writer’s education, I highly recommend the Writer’s Studio over the course-catalogs-on-every-street-corner mass manufacturers of continuing ed like Gotham. Definitely read the column:
Philip Schultz is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the author of the forthcoming memoir “My Dyslexia.”
I WAS well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine. When I was his age I’d already all but given up on myself.
via With Dyslexia, Words Failed Me and Then Saved Me – NYTimes.com.