From Library Journal
This slim volume is the journal that popular author Hassler kept during 1975, when he took a sabbatical year from teaching and wrote Staggerford, his first novel of small-town life. He has since written ten more novels and in September brought out a book of short stories (Keepsakes and Other Stories). Hassler says he discovered early on that his journal writing had more vitality if he wrote to friends rather than just to himself, and he dedicates this book to Dick Brook, to whom most of it was originally addressed. The rigors of preparing manuscripts before the days of PCs and other historical details are effortlessly and charmingly presented. The tone throughout is friendly and conversational, hard to fault but also hardly stimulating. Recommended only where interest in Hassler's work is strong.
-Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Hassler (Emeritus, St. Johns Univ., Minnesota) gives readers an over-the-shoulder glimpse at the creative process, self-doubt, and elation that accompanied the first of his nine novels, Staggerford (1977). In 1975, with six short stories having brought 85 rejection slips, a restless Hassler requested a one-year sabbatical from teaching English at a community college in Brainerd, Minnesota, in order to realize his dream of writing a novel. The result was Staggerford, a tragicomedy about a high school teacher that has now gone through 15 paperback printings. Despite his success, however, Hassler presumes too much in expecting his loyal following to snatch up what is essentially grist for a luncheon speech or a magazine article. Instead of providing glimpses of the embryonic ideas, structures, themes, and descriptions that crop up in the journals of John Cheever or F. Scott Fitzgerald, these journal entries sound already worked over for publication. Hassler does show how writers, in tenaciously grasping general principles of the craft, can still flounder. In fleshing out The Bonewoman, for example, he remarks that he knows how she looks, but not how she sounds: You need more than one sentence from a person to get a good grasp of her voice, its timbre and tone. Other entries, less valuable to aspiring writers, catalogue the minutiae of an authors routine (I go through a lot of contortions when I write. I jump up from the typewriter and stride around the table. I flit from window to window). Too often, Hassler stuffs these inventories with autobiographical filler, reflecting on his lonely sojourns in an isolated cabin and the reactions of family and friends to his crazed, but ultimately triumphant, pursuit of an impossible dream. When he focuses on the writers craft, Hassler can be wonderfully revealing. But the rest of this could have been saved for the family album. --
Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
