A Likely Story: The Writing Life

Front Cover
Red Deer College Press, 1995 - Biography & Autobiography - 223 pages

A Likely Story recounts the writing life of Robert Kroetsch, one of Canada's foremost writers and literary theorists. With incisive wit, humor and penetrating insight, Robert Kroetsch follows the events of his life, both real and literary, that have moved him from the bareness of desk and computer into the secret places at the heart of the writing experience. Throughout this chronicle, he toys ironically with the notion that he ceases to be himself when he writes, that writing allows him to escape from the confines of self into exciting varieties of the essay, story and poem.

A Likely Story records in loving detail that escape. It is a remarkable assemblage of confessional personal essays, one of the principal elegiac poems of out time, a cowboy poem and speculative pieces that defy literary classification. Through them all Robert Kroetsch enters the landscape of recollection, discovery, delight, self-deception, play, grief and revelation, and through them all he insists with customary boldness: "I am attempting to write an autobiography in which I do not appear."

From inside the book

 

Contents

Went Up North
13
Wanted to Write a Manifesto
41
The Cow in the Quicksand and
65
Copyright

2 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

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References to this book

About the author (1995)

Robert Kroetsch was born on June 26, 1927 in Heisler, Alberta, Canada. He received a B.A. from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. He taught English at the State University of New York in Binghamton and at the University of Manitoba. His first novel, But We Are Exiles, was published in 1965. During his lifetime, he wrote nine books of fiction, seven books of non-fiction, and fourteen collections of poetry. His works included The Words of My Roaring, Gone Indian, Badlands, Alibi, and Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. He received several awards including the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1969 for The Studhorse Man, the Lieutenant Governor's Alberta Distinguished Artist award, and the Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Writers Guild of Alberta. He was named and Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004. He was killed in car accident on June 21, 2011 at the age of 84.

Bibliographic information

TitleA Likely Story: The Writing Life
Non Fiction
AuthorRobert Kroetsch
PublisherRed Deer College Press, 1995
Original fromthe University of Michigan
Digitized11 Mar 2008
ISBN0889951039, 9780889951037
Length223 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures
Language Arts & Disciplines / Writing / Authorship
Literary Criticism / Canadian
  
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