A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write The Art of the Essay Paperback Melissa Pritchard

from CarolynSchroeder

These were a pretty heady, but incredibly well written, bunch of essays on a range of topics, but most had some thread into what it feels like to live a writer's life, or maybe more accurately, an observer of life to enable one to write. Being a writer, I thought I would find a bit more inspirati...

from HippieLunatic

This was a thought-provoking set of essays, highlighting various aspects of a writer's life... inspiration, growth, dedication to the craft as opposed to the paycheck. While not all of the essays resonated with me, personally, I particularly liked Elephant in the Dark for its exploration on what ...

from eachurch

This is an extraordinary collection of essays. They range from meditations on writing to odes to her dog to an examination of a life of a young man who escaped from slavery in Sudan and made his way to the US. From the seemingly mundane to the sacred, Pritchard writes in a marvelously clear voice...

from gendeg

In A Solemn Pleasure, Melissa Pritchard paraphrases a Sufi parable for one of her essays titled "Elephant in the Dark." To me it captures one of the most compelling thematic arcs of her collection: the slipperiness of art or art's 'many-sidedness': "Some Indians kept an elephant in a dark room. B...

from agrondin

I enjoyed reading these essays. Pritchard's language is elegant and clear, sophisticated but not pretentious. She seems to approach the essay in the spirit of the original etymology -- to test, to try, to weigh -- and so some of selections may be too brief or too meandering for readers who expect...