My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

An invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture In this intimate and eloquent meditation, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about what he calls an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered,” through forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers. He weaves together his experiences as a poet and prose writer with discussions of underexplored elements of the writing life, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community. In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey. Phillips’s book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.