For “Why I Write”

1. Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

This book is the fictional story of a Canadian writer who eventually fakes her own death. Atwood is an acclaimed writer but this book never received any awards, which surprises me. The books’ ideas about why people need fiction really resonated with me when I first read it. I thought that it answered the question “why I write” well, so I used quotes from the book in my “Why I Write” essay. The quotes I used described how people use fiction as an escape and I think that Margaret Atwood could be considered an authority on the subject as she is a fiction writer herself.

2.  Berk, Laura (2009). Exploring Lifespan Development (5th Ed) with MyDevelopmentLab and Study Guide. New York: Allyn & Bacon.

This is a modern and reliable textbook on Developmental Psychology. In the section on “emotional and social development in infancy and toddlerhood” it discusses how children become self-aware on page 189. This realization marks a serious stage in a child’s cognitive development, and I learned about it from this book. In my “Why I Write” essay I talk about this stage marker and how I specifically reacted when I came to this time. This book discusses the signs of self-awareness and what effects it has in most children but it doesn’t speculate on what it might mean for each unique individual. After learning about the basic concept I expanded the idea for use in my essay.

3. Whitman, Walt, and Lawrence Clark Powell. Leaves of Grass; Poems. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1964.

This book is a collection of poems by Walt Whitman. He is an acclaimed American poet and many of his poems in Leaves of Grass have nature as a prominent theme. The quote I used in my “Why I Write” essay and on my blog is from “Song of Myself,” part 35. The meaning of Whitman’s line is of course up for debate, but I think that it is likely that he intended it as I interpreted it, that “sending out sun-rise” meant writing. I used his quote to describe how I felt about writing, that it felt like “sending out sun-rise.”