Kurt Vonnegut used to like to say, Practicing an art form is a way to grow your soul.
Pity the Reader indeed..
This book is full of such rare, intimately teachable moments, and they add up to something special.
Thus he illustrates his first Writing rule: Find a subject you care about.
Vonnegut recounts that his favorite work of art among all those his children produced so far is a letter his daughter Nanette wrote to a disgruntled customer, after he had tormented a new waitress at the restaurant where she had just started working, and then he shares the letter with us.
It turns out he was generous to a fault about students\' writing, idiosyncratic, a bit tortured and always creative as a teacher, and here in this book that portrait becomes our gateway into getting to know Kurt Vonnegut better than we ever have before as a human being.
It includes rare photos and reproductions, Vonnegut\'s own account in his own words of how he became a writer and why it matters, and previously untold stories by and about Vonnegut as teacher and friend.
Pity the Reader is the very embodiment of that idea, a book about Writing and life and why the two go together.
He would screw up his lips into a prune face after he said this because of how important he believed this idea to be.
Kurt Vonnegut used to like to say, Practicing an art form is a way to grow your soul
