Acetylene Torch Songs - by Sue William Silverman (Paperback)

About the Book

Acetylene Torch Songs is a guidebook for writers who want their honesty, social engagement, and intimacy to reach beyond the page and transform the lives of readers with searing, indelible, and unquenchable words.

Book Synopsis

Silver Medal for the 2024 IPPY Award

At times writers--from the unpublished to jaded lifers--need a fire lit under them to pursue the complex work of self-exploration. Acetylene Torch Songs provides that spark for memoirists and essayists seeking mentor-based instruction and inspiration.

Drawing on twenty-five years of teaching and mentoring writers, Sue William Silverman stresses practice over theory. She encourages craftiness as well as craft and urges writers to embark on emotional quests in pursuit of their art. Acetylene Torch Songs uniquely illustrates how the writer's imaginative spirit comes alive on the page through metaphor, literary masks, sensory memories, voice, obsessions, and more. This holistic approach to writing emphasizes how the creative process brings together the heart, mind, and senses to illuminate the human condition through language. Featuring a personal essay in each chapter, Silverman uses her own work to model a specific concept or approach, demonstrating how obsessions, secrets, and memories can burn on the page.

Through guided prompts, worksheets, checklists, publishing advice, personal essays, and strategies, Silverman encourages writers to find the confidence and courage to write stories that reach beyond the page through their intimacy, social engagement, and honesty.

Review Quotes

"I've read a fair amount of creative nonfiction craft books, recommended many of them, and taught many of them, but none have felt so much like a craft class as Sue William Silverman's Acetylene Torch Songs."--Whitney (Walters) Jacobson, Split Rock Review

"Our obsessions haunt us, and writing helps us to contend with what Silverman calls our 'shadowy ghosts, ' the darker aspects of ourselves. . . . These lessons and examples [in Acetylene Torch Songs] show how we can take what keeps us up at night and shape it into something that not only longer controls us, but can potentially help others to heal."--Lilith Magazine

"Acetylene Torch Songs reminded me of why I write and motivated me to rebirth some of the more confessional pieces I'd shelved. It made me not just want to be a better writer, but to do the kind of soul work that creates 'writing that burns through, no matter what it finds.'"--Lisa Cooper Ellison, Hippocampus-- (2/3/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Acetylene Torch Songs will burn its way through everything you thought you knew about craft and seduce you into a spell of curiosity and revelation. This is one of the best books on writing truth as art I've ever read. From now on it will be by my side as I open up the world of memoir writing to my students."--Linda Joy Myers, founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers and award-winning author of Don't Call Me Mother

"Sue William Silverman's Acetylene Torch Songs is a gift for creative nonfiction writers, and a guiding light: offering a holistic and hands-on approach to writing our memories, our obsessions, and ourselves. This is a gorgeous book of body and mind, of heart and soul. In the truest sense it's also a torch: one we might carry with us as we write, as we dig into the dark corners of our lives, making our stories burn bright."--Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland

"Acetylene Torch Songs is precisely what you'd expect from the wondrous Sue William Silverman. This is no mere manual but an essential lodestar for artists of nonfiction, a book with a vision that will be a game-changer for writers who wish to do as Silverman herself does so well: to daringly reveal the ecstasies and darknesses that dwell at the hub of us."--William Giraldi, author of The Hero's Body and American Audacity

"Silverman reclaims and honors the disparaged term 'confessional, ' encouraging writers to use their passions, hauntings, and experiences as fuel for quality nonfiction. Snapping with bright fire, this new craft guide is also a guide for the soul: audacious, pulsing with life, and sure to inspire."--Sonya Huber, author of Voice First: A Writer's Manifesto

"This wonderful book is unique in my experience: writing advice not from Olympus but from a kind, wise, human guide who has learned how to translate her experience into art and who shows us how we can, too. Beginners and veteran writers alike have much to learn from Silverman."--Clifford Thompson, author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues

About the Author

Sue William Silverman is an award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet of eight books, including Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction (made into a Lifetime TV movie) and How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences (Nebraska, 2020). She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.