Gail Godwin

Autobiographical & Literary Essays

"What Made Me Write About a Boy," New!

"Musings on the Spiritual Life," New!

"Working on the Ending," New York Times, 2010

"The Female Apprentice Novel: Is This Young Woman Worth Writing About Or Should She Get Over Herself?," 2006.

"Inner and Outer Landscapes," Antaeus, Spring, 1978.

"Becoming a Writer," The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternberg, Norton, 1980.

"A Novelist Sings a Different Tune," [on writing librettos] New York Times Book Review, 15 December, 1985.

"One Woman Leads to Another," essay review of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, edited by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, New York Times Book Review, 28 April, 1985.

"House Parties and Box Lunches: One Writer's Summer at Yaddo," New York Times Book Review, 10 August,1986.

"A Diarist on Diarists," Our Private Lives, ed. Daniel Halpern, 1988.

"Journals, 1982-1987,"  Our Private Lives, ed. Daniel Halpern, 1988.

"My Mother, the Writer: Master of a Thousand Disguises," New York Times Book Review, 11 June, 1989.

Gail Godwin's new introduction to Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, re-issued by Book of the Month Club, 1990.

"Rituals and Readiness: Getting Ready to Write," The Writing Life: a Collection of Essays and Interviews by National Book Award Authors, Random House, 1995.

"The Girl in the Basement," Who's Writing This? Notations on the Authorial I, with Self Portraits, ed. Daniel Halpern, Ecco Press, 1995.

"Uncle Orphy," Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, ed. Joyce Dyer, University of Kentucky Press, 1998.

"The Writing Life," The Washington Post Book World, February 14, 1999.

"Waltzing with the Black Crayon," [studying with Kurt Vonnegut at Iowa] Yale Review, January, 1999.

Gail Godwin on a favorite writer [C.G. Jung] For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most, ed. Ronald B. Shwartz, Grosset/Putnam, 1999.

"The Watcher at the Gate," February 2000.

"Farewell to a Mentor," [the Rev. Gale D. Webbe, 1909-2000] The Living Church, May 14, 2000.

"Mother & Daughter Ghosts, a Memoir," The Angle Street Review, vol. II. I, 2000. Collected Art, Poetry, and Prose of the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina

Gail Godwin's introduction to the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, 2001.