Have You considered chemistry?
Hayley Brown How to Start Writing (and when to stop): Advice for Writers by Wislawa Szymborska, edited & translated by Clare Cavanagh New Directions Books, 2021.
Before the Nobel Prize, even before she began publishing her poetry, essays, and translations, Wiszawa Szymborka worked at Życie Literackie (Literary Life) from 1953 to 1981, where she wrote anonymous “book reviews’’ for aspiring young writers. The feedback she provided in the journal’s weekly column—Literary Mailbox—accrued as a collection of letters expressing how not to write, how not to address an editor or publisher, and how not to keep writing if your work is “cliched, immature, shapeless,” or simply no more than monotonous chaos. A compilation of these letters was originally published in Polish at the turn of the twenty-first century, and is now translated into English by Clare Cavanagh, twenty-one years after its initial publication. What sets the content of the Literary Mailbox apart from other anonymous columns in the literary sphere is its sheer brutality. Szymborska is witty, honest, concise, and most notably, unconcerned with the feelings of her readers. In an interview from October 2000, when asked quite directly about her “heartlessness,” she scoffs at the idea, and responds by saying that her first poems and stories were bad, too, that she knew “firsthand the curative powers of cold water over one’s head.” She then follows up with a moment of reflection: “I was brutal,