A little like reading Elements of Style on amphetamines, Joy Writing by Kenn Amdahl, cascades over its pages with enthusiasm for writing. I wanted to take up my pen and buy a box of yellow tablets before I finished reading it. Yellow highlights throughout my copy remind me that there are other writers that I want to read. The examples he chooses are engaging and witty. Much of his advice is common sense: "Revising means making choices." Some of his advice is surprising, "Let yourself write badly when you create first drafts" And some of his advice is phrased in a silly way, "the poet must distract the Colonel Klink/editor within himself. Simply telling him to wait in the closet isn't enough, we need him in a different time zone." Most of it is practical; join a writing group. And all of it is written in an intimate, conversational tone as if Kenn were talking directly to the reader. Joy Writing is 160 pages of inspiration for budding writers.

Alice O'Grady, English Teacher, Wilson HS, Long Beach, CA

As a high school creative writing teacher, I know something about the difficulty of talking at a captive, but not necessarily captivated, audience about the joys of reading and writing literature. As a creative writer myself, I know something about the difficulty of finding a helpful text on the same subject. That being said, I found Amdahl'(then again - I already enjoy writing and teaching quite a bit).

Though I did not find the cover image and the multi-colored font of its title attractive, upon opening the text at random and reading around before I went back to the beginning to give it a thorough read I found Amdahl's prose to be straightforward and seemingly honest and his examples to be helpful. The key to guidebooks such as this is threefold: organization, relevance and variance of example, and brevity of personal anecdote. Amdahl's text fares well in these areas.

The text's sections are well organized (and usually well titled-this is more important than one might think for younger readers/writers) and provides short chapters with relevant and variant topics and examples. For this reason the text applies well to a variety of younger writers with varying tendencies, tastes, and needs. Although Amdahl cannot avoid the personal anecdote (after all it is his book) he does so with some restraint and does keep the discussion interesting.

To conclude this and keep it short, I can recommend this book to young adults and teachers of young adults who want to become more effective and more appreciative writers. It doesn't answer all the questions (nothing does), but it can provide the needed push to get more words on the pages, and it can help many begin to solve the problems of the empty page.

William Patterson, Lawrence HS, English Department, Lawrence, Kansas

15 February 2006