Word: kuriloffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...biographies, airline magazines, the printed bafflegab of lawyers and academics, interviews with pious athletes and pouting ads by misunderstood oil companies, the affliction called writer's block is insufficiently widespread. But no wretch who has ever tried to write anything will be surprised to learn that Nancy Isaac Kuriloff, a therapist who works in Los Angeles and deals with fear of writing, has plenty of clients...
...quot;We are really talking about peril," Kuriloff says in the living room of her Brentwood apartment. She is an intense, frail-looking, girlish woman of 39 who moves about when she speaks, dashing to the bookshelf to verify a remembered fragment of poetry, changing chairs to find one whose compass bearing on the conversation is exactly right. When she listens, she cocks her head, nods emphatically -"Yes, yes, yes!"-leans forward in sympathy, sits back in surprise and pleasure, claps her hands...
...describing a ghastly scene, the desolate interior landscape of the becalmed writer. This bedeviled soul feels stupid, worthless, paralyzed; he is in a state of panic and isolation; he feels a terrible sense of impending disaster. "And in this situation the Critic is remorseless." That is Kuriloffs central perception: most people who write anything at all must deal, sooner or later, with a hostile, censorious inner voice. It will say, for example, "You must finish, and you don't have enough time." Or "You can't do it, you're no good, and everyone will find...
...quot;Kuriloff is a poet who has been published in the Atlantic. But it was the agony of writing scholarly essays as a Ph.D. candidate in education at the University of California at Berkeley that led her to try to help other people. In college she was an expert player of the academic game, a great winner of praise and fellowships. Such accomplishments did not prevent her from feeling, as she once wrote, that each writing assignment was "a blankness, a barrier, a kind of enemy." She bested her enemy often enough to be able to do well...
...soothingly, Kuriloff goes on talking. − By John Skow