A Writer's Moment: Living A Well-Sculpted Life

A Writer's Moment: Living A Well-Sculpted Life: “Treat your life like something to be sculpted.” – Larry Niven Born in Los Angeles on this date in 1938, Laurence...

Living A Well-Sculpted Life

“Treat your life like something to be sculpted.” – Larry Niven

Born in Los Angeles on this date in 1938, Laurence van Cott Niven has been a full-time writer since the early 1960s, starting with a well-received short story “The Coldest Place.” Since then he has built a reputation as the world’s leading “Hard Sci-Fi” writer, especially for his worldwide bestselling series Ringworld.  Called by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction “The most energetic future history series ever written,” Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards.

He has written 54 novels, several screenplays and television scripts, and dozens of short stories, novellas and stories for comics, winning numerous awards in the process.  Named by Arthur C Clarke as his favorite author, Niven likes using big science concepts and theoretical physics.   He also created several alien species, one of the best-known being The Kzin, featured in a series of 12 books collectively called “The Man-Kzin Wars.”  In addition to Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Niven often includes elements of the Detective Fiction and Adventure genres’ in his stories. 

                                        Over the course of his career Niven has put together a list of “Niven's Laws,” which he describes as “how the Universe works” as far as he can tell.   About the possibility of time travel, he said, “I'd  visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.”

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A Writer's Moment: Giving Kids Wit, Charm and Hope

A Writer's Moment: Giving Kids Wit, Charm and Hope: “One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even t...

Giving Kids Wit, Charm and Hope

“One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading.  I have been a reader ever since.” – Beverly Cleary

Cleary, who turned 103 this month, authored more than 30 books about and for children, and generations of children worldwide have embraced them.  Nearly 100 million copies of her works have been sold and they’re still going strong, as is Cleary, who celebrated her birthday on "Drop Everything and Read Day"  (April 12^th).

Among her character creations are Henry Huggins, Ribsy, Ralph S. Mouse, Beezus and Ramona – names embedded in our Kids’ Lit Lexicon.   Among her dozens of awards are the Newberry Medal, the National Book Award. The National Medal of Arts, the “Living Legend” Award from the Library of Congress, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal.  

                             It was working as a children’s librarian that first made Cleary aware she wanted to write children’s books.  Her mother told her that kids like stories filled with wit and charm, so she created stories she hoped would fit that profile while also sparking kids’ interest in reading.

She said she also knew that kids are sometimes confused or frightened by the world around them and feel deeply about things that adults can easily dismiss.   “I didn't start out writing to give children hope,” she said, “but I'm glad that through my books some of them found it.”

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A Writer's Moment: 'No Looking Back'

A Writer's Moment: 'No Looking Back': “I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry...

'No Looking Back'

“I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.” – Edwin Morgan

Morgan, born on this date in 1920, was widely recognized as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century.       In 1999, ten years before his death, he was the first to be honored with the title “Scottish National Poet.”  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Morgan’s,

                      Absence

My shadow --
I woke to a wind swirling the curtains light and dark
and the birds twittering on the roofs, I lay cold
in the early light in my room high over London.
What fear was it that made the wind sound like a fire
so that I got up and looked out half-asleep
at the calm rows of street-lights fading far below?
Without fire
Only the wind blew.
But in the dream I woke from, you
came running through the traffic, tugging me, clinging
to my elbow, your eyes spoke
what I could not grasp --
Nothing, if you were here!

The wind of the early quiet
merges slowly now with a thousand rolling wheels.
The lights are out, the air is loud.
It is an ordinary January day.
My shadow, do you hear the streets?
Are you at my heels? Are you here?
And I throw back the sheets.

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A Writer's Moment: Stirring Together Life's Elements

A Writer's Moment: Stirring Together Life's Elements: “A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and persona...

Stirring Together Life's Elements

“A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.” – August Wilson

Born on April 27, 1945, Wilson was an African-American playwright whose work was highlighted by a series of 10 plays called The Pittsburgh or Century Cycle.  Among them were Fences, which won both a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony – and was made into an Academy Award winning movie; and The Piano Lesson, which also won a Pulitzer for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Award.  Each play is set in a different decade of the 20^th Century, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the Black experience.

  

Wilson said his aim was to "raise consciousness through theater.”  He was fascinated by the power of theater as a medium where a community at large could come together to bear witness to events and the unfolding currents of society.  Wilson had the remarkable ability to make everything he said and wrote crackle with enthusiasm and life, and any aspiring writer or actor who listened to his talks would always walk out fired up about writing or acting and ready to get busy trying to emulate what he shared. 

                            “In creating plays," he said,  "I often use the image of a stewing pot in which I toss various things that I’m going to make use of—a black cat, a garden, a bicycle, a man with a scar on his face, a pregnant woman, a man with a gun."   The results were as tasty as tasty can be.

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A Writer's Moment: Taking a Chance on Everything

A Writer's Moment: Taking a Chance on Everything: “I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things y...

Taking a Chance on Everything

“I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed. What about you? When's it gonna be your turn?”—Melvin Burgess

Born in England on this date in 1954, Burgess started writing in his mid-30s and had almost instant success as a Children’s and Young Adult fiction writer when his first book, The Cry of the Wolf, was “highly commended^” by librarians for the prestigious Carnegie Medal.  Then in the mid-1990s his ”lucky 7^th” book Junk, about heroin-addicted teenagers on the streets of Bristol, not only won the Carnegie but also the Guardian Book Award and soared to the top of most YA bestseller lists worldwide.  

 

           Now the author of 25 books and a television screenplay, Burgess said that when he was a child he choice of careers was to be “an animal collector,” influenced by zoologist Gerald Durrell, who also was an award-winning writer and founder of the Jersey Zoo.   “He had a job collecting animals for zoos, and for a long time that is what I wanted to do.”

But after being influenced by an enthusiastic English teacher, he started studying authors and turned his focus toward a writing career.    “I read all the time so it's difficult to say who my all-time favorites (authors) are,” he said.  “One is George Orwell, because he makes political writing so simple a child could understand it.“

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A Writer's Moment: That Pain You Can't Do Without

A Writer's Moment: That Pain You Can't Do Without: “I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.”...

That Pain You Can't Do Without

“I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.” – Robert Penn Warren

Born in southern Kentucky on this date in 1905, Penn Warren had the remarkable ability to put his reader both into a place and inside the lives of those about whom he was writing, whether it was in works of fiction or in his remarkable poetry.

Founder of the influential literary journal, The Southern Review, he is the only person to win the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry, winning the latter award twice.  His first Pulitzer came for All The King’s Men, the 1947 novel about ruthless Louisiana politician Willie Stark.  It’s one of the few books to also be made into both a movie and an opera, with the movie version earning a Best Picture Academy Award featuring Best Actor winner Broderick Crawford.

Penn Warren’s poetry Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for Promises: Poems 1954-1956, which also won the National Book Award, and Now and Then.  In the 1940s he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and in 1986 he was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate.  Among his many other honors were a Jefferson Lectureship, the highest Congressional award for achievement in the humanities; The Presidential Medal of Freedom; and The National Medal of Arts.  

        “How do poems grow?” Penn Warren asked.  “They grow out of your life.   The urge to write poetry is like having an itch.  When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”

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A Writer's Moment: Living The American Dream

A Writer's Moment: Living The American Dream: "We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.” – Edwin Markham Markham’s story...

Living The American Dream

"We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.” – Edwin Markham

Markham’s story is one of those remarkable “American Dream” types.  Born on April 23, 1852, to a family of 10 kids, he grew up in a broken home, worked the family farm as a child, and was mostly self-educated. 

Against the wishes of his family, he decided to go to college and study literature, earning degrees in the Classics.  He fell in love with poetry and began writing in his late 40s, writing many poems and essays for the ages.  Among them were his famous “The Man With The Hoe,” inspired Edwin Vincent Millet’s equally famous painting; and "Lincoln, the Man of the People."   Selected in 1922 to be read at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, it has often been called the greatest poem ever written about our 12^th President.

An amazing letter writer and book collector, Markham amassed a personal library of over 15,000 books.     He died in 1940 and bequeathed the books and his personal papers and letters, which included years of correspondence with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell, to tiny Wagner College in New York City.

 

Poet Laureate in his native Oregon in the 1930s, he was the first recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award in 1937, and six schools and a World War II ship were named in his honor after his death. Near the end of his long life, he remarked, “Ah, great it is to believe the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream; but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true!”

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A Writer's Moment: For The Beauty of Our Earth

A Writer's Moment: For The Beauty of Our Earth: “We are as much alive as we keep the earth alive.” – Chief Dan George I’ve been involved in Earth Day since its founding in 1970, wri...

For The Beauty of Our Earth

“We are as much alive as we keep the earth alive.” – Chief Dan George

I’ve been involved in Earth Day since its founding in 1970, writing that year about the efforts of school children to “do good things for the earth” – the mandate of Earth Day founder, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson.   

On this 49^th annual Earth Day, I  share this link to John Rutter’s beautiful rendition of “For The Beauty of the Earth.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHIfRLNYUGw 

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A Writer's Moment: Sharing the Joy of Poetry

A Writer's Moment: Sharing the Joy of Poetry: “I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should,...

Sharing the Joy of Poetry

“I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.” – William Jay Smith

Born in Louisiana in April 1918, Smith was Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress from 1968-70, and Poet-in-Residence at prestigious Williams College for many years.    The author of more than 50 books of poetry for adults and children, including the multiple award-winning children’s book Laughing Time, he was twice honored as a finalist for the National Book Award.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Smith’s,

The World Below The Window

The geraniums I left last night on the windowsill,
To the best of my knowledge now, are out there still,
And will be there as long as I think they will.

And will be there as long as I think that I
Can throw the window open on the sky,
A touch of geranium pink in the tail of my eye;

As long as I think I see, past leaves green-growing,
Barges moving down a river, water flowing,
Fulfillment in the thought of thought outgoing,

Fulfillment in the sight of sight replying,
Of sound in the sound of small birds southward flying,
In life life-giving, and in death undying.

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A Writer's Moment: Expanding Upon Life's Mysteries

A Writer's Moment: Expanding Upon Life's Mysteries: “A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.” – Stendhal Born in 1883, Marie-Henri Beyle - who wrote under the pseudonym Stendhal -...

Expanding Upon Life's Mysteries

“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.” – Stendhal

Born in 1883, Marie-Henri Beyle - who wrote under the pseudonym Stendhal - is one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction. Perhaps his finest novel is the 1830 work The Red and the Black from which the above quote comes.

Before settling on the pen name Stendhal, he published under many names including “Louis Alexandre Bombet” and “Anastasius Serpière.”  The only book that Beyle published under his own name was The History of Painting  in 1817.  Over his lifetime, in addition to many books – both fiction and non – Stenhal authored hundreds of stories, essays and published letters. 

                                 “A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions,” Stendahl said.   “Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding.  Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”

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A Writer's Moment: Great Thoughts, Great Actions

A Writer's Moment: Great Thoughts, Great Actions: “Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.” – Theodore Roosevelt Outside of his politi...

Great Thoughts, Great Actions

“Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Outside of his political career, Roosevelt was both a voracious reader and tireless writer.  He wrote thousands and thousands of letters and essays and had 25 books published about a range of subjects, including history, biology, geography and philosophy. 

 

His writing about the American West, in particular, has stood the test of time and is still often used by those seeking depictions of life on the frontier in those times.  And, of course, his concern for our environment and protecting our land for future generations did more to shape of our current national park system than perhaps any other president before or since.

  When asked once about his decisive leadership in many of these things, he said, “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”  We can be grateful that he never chose to do nothing.

A Writer's Moment: Never Exclude Anyone

A Writer's Moment: Never Exclude Anyone: “I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn&#...

Never Exclude Anyone

“I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.” – Nick Hornby

Born in England on this date in 1957, Hornby is both a writer and lyricist, perhaps best known for his memoir Fever Pitch and novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, all adapted into feature films. Hornby's works, which frequently touch upon music and sport, have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.

The author of 7 novels, 9 nonfiction books, numerous short stories and screenplays, and two television specials, including this year’s State of the Union, Hornby also has edited half-a-dozen anthologies.  Honored with many writing and screenwriting awards, including the prestigious “E.M. Forster Prize” and the “British Sports Book Award for Outstanding Contribution to Writing,” the BBC named Hornby among its top 30 most influential people in British Culture.  

                              Hornby also is co-founder of the Ministry of Stories, a non-profit organization in East London dedicated to helping children and young adults develop writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.   “I don't want my books to exclude anyone,” Hornby said.  “But if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!”

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A Writer's Moment: In Order To Shape The Future

A Writer's Moment: In Order To Shape The Future: “Memories are the key – not to the past, but to the future.” – Corrie ten Boom   Cornelia “Corrie” ten Boom,  both born and died on ...

In Order To Shape The Future

“Memories are the key – not to the past, but to the future.” – Corrie ten Boom

 

Cornelia “Corrie” ten Boom,  both born and died on this date (1892 and 1983, respectively), was one of the many thousands of ordinary people in World War II who risked their lives to save those who were being hunted by the Nazis as part of what would become known as the Holocaust.

 

Captured and imprisoned for her actions, she survived the war to write about the experience in The Hiding Place.  It was one of many books she wrote while following her own advice to “remember things from the past in order to help shape the future” – a mandate for all who choose a life of writing and communication.

 

Corrie ten Boom

Also acclaimed for her work on behalf many other causes, she founded a church to serve those with mental disabilities and became a champion for foster children. 

 

 During her final year of life, she reflected on how she could have been killed or died at a much younger age and about the urgency she always felt to “do things for others.”  She said simply, “The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.”