A Writer's Moment: 'Ink into words and pictures'

A Writer's Moment: 'Ink into words and pictures':   “A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a da...

'Ink into words and pictures'

 “A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.” – Jim Bishop

 

Born in Jersey City, NJ, on this date in 1907, Bishop dropped out of school after 8th grade, then studied typing and shorthand on his own in hopes of becoming a journalist.  In 1929, he was hired as a copy boy at the New York Daily News, the start of a 50-year career writing for newspapers and magazines. 

 

When not writing journalistically, Bishop began working on biographies and ultimately published half-a-dozen including the bestselling The Day Lincoln Was Shot, a book that took him 24 years to complete but ultimately sold over 3 million copies.  The book has been re-published in two dozen languages and made into two television specials and a feature-length movie.

 

Bishop also was a syndicated political columnist, book reviewer and critic, although the latter role concerned him, noting,  “A good writer is not, per se’, a good book critic, no more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."

A Writer's Moment: 'The Writer's Art of Observation'

A Writer's Moment: 'The Writer's Art of Observation':   “Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die when you’re right in the middle of it.” –  P.J. O'Rourke. Born in Toledo,...

'The Writer's Art of Observation'

 

“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die when you’re right in the middle of it.” – P.J. O'Rourke.

Born in Toledo, OH on Nov. 14, 1947 Patrick Jake O'Rourke was a conservative political satirist, journalist, creative writer and regular on the hit NPR show "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me” until his death from cancer in 2022.

O’Rourke authored 23 books, including the mega-bestseller None of My Business: P.J. Explains Money, Banking, Debt, Equity, Assets, Liabilities, and Why He's Not Rich and Neither Are You.   He also co-wrote National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook with Douglas Kenney, the book that inspired the movie Animal House.

O’Rourke said judging who and what people are all about is easy to determine through the writer's art of observation. 

“People will tell you anything,” O’Rourke said, “but what they do is always the truth.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Nothing is more important'

A Writer's Moment: 'Nothing is more important':  

'Nothing is more important'

 

Creating terse, imagistic poems

 

“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” – Charles Simic  

Simic, born in Belgrade in 1938, won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The World Doesn’t End and writing with a style called literary minimalism, creating terse, imagistic poems. Critics have referred to Simic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes."

Displaced by World War II and eventually emigrating to the U.S., Simic didn’t speak English until he was 15, but once he learned the language he became one of our most prolific writers, producing some 60 books, the last being No Land In Sight: Poems, published in 2022.   Named U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement, he died in 2023.    For Saturday’s Poem here is Simic’s,

                                                 The Wooden Toy

     The wooden toy sitting pretty.

   No … quieter than that.

      Like the sound of eyebrows

      Raised by a villain 

      In a silent movie.

    Psst, someone said behind my back.