A Writer's Moment
A look at writing and writers who inspire us.
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“Librarians and romance writers accomplish one mission better than anyone, including English teachers: we create readers for life - and w...
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“One of the great joys of life is creativity. Information goes in, gets shuffled about, and comes out in new and intere...
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“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, ...
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A Writer's Moment: 'Property of the imagination' : “The English language is nobody's special property. ...
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A Writer's Moment: 'Information In; Creative Responses Out' : “One of the great joys of life is creativity....
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A Writer's Moment: 'Story ideas surround you' : “I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears...
Thursday, March 19, 2026
A Writer's Moment: 'It's every novelist's obsession'
'It's every novelist's obsession'
“The
novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right
next word. “ – Philip Roth
Born
in Newark, NJ on this date in 1933, Roth jumped into a writing career with a
bang, his first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, winning
the National Book Award.
It
was the first of two National Book Awards and two Book Critics Circle Awards for Roth. One of America’s most honored
writers, he also won the Man Booker International Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award
(three times), and the Pulitzer Prize (for his novel American Pastoral).
Roth's
fiction, regularly set in his native Newark, is known for its intensely
autobiographical character, and for philosophically and formally blurring the
distinction between reality and fiction. “Literature isn't a moral
beauty contest,” Roth said. “Its power arises from the authority and
audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is
what counts.”
Roth,
who died in 2018, wrote 4 collections of short stories and 29 novels, including Portnoy’s
Complaint, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America. Eight of his works were adapted into movies.
“It
was my great problem to solve: 'How to write a book,' you know?” he said. “And
after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do
it again.”
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
A Writer's Moment: Absorbing the rhythms of the world
Absorbing the rhythms of the world
“What
makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the
language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives.
Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.” –
John Burnside
Born
in Scotland on this date in 1955, Burnside was one of only two writers to win
both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same
book. Burnside’s Black Cat Bone took home the
prestigious awards in 2011. He also won the Whitbread Award
for The Asylum Dance.
Burnside,
who died from illness in 2024, authored 8 nonfiction books, 11 novels and 23
poetry collections, the last being The Empire of Forgetting, published
posthumously in 2025. He also wrote numerous
short stories, essays, and two award-winning memoirs, A Lie About My
Father and Waking Up In Toytown, and was honored with Great
Britain’s "David Cohen Prize” for lifetime achievement in literature.
“I
love long sentences,” he said of his writing style. “My big heroes
of fiction writing are Henry James and (Marcel) Proust – people who recognize
that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications,
qualifications and feelings.”
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
A Writer's Moment: 'A wonderfully flexible form'
'A wonderfully flexible form'
“The
pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach,
an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is
such a wonderfully flexible form. You learn a lot, writing fiction.”
– Penelope Lively
Born
in Egypt on this date in 1933, the gregarious Lively has been an active, award-winning
writer for nearly 60 years. Author
of both adult and children’s literature, she earned a Booker Prize for her
adult novel Moon Tiger, and the Carnegie Medal for British Children's
Boks for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe.
Honored
as a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Lively has written in several
genres, doing novels, short stories – her most recent collection titled Metamorphosis
– and radio and television scripts, reviews, and articles for newspapers and
journals. She’s also penned two memoirs:
Dancing Fish and Ammonites and Life in the Garden.
While
she didn’t start writing until her late 30s, she has been extremely prolific
since, generating dozens of books in her main genres. “Every
novel generates its own climate,” she said.
“You just have to get going with it.”
And
she advocates for being a good reader. “All
I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me,”
she said. “If I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment
with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on
writing myself.”