A Writer's Moment: 'Stimulating the urge to write'

A Writer's Moment: 'Stimulating the urge to write':   “No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write...

'Stimulating the urge to write'

 

“No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.” –  Cynthia Ozick

  

Born in New York City on April 17, 1928, Ozick has written fiction and a wide range of nonfiction, including politics, history, literary criticism, and The Holocaust.  Ozick’s lyrical fiction style has earned such accolades as “The greatest living American writer” (from several of her contemporaries), and the title “The Emily Dickinson of The Bronx.”  And her essay style has been called everything from “uncompromising” to “biting” to “brilliant.”  

 

She has authored 7 novels, 8 short-story collections (her short stories have won multiple O. Henry Award first prizes), and 10 books of essays.  Still going strong on the eve of her 98^th birthday, she released In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays in 2025.

 

 Recipient of a National Jewish Book Council Award for Lifetime a=Achievement, she also was a finalist for the National Book Award (for her Puttermesser Papers), won both the PEN/Nabokov and PEN/Malamud Awards, and earned the Presidential Medal for the Humanities.  Her works have been translated into 17 languages.   

 

“In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery,” she said.  “But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph.  That is the pleasure of it."

A Writer's Moment: 'Your topic? It's the whole world'

A Writer's Moment: 'Your topic? It's the whole world':   “Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rath...

'Your topic? It's the whole world'

 

“Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.” – Paul Theroux

 

Born in Medford, Mass., in April of 1941, Theroux has become both an accomplished novelist AND travel writer.  His best-known works are The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast, adapted into both a popular movie and Apple TV series.   

 

Winner of the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Mosquito Coast, he also earned the Royal Geographic Society’s Patron Medal (in 2015) and the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (for Picture Palace) in 1978.  And, his novels Saint Jack, Half-Moon Street and The Chinese Box have been adapted into films.  The prolific Theroux has authored some 80 books, including a 2024 novel Burma Sahib and a 2025 collection, The Vanishing Point: Stories.

 

To Theroux, the whole world is a book topic.  “Everything is fiction,” he said.  “You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.”  And, as for his travel writing: “The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide . . .make voluminous notes . . . and tell the truth.”

A Writer's Moment: Giving ideas 'emotional reality'

A Writer's Moment: Giving ideas 'emotional reality':   “Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an ide...

Giving ideas 'emotional reality'

 

“Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.” –  Anne Michaels

 

Born in Toronto on this date in 1958, Michaels is a poet, novelist and teacher whose numerous writing awards include a handful for her both her book of poetry The Weight of Oranges and her novel Fugitive Pieces.  The latter not only earned a Books in Canada First Novel Award, but also the Trillium Book Award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian Fiction Prize.  

When she's not writing, she also enjoys composing – particularly musical scores for theater.  But, it's fiction that Michaels most enjoys.

 

“It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader,” she said.  “You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.”

A Writer's Moment: 'The ultimate job' for good writers

A Writer's Moment: 'The ultimate job' for good writers:   “Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful. ” – Eudora Welty   Born i...