A Writer's Moment: Absorbing the rhythms of the world

A Writer's Moment: 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 sk...

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.”

A Writer's Moment: 'A wonderfully flexible form'

A Writer's Moment: '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...

'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.”

A Writer's Moment: Seeing characters and stories 'everywhere'

A Writer's Moment: Seeing characters and stories 'everywhere': "With historicals, the research is half the fun.  Contemporaries are especially easy.  People are right out there in front of you; yo...

Seeing characters and stories 'everywhere'

"With historicals, the research is half the fun.  Contemporaries are especially easy.  People are right out there in front of you; you meet them every day.  You can concentrate wholly on the story and characters." – Heather Graham Pozzessere 

 Born in Miami, Fla., on March 15, 1953 Pozzessere has penned more than 150 novels and novellas, writing in the historical, romance, paranormal and suspense genres.  Also known under both her maiden name Heather Graham, and pen name Shannon Drake, she has built a faithful reading audience that ranges in age from teenagers to women in their 90s – “and men, too,” she said, “especially for my Civil War era books.”  Her most recent, co-authored with Jon Land, is Blood Moon.

 

Once an aspiring actress, Pozzessere has starred instead as a writer – awarded the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Thriller Writer's Silver Bullet for her charitable efforts.  She is founder of the Florida Chapter of the Romance Writers of America, and a member of Mystery Writers of America, Novelists Inc., and the Horror Writers Association.

 

A graduate of the University of South Florida and mother of 5, Pozzessere started writing in the early 1980s.  Her first book, When Next We Love, came out in 1983, and she followed it with a remarkable 12 more titles from 1983 to 1985.  She said she sees characters and stories “everywhere.” 

 

“I always feel a responsibility to the people I write about,” she said.  “I feel obligated to portray them in the way they feel is proper.”

A Writer's Moment: Inspiration from just one moon

A Writer's Moment: Inspiration from just one moon:   “The moon looks upon many night flowers; the night flowers see but one moon.” –  Jean Ingelow   Born in England in March of 1820, Inge...