A Writer's Moment: 'How you fortify your inner life'

A Writer's Moment: 'How you fortify your inner life':   ‘If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.’ – Seamus Heaney   Born in Northern Ireland on...

'How you fortify your inner life'

 

‘If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.’ – Seamus Heaney

 

Born in Northern Ireland on April 13, 1939 Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th Century.  He authored more than two-dozen volumes of poetry and criticism, 2 plays and numerous translations and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.  

 

A 12-volume collection of his poems titled The Poems of Seamus Heaney, encompassing all the poems Heaney published in his lifetime as well as some that appeared after his death in 2013 – was released in 2025. For Saturday’s Poem, here is Heaney’s,  

                                                              Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

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

A Writer's Moment: 'That 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...

'That helpless 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...