A Writer's Moment: The 'Ongoing Gleam' of hope

A Writer's Moment: The 'Ongoing Gleam' of hope:   Francis Scott Key, 1779-1843, was a lawyer and amateur poet from Georgetown, Washington, D.C., when he wrote the poem “The Defence of Fort...

The 'Ongoing Gleam' of hope

 

Francis Scott Key, 1779-1843, was a lawyer and amateur poet from Georgetown, Washington, D.C., when he wrote the poem “The Defence of Fort McHenry” that gave us our nation’s national anthem. 

 

Key had been sent to negotiate the release of American prisoners aboard one of the British ships in the Baltimore Harbor but instead was detained aboard the ship as the British prepared to bombard Fort McHenry and capture the city.  Unable to do anything but watch the bombardment – on the night of September 13–14, 1814 – he saw at dawn that the American flag still flew above the embattled fort and excitedly reported the outcome to the other prisoners being held on the ship.

 

Then, inspired, he wrote his famous poem about the experience – the first stanza becoming our anthem.  For Saturday’s Poem, here are the first two stanzas (there are 4 stanzas in the complete poem) of Key’s later re-titled,

 

The Star Spangled Banner 

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,   

O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming;   

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;   

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave   

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?       

 

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,   

Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes, 

What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,   

As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?   

Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,   

In full glory reflected now shines on the stream;   

‘Tis the star-spangled banner; O long may it wave 

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!       

A Writer's Moment: 'It was the key to success'

A Writer's Moment: 'It was the key to success':   “Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of you...

'It was the key to success'

 

“Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.” – Neil Simon
 

Born in the Bronx, NY on July 4, 1927 Simon grew up during the Great Depression – a great shaper of both his life and his art.  Writing about “life” became the grist for his creative mill, beginning with work on comedy scripts for radio and then gravitating to the Broadway stage.

 

He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, earning more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.   After breaking onto the playwriting scene with Come Blow Your Horn in 1961, Simon won his first Tony for the long-running and one of the most widely performed plays in history, The Odd Couple. 

 

The first playwright to earn 15 “Best Play” awards, he was given a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.   Simon, who died in 2018, also won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Lost in Yonkers, was named for the Mark Twain Prize, America’s top humor award, and was the first living playwright to have a Broadway theater named in his honor.    

 

While humor is at the heart of most of Simon’s works, his rich variety of entertaining, memorable characters also portray the human experience with serious themes.   His said he thought his willingness to try new things was a key to his success.   

 

“If no one ever took risks,” he said, “Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.”

A Writer's Moment: The foundation for 'the biggest stories'

A Writer's Moment: The foundation for 'the biggest stories':   “The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.” –   Susan Glaspell   Born on July 1, 1876 ...

The foundation for 'the biggest stories'

 

“The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.” –  Susan Glaspell

 

Born on July 1, 1876 Glaspell was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright as well as an actress, novelist and journalist who joined with her husband George Cram Cook to found the Provincetown Players, America’s first modern American theater company.    She also served in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project, created during the Great Depression as a relief measure for artists, writers, directors and theater workers to help keep regional theater alive.

 

A prolific writer, Glaspell wrote 9 novels, 15 plays, more than 50 short stories, and a biography, a leading writer on issues of gender, ethics, and dissent.  She has been recognized as a pioneering feminist writer and America’s first important modern female playwright.  Her one-act play Trifles, written in 1916, is frequently cited among the greatest works of American theater.  It also was adapted as a short story and 50 years later as a popular movie A Jury of Her Peers.

 

Inspired by the great investigative journalist Nellie Bly, she worked as a school newspaper reporter at  Drake University where she got her first taste of “being on-stage” as a leading member of the school's debate team.  She simultaneously worked at the Des Moines Daily News and became the paper's first full-time female reporter after graduation.

“I am glad I worked on a newspaper,” she said of that experience. “It made me know I had to write . . .  whether I felt like it or not.  And I loved it!”

A Writer's Moment: 'The difficult challenge of fiction'

A Writer's Moment: 'The difficult challenge of fiction':   “Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It's a skill every writer has to acquire.”  – Lisa Sco...