A Writer's Moment: 'It creates a communal nature'

A Writer's Moment: 'It creates a communal nature':   “A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the com...

'It creates a communal nature'

 

“A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the theater audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time.  I find that thrilling.” – August Wilson

 

Born in Pittsburgh on April 27, 1945 Wilson wrote 20 plays, highlighted by the 10-play Pittsburgh (or Century) Cycle..  Each of the 10 plays is set in a different decade of the 20^th Century, depicting both comic and tragic aspects of the black experience.

 

Over his career, cut short by his death from liver cancer, he won 8 New York Drama Critics Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes (for Fences and The Piano Lesson) and a Broadway Tony Award, also for Fences, which then was made into an award-winning movie.

 

Wilson, who died in 2005, said his aim with The Century Cycle was to sketch the black experience and "raise consciousness through theater.”  He was fascinated by the power of theater as a medium to bring community together to bear witness to life.  

 

And, he added, “I think my plays offer white Americans a different way to look at black Americans.”

A Writer's Moment: 'That makes you think'

A Writer's Moment: 'That makes you think':   “The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.” – Harper Lee   Born in Alabama on this date...

'That makes you think'

 

“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.” – Harper Lee

 

Born in Alabama on this date in 1926, Nelle Harper Lee became one of America’s most acclaimed novelists even though she wrote just two books.  But, of course, the first of those was To Kill a Mockingbird.  Published in 1960 it achieved immediate success, rocketing to the top of most bestseller lists and winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. That singular achievement led to her being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.

 

Lee also was feted for assisting Truman Capote (the model for her character Dill in Mockingbird) in his research for his 1966 masterpiece In Cold Blood.   Between them, Lee and Capote created a new kind of journalistic reporting, obtaining “notes” from a primary source without actually writing them down.  Both were able to remember things in minute detail, and they would spend hours after interviewing sessions re-creating those interviews.  Their skill with the technique led to sources to “opening up” in ways they might otherwise have not wanted to do.

 

Lee lived her last 50 years as a recluse.  Until her death in 2016, she granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances.  And with the exception of a few short essays, she published nothing further until 2015 when her so-called “prequel” to Mockingbird – Go Set A Watchman – came out.   Mockingbird’s universal acceptance had seemed to cause her to freeze up when it came to further writing.

 

“I never expected any sort of success with ‘Mockingbird’ … I just sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement,” she once said.  “I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful (writing) death I'd expected.”

A Writer's Moment: 'These are our tools of thought'

A Writer's Moment: 'These are our tools of thought':   “I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situati...

'These are our tools of thought'

 

“I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.” – Jill Paton Walsh

 

Paton Walsh was the writing name of Gillian Bliss, born in England in April of 1937.  A novelist and children's book writer, she was best known for her novel Knowledge of Angels, nominated for the Booker Prize, and for the Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane mysteries that either completed or continued the work of renowned British crime writer and poet Dorothy Sayers.

 

Paton Walsh, who died in 2020, also earned considerable acclaim for her series featuring college nurse and part-time detective Imogine Quy, set at the fictional St. Agatha College in Cambridge, and for her two-dozen highly successful children's and young adult titles, including the much honored A Chance Child and Grace.

 

"There is nothing more important than writing well for the young,” she once noted, “especially if literature is to have a continuance."

A Writer's Moment: 'It begins in childhood'

A Writer's Moment: 'It begins in childhood':   “I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to chil...