A Writer's Moment: 'Having a genuine adventure'

A Writer's Moment: 'Having a genuine adventure':   “I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from t...

'Having a genuine adventure'

 

“I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.” – Robert Kurson 

Born on April 18, 1963 Kurson wrote Shadow Divers, the blockbuster bestselling true story of two Americans who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey.  Shadow Divers spent 24 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and was awarded an American Booksellers Association’s "Book of the Year Award."

 

A one-time lawyer with a degree from Harvard Law School, Kurson said he always thought writing would be his real profession and first decided to give it a try at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he wrote both sports stories and features. 

 

A self-proclaimed “adventure seeker,” Kurson also wrote Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship, a gripping account of the search for the wreck of the 17th-century pirate ship Golden Fleece.

 

“I think that pirates represent every person's ability to get up and leave their current daily situation and go on an adventure, and maybe to see things and do things they've never done before or even dreamed of doing," Kurson said.   “It's never too late in life to have a genuine adventure.”

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...