A Writer's Moment: 'Better to be right . . . or wrong?'

A Writer's Moment: 'Better to be right . . . or wrong?':   “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”    – Aldous Huxley    Best known for  Brave New W...

'Better to be right . . . or wrong?'

 

“Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”   – Aldous Huxley

 

 Best known for Brave New World, considered by most critics as one of the ten best language novels of the 20^th Century, and for the non-fiction book The Doors of Perception, Huxley was born into a family of writers and educators in London, England in July of 1894.  

 

Writing by the age of 10, he was editing the distinguished magazine Oxford Poetry in his early 20s before starting his creative writing career doing short stories and poetry.  At age 30 he turned to novels, all successful, though none so much as Brave New World, released in 1931.  Following the novel’s immense success, he became a travel writer and his travel books are still considered among the best ever written.  Huxley finished his writing career as a television and film scriptwriter in the United States, where he died in 1963.   

 

Widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time, Huxley was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Of Brave New World, he said he wrote it out of fear that mankind would lose individual identity in the future and needed to be prepared.  

 

“The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong,” he said.  “The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Well, Imagine That'

A Writer's Moment: 'Well, Imagine That':   “If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering .” – Tom ...

'Well, Imagine That'

 

“If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.” – Tom Robbins

 

Born in Blowing Rock, NC in July of 1932, Robbins went to school in Virginia and after a stint in the military started his writing as a journalist.  His creative writing career started in the mid-1960s when he rejected an opportunity to write a book about art but told the publisher that he had an idea for a novel.  The publisher gave him a chance and the result was the bestseller, Another Roadside Attraction.

 

Robbins, who died in 2025, wrote 8 bestselling novels, many dozens of short stories and essays, and 2 nonfiction books, including the self-declared “un-memoir” Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life.  Heading up the list of his many successes is his irreverent novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, also made into a popular movie.  Ultimately, Writer’s Digest named him one of the 100 Best Writers of the 20^th Century.

 

“The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination,” Robbins said.  “If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's a search for order'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's a search for order':   “For me, poetry is always a search for order.”  – Elizabeth Jennings Jennings was born in England on this date in 1926 and was lauded f...

'It's a search for order'

 “For me, poetry is always a search for order.” – Elizabeth Jennings

Jennings was born in England on this date in 1926 and was lauded for her lyric poetry and mastery of form.  She started writing in her mid-20s after graduating from Queen Anne’s College and was published in such major journals as Oxford Poetry, New English Weekly, The Spectator and Poetry Review before her first book, Poems, – winner of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s award for “Best First Book of Poetry” – came out in 1953.

She followed it with A Way of Looking, winning the Somerset Maugham Award given to leading writers under the age of 35.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Jennings’,

Delay
The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

A Writer's Moment: 'A most solitary occupation'

A Writer's Moment: 'A most solitary occupation':   “Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He or she must be alone, uninterrup...