A Writer's Moment: 'It's what you can't stop thinking about'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what you can't stop thinking about': “You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can't keep your mind off.” – A. R. Ammons   ...

'It's what you can't stop thinking about'

“You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can't keep your mind off.” – A. R. Ammons

 

Born in North Carolina on this date in 1926, Ammons worked as an elementary school principal and a glass company executive before turning his full attention to literature – both teaching and writing.   From 1964 to 1998 he taught creative writing at Cornell University while authoring hundreds, if not thousands, of poems.

 

Ammons wrote about nature and the self, themes that had preoccupied Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and that remained the central focus of his work.  His Collected Poems, 1951–1971 (a terrific read) won a National Book Award.   And his Selected Poems is an excellent introduction to his works   In his work, Ammons focuses on change, both in nature and in daily life.           

                                                               

 Shortly before his death in 2001 Ammons was asked: “What is poetry?”    

                                                               

 “Poetry," he replied, "is the music of words . . . the linguistic correction of disorder.” 

A Writer's Moment: 'It's not a matter of choice'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's not a matter of choice': “Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.”  – N. Scott Moma...

'It's not a matter of choice'

“Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.” – N. Scott Momaday

 

Native American Momaday, a Kiowa was a novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize (for his novel House Made of Dawn) and National Medal of Arts.  While “House” has been called “A Classic,” he is perhaps best known for the novel/memoir/folklore work The Way to Rainy Mountain.

 

Momaday grew up on Reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, and earned degrees from the University of New Mexico Stanford, where he also began his writing career, focusing first on poetry.  

 

Also a renowned teacher and speaker, he was one of the nation’s first Native American academics and created a curriculum based on American Indian literature and mythology.   In addition to his national honors, he was awarded some two dozen honorary degrees and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Selected for the Native American Hall of Fame in 2018, Momaday died in 2024.

 

 “I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain,” Momaday said.   “None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.”

A Writer's Moment: 'That thing humans do'

A Writer's Moment: 'That thing humans do':   “Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought...

'That thing humans do'

 

“Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.” – Richard Ford

 

Born in Mississippi on this date in 1944, Ford is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and short story writer best known for his novels The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank With You.  He also wrote the best-selling short story collection Rock Springs, which has many widely anthologized stories.

 

The grandson of a railroad engineer, Ford started his adult life working for the railroad before deciding to further pursue his love of literature by studying English Literature at Michigan State University.  

 

“I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life,” he said.  “Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.”  And so he became a writer, although he took a swing at law school first before dropping out to attend a creative writing program at the University of California.  His first books were well received but not big sellers, so he went to work as a sportswriter, which eventually led to his first bestseller, The Sportswriter.

 

Journalism and his personality have provided plenty for his writing base.  “My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done,” he said.  “Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Dreams or Swords'

A Writer's Moment: 'Dreams or Swords':   All books are either dreams or swords; you can cut, or you can drug, with words.”  – Amy Lowell   Pulitzer Prize winner Lowell, whose ...