A Writer's Moment
A look at writing and writers who inspire us.
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“Librarians and romance writers accomplish one mission better than anyone, including English teachers: we create readers for life - and w...
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“One of the great joys of life is creativity. Information goes in, gets shuffled about, and comes out in new and intere...
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“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, ...
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A Writer's Moment: 'Property of the imagination' : “The English language is nobody's special property. ...
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A Writer's Moment: 'Information In; Creative Responses Out' : “One of the great joys of life is creativity....
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A Writer's Moment: 'Story ideas surround you' : “I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears...
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
A Writer's Moment: Absorbing the rhythms of the world
Absorbing the rhythms of the world
“What
makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the
language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives.
Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.” –
John Burnside
Born
in Scotland on this date in 1955, Burnside was one of only two writers to win
both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same
book. Burnside’s Black Cat Bone took home the
prestigious awards in 2011. He also won the Whitbread Award
for The Asylum Dance.
Burnside,
who died from illness in 2024, authored 8 nonfiction books, 11 novels and 23
poetry collections, the last being The Empire of Forgetting, published
posthumously in 2025. He also wrote numerous
short stories, essays, and two award-winning memoirs, A Lie About My
Father and Waking Up In Toytown, and was honored with Great
Britain’s "David Cohen Prize” for lifetime achievement in literature.
“I
love long sentences,” he said of his writing style. “My big heroes
of fiction writing are Henry James and (Marcel) Proust – people who recognize
that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications,
qualifications and feelings.”
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
A Writer's Moment: 'A wonderfully flexible form'
'A wonderfully flexible form'
“The
pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach,
an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is
such a wonderfully flexible form. You learn a lot, writing fiction.”
– Penelope Lively
Born
in Egypt on this date in 1933, the gregarious Lively has been an active, award-winning
writer for nearly 60 years. Author
of both adult and children’s literature, she earned a Booker Prize for her
adult novel Moon Tiger, and the Carnegie Medal for British Children's
Boks for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe.
Honored
as a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Lively has written in several
genres, doing novels, short stories – her most recent collection titled Metamorphosis
– and radio and television scripts, reviews, and articles for newspapers and
journals. She’s also penned two memoirs:
Dancing Fish and Ammonites and Life in the Garden.
While
she didn’t start writing until her late 30s, she has been extremely prolific
since, generating dozens of books in her main genres. “Every
novel generates its own climate,” she said.
“You just have to get going with it.”
And
she advocates for being a good reader. “All
I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me,”
she said. “If I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment
with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on
writing myself.”
Monday, March 16, 2026
A Writer's Moment: Seeing characters and stories 'everywhere'
Seeing characters and stories 'everywhere'
Born
in Miami, Fla., on March 15, 1953 Pozzessere has penned more than 150 novels
and novellas, writing in the historical,
romance, paranormal and suspense genres. Also known under both her
maiden name Heather Graham, and pen name Shannon Drake, she has built a
faithful reading audience that ranges in age from teenagers to women in their
90s – “and men, too,” she said, “especially for my Civil War era
books.” Her most recent, co-authored with Jon Land, is Blood
Moon.
Once
an aspiring actress, Pozzessere has starred instead as a writer – awarded
the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the
Thriller Writer's Silver Bullet for her charitable efforts. She is
founder of the Florida Chapter of the Romance Writers of America, and a member
of Mystery Writers of America, Novelists Inc., and the Horror Writers
Association.
A
graduate of the University of South Florida and mother of 5, Pozzessere started
writing in the early 1980s. Her first book, When Next We Love, came out in 1983, and she followed it with a remarkable 12 more titles from 1983 to 1985. She said she sees characters and stories
“everywhere.”
“I
always feel a responsibility to the people I write about,” she
said. “I feel obligated to portray them in the way they feel is
proper.”