A Writer's Moment: 'The ultimate job' for good writers

A Writer's Moment: 'The ultimate job' for good writers:   “Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful. ” – Eudora Welty   Born i...

'The ultimate job' for good writers

 

“Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful.” – Eudora Welty

 

Born in Jackson, Miss., on this date in 1909, Welty spent most of her life in and wrote about the American South, sharing a love of the region and its unique communities and bringing its stories to life for the world to see.  

 

Primarily a writer of short stories and honored in 1992 for her lifetime contributions to the genre, she also penned one of the all-time best American novels – the 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Optimist’s Daughter.  And, she did a series of lectures released in the 1980s as a New York Times bestselling nonfiction book, One Writer's Beginnings, runner-up for the National Book Award.

 

“Place” was always vitally important to Welty.   “It is,” she said, “what makes fiction seem real, because with it come customs, feelings, and associations.   Place answers the questions: ‘What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?’”   And that, she said, is the job of the storyteller.  

 

“Long before I wrote stories, I ‘listened’ for stories,” she said.  “Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what a poem can offer'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what a poem can offer':   “We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you...

'It's what a poem can offer'

 

“We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.” – Tracy K. Smith

 

Smith, who was born in Massachusetts on April 16, 1972, started writing poetry as a 5^th grader and became our nation’s 22^nd Poet Laureate (2017-19) and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her poems Life On Mars.   For Saturday’s Poem here is Smith’s,

 

                                                            The Good Life

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Driven to communicate'

A Writer's Moment: 'Driven to communicate': A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate . . . to share . . . to be understood." ...

'Driven to communicate'

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate . . . to share . . . to be understood." -  Leo Rosten

Born on April 10, 1908, Rosten was a novelist, scriptwriter and humorist who also had a deep interest in the relationship of politics and the media and the intricacies of their connections.  

 

An immigrant from Russia who grew up in New York City, he worked his way through school, earning a doctorate degree from the University of Chicago.   After starting his career as an economist while  simultaneously writing stories for The New Yorker and Look magazines, he took on a series of government information jobs during WWII and wrote the first of his screenplays, The Conspirators.  From 1944 to 1987, the year of his death, he wrote more than three dozen books, numerous feature stories and essays, and was a much sought-after speaker.

 

His quotes often were shared, including this one (a version of which is often mis-attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson):  

 

"The purpose of life . . . is to be useful; to be honorable . . . to be compassionate . . . to matter; to have it make some difference that you have lived."

A Writer's Moment: Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments'

A Writer's Moment: Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments':   “I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talkin...