A Writer's Moment: 'To hold nothing back'

A Writer's Moment: 'To hold nothing back':   “I love writing. I've pursued it with a passion.”  – Betsy Byars   Born in Charlotte, NC in August of 1928, Byars' passion for...

'To hold nothing back'

 

“I love writing. I've pursued it with a passion.” – Betsy Byars

 

Born in Charlotte, NC in August of 1928, Byars' passion for writing began in high school and led to a degree in English from Queens College in New York.  Her first professional writing was for magazines before she authored the book Clementine in 1962.

 

Listed among the 100 best children’s authors of all time and one of the 10 best writers for children during her lifetime, she wrote more than 50 books and collaborated with two of her daughters on half-a-dozen more.  Byars, who died in 2020, also wrote a bestselling memoir.

 

Her novel Summer of the Swans won a Newbery Medal, and her novel The Night Swimmers earned a National Book Award.  And, to show she also could handle mystery writing, she won the Edgar Prize for the novel Wanted …Mud Blossom.   She created some of the most popular and beloved characters in children’s literature – like Kate Morrison in The Computer Nut and Benjie “Mouse” Fawley in The 18^th Emergency – but presented each of them only once.

 

“Early in my career,” Byars said, “I decided not to do sequels. I know that children enjoy them, but I valued the feeling that this was the only time I would write about these characters. I felt it gave me an added incentive to do my best by them, to tell readers everything I knew, to hold nothing back.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Find the good, and praise it'

A Writer's Moment: 'Find the good, and praise it':   “In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.”  –  Alex Haley   Born in Ithaca, NY on Aug. 11, 1921 Hal...

'Find the good, and praise it'

 

“In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.” –  Alex Haley

 

Born in Ithaca, NY on Aug. 11, 1921 Haley authored 4 award-winning books, anchored by Roots: The Saga of an American Family, continuously in print since its appearance in 1976.  A television series based on the book also set a record-breaking audience of over 130 million viewers.

 

A Coast Guard veteran from both World War II and the Korean War, Haley was self-taught as a writer in order to “report” on things to folks back home, writing both for individuals and for his community newspapers.  After his Coast Guard career, he expanded his reportorial efforts, which eventually led him to his biographical writing.  Haley's first book, which catapulted him onto the national scene, was The Autobiography of Malcolm X.   

 

In addition to his books, he authored 3 story collections and several screenplays before his death from a heart attack in 1992.    Roots raised public awareness of African American history and also inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history for all races.   Haley said that was one of his proudest accomplishments.  

”In every conceivable manner," he said, "the family is link to our past; bridge to our future.”   

A Writer's Moment: First 'doing the living'

A Writer's Moment: First 'doing the living':   “Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.”  – Philip Larkin Born in Coventry on Aug. 9, 1922, Larkin was one of post...

First 'doing the living'

 

“Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.” – Philip Larkin

Born in Coventry on Aug. 9, 1922, Larkin was one of post-war England’s most famous poets and was commonly referred to as “England’s other Poet Laureate” until his death in 1985.  His best-known and most popular collections – The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows – present “a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry . . . can take comfort and delight.”  For Saturday’s poem, here is Larkin’s,

        Summer is fading
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

A Writer's Moment: 'Seeing what you meant'

A Writer's Moment: 'Seeing what you meant':   “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”  – E.M. Forster   Born in London in 1879, Forster, best known for his novels A Ro...