A Writer's Moment: 'It's that funny thing about memory'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's that funny thing about memory':   “Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.”  – Tobias Wolff Born in Birming...

'It's that funny thing about memory'

 

“Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.” – Tobias Wolff

Born in Birmingham, AL in June of 1945, Wolff is a short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing especially known for This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army.  His short story collection The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and he's been honored for his lifetime body of work with a National Medal of the Arts award.

 

A Vietnam veteran (Special Forces), he completed several tours of duty there before heading back to school to study creative writing and ultimately beginning his award-winning career.  Wolff said he had wanted to be a writer since age 14 but work and then the military always got in the way.  He has used many of his "life" experiences in his writing and is especially noted for using autobiographical elements in his short stories.   

 

 After earning several degrees, Wolff started teaching creative writing in the late 1980s, first at Syracuse and then at Stanford.  Dozens of successful writers trace their beginnings to classes and mentoring provided by Wolff, who has counseled and taught them in all genres.  That being said, it is short story writing that remains his favorite.

 

“Everything," he said, "has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Programmed to be Curious'

A Writer's Moment: 'Programmed to be Curious':   “Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, a...

'Programmed to be Curious'

 

“Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading.” – Claire Tomalin

 

Born in London on June 20, 1933 Tomalin is best known for her biographies of such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Jane Austin.    She did not set out to be a writer but jumped into the field to support her family of 5 children after her journalist husband Nicholas Tomalin was killed while working as a war correspondent.   Starting in 1973, she worked as an editor of the New Statesman and at The Sunday Times before trying her hand at biography. Her very first effort, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, not only was a popular bestseller but set her on a writing path that has produced 11 bestselling biographies and won her more than a dozen top prizes.

 

While she has scaled back her writing – her most recent book is 2021’s The Young H.G. Wells: Changing The World  -- she is still active as a vice president of both the Royal Literary Fund and The Royal Society of Literature. 

 

Among her books, she said she very much enjoyed writing Charles Dickens: A Life, considered one of the best ever on the author and his works . 

 

“Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19^th century,” she said.  “Dickens is (was) a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.”

A Writer's Moment: To hear 'we just need to listen'

A Writer's Moment: To hear 'we just need to listen':    "The earth is a place of beauty, and we must cherish it.  Nature speaks in whispers; we just need to listen." - Amy Clampitt Bo...

To hear 'we just need to listen'

 

 "The earth is a place of beauty, and we must cherish it.  Nature speaks in whispers; we just need to listen." - Amy Clampitt

Born in New Providence, Iowa on June 15, 1920 Clampitt was a librarian at the Audubon Society in New York City when her first poem was published in 1978.  She went on to write 3 nonfiction books and 9 poetry collections, led by.The Kingfisher in 1983.   So transformative was her poetry that she was awarded a MacArthur (Genius) Grant in 1992.  She used that “no strings attached” grant to work on her final collection, A Silence Opens, published in 1994 (the same year as her death from cancer).  For Saturday’s Poem here is Clampitt’s,

 

Beach Glass 

While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty—
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
or touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass—
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I'm afraid) Phillips'
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.

A Writer's Moment: 'How to have more of what you love'

A Writer's Moment: 'How to have more of what you love':   "Take something you love, tell people about it, bring together people who share your love, and help make it better. Ultimately, you...