A Writer's Moment: A Maker Of Poems

A Writer's Moment: A Maker Of Poems: “Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.” – Théophile Gautier Born th...

A Maker Of Poems

“Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.” – Théophile Gautier

Born this day in 1811, Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French dramatist, novelist, journalist and one of the premier art critics of the 19^th Century.    And, he wrote poetry.  “I like to think that art and poetry are intertwined,” he said.  “The word ‘poet’ literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist.”  Like his art criticism, his poetic writing took new twists, giving the public yet another way to look at things.       For Saturday’s Poem, here are words from Gautier’s,  

 

    Unknown Shores

I may not ask again:
where would you like to go?

Have you a star; she says,
O any faithful sun
Where love does not eclipse?
The countdown slurs and slips.
-Ah child, if that star shines,
is in chartless skies,

I do not know of such!
But come, where will you go?

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A Writer's Moment: Writing That Nourishes The Soul

A Writer's Moment: Writing That Nourishes The Soul: “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading th...

Writing That Nourishes The Soul

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”  -- Kurt Vonnegut 

In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published 14 novels, 3 short story collections, 5 plays, and 5 works of non-fiction. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

Born in 1922, Vonnegut always claimed that it was by reading other great writers that he himself developed the writing style and ideas that led to his success.  Among the most influential on his writing, he said, were George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau and H.G. Wells.      

A journalist first, Vonnegut often credited journalistic writing as another key to his style – one that made his writing both straightforward and understandable by a wide audience.

“One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings,” he said.  “People are humanists … most of them, anyway.”

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A Writer's Moment: Fighting Those 'Writing Demons'

A Writer's Moment: Fighting Those 'Writing Demons': “When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your he...

Fighting Those 'Writing Demons'

“When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you'll never get anything done. There's enough inner strife.” – Melissa Rosenberg

Born in California on this date in 1962, Rosenberg has worked in both film and television where she’s won a Peabody Award, and been nominated for two Emmy Awards and two Writers Guild of America Awards.   She also is a major supporter of female screenwriters through the WGA Diversity Committee and co-founded the League of Hollywood Women Writers.

“I also am involved with 'Write Girl,' which is such a great organization, because they go into inner city schools and work with underprivileged girls to pair them up with other writers,” she said.  “And it gets them learning to express themselves and become familiar with their own voice. They have a 100% success ratio getting those girls into college.”        Among her best-known works are the Dexter, Twilight, and Jessica Jones’ series, all major award-winners or nominees for this talented writer.  She also served as executive producer for Dexter and not only produced but also created and wrote for Jessica Jones, currently in its fifth season.

“If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them,” she said.   “I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.”

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A Writer's Moment: Scratching That Writing Itch

A Writer's Moment: Scratching That Writing Itch: “You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do?   You might as well use it?” – L.M. Montgo...

Scratching That Writing Itch

“You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do?  You might as well use it?” – L.M. Montgomery

I had the good fortune of sharing the pages of a book with the marvelous Lucy Maud Montgomery, who rocketed to worldwide acclaim with her very first book, Anne of Green Gables, and really never looked back.  Over a 45-year writing career, she ended up publishing 20 novels, many featuring her lead character Anne Shirley.  But she also wrote a remarkable 530 short stories.  One of them was chosen for the anthology A Farm Country Christmas, and to my delight, so was one of mine. 

Anne Shirley made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following.   Mark Twain called Anne, “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice.”  (I believe he was referring to that one who made that visit to Wonderland).

                                            By the time of her death in 1942 (at age 68) Montgomery also had written some 500 poems and 30 essays and been honored as the first Canadian female named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England.  In 1935 she was invested into the Order of the British Empire, one of the highest British honors.  Anne of Green Gables has now sold more than 50 million copies and been published in 20 languages worldwide.
 

“We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed,” Montgomery once noted.   “Life would be a sorry business without them. With them it's grand and great.”  

A Writer's Moment: Writing For Your 'Self' Improvement

A Writer's Moment: Writing For Your 'Self' Improvement: “Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselv...

Writing For Your 'Self' Improvement

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.” – Alduous Huxley

Since my latest book And The Wind Whispered is set in 1894 I’ve become more interested in things that happened during that year.  One thing I hadn’t expected to discover was that it was the birth year of renowned writer and philosopher Huxley, who was born in Surrey, England in July of that year.

Few people had as great an impact on the world’s thinking, particularly through his novel Brave New World, ranked by those who do such rankings as somewhere between the Number 1 and Number 5 best fictional work in the English language written in the 20^th Century.

Widely acknowledged as one of the world’s pre-eminent intellectuals, Huxley was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 7 different times.      And he kept striving, through his many forms of writing, to find “the right words” to share his hopes and fears for the world and to encourage each individual to do his or her best to make it a better place.

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving,” he said,  “and that's your own self.”

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A Writer's Moment: What We Know

A Writer's Moment: What We Know: “Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than yo...

What We Know

“Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?” – Frank McCourt

Born in August, 1930, McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes.  McCourt’s life was bookended in New York City where he was born, died and spent many years as a teacher.  He also won accolades for his book Teacher Man, which detailed his teaching experiences and the challenges of being a teacher. 

                               McCourt also wrote the book for the musical The Irish… and How They Got That Way, which featured an eclectic mix of Irish music and poetry.   Here for Saturday’s Poem are an untitled poem by McCourt, and a short poem McCourt often read on stage and in his classroom written by Oscar Wilde.

You might be poor                                        You don’t love someone for

Your shoes might be broken,                       Their looks or their clothes,

But your mind is                                           Or for their fancy car,

A palace.                                                        But because they sing a song

                                                                        Only you can hear.  – Oscar Wilde

It’s lovely to know

The world can’t interfere

With the inside

Of your head.  – Frank McCourt

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A Writer's Moment: The Powerful Combo of Images & Words

A Writer's Moment: The Powerful Combo of Images & Words: The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about ...

The Powerful Combo of Images & Words

The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.” – Galen Rowell

A wilderness photographer, climber and writer, Rowell was born in California on this date in 1940 and died in 2002 after devoting his final 30 years to photographing and writing about the world’s wild places.   In the process, he won the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography and established his own lasting legacy.

He was held in equal high regard for his writing on photography and on humanitarian and environmental issues and mountaineering.  His remarkable 18 books included In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods about the history of mountaineering on the Himalayan mountain K2, and Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape, one of the best selling “how-to” photo books of all time. 

                                                 In addition to his many photo shoots and articles for such prestigious journals as Life, National Geographic, and Outdoor Photographer, he also produced myriad stand-alone shots. “Luckily,” he once said, “people tell me how they have had a particular landscape photograph of mine in their office or bedroom for 15 years and it always speaks to them strongly whenever they see it.”

When asked his secret to photographic success, he said it was recognizing how film sees the world differently than the human eye and adjusting his shooting techniques to fit.  “Sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed. It’s remarkable.”

 

(To see examples of Rowell's work, visit 'Images of Galen Rowell')

A Writer's Moment: Writing To Foment Change

A Writer's Moment: Writing To Foment Change: “Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, fe...

Writing To Foment Change

“Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.” – Mary Gaitskill

Born in 1954, Gaitskill is noted for her wide range of writings – including essays, short stories and novels.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories (twice), and The O. Henry Prize Stories.  Her most recent book is a collection of essays, Somebody With A Little Hammer. 

                            A native of Kentucky, she said she chose to become a writer at age 18 because she was "indignant about things—it was the typical teenage sense of 'things are wrong in the world and I must say something.’”  Her fiction typically is about female characters dealing with their own inner conflicts.  Often her characters are controversial, but her writing style has won her many awards.

She said she’s always strived to write like the life that she’s lived and “My ambition was to live like music.”

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A Writer's Moment: Creating Dreams Through Writing

A Writer's Moment: Creating Dreams Through Writing: “A good book ought to bring out lots of different responses from those that read it - none of them pre-planned, and al...

Creating Dreams Through Writing

“A good book ought to bring out lots of different responses from those that read it - none of them pre-planned, and all of them very personal. Whatever they take away from the reading of the book is valuable.“ – Sharon Draper

Born on this date in 1948, Draper is not only an award-winning writer but also the 1997 National Teacher of the Year, a five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for books about the African-American experience, and winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award from American Library Association for her body of work that has made a "significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.”

Best known for the Hazelwood and Jericho series and for her historical novel Copper Sun, she also is an accomplished public speaker who addresses educational and literary groups of all ages, both nationally and internationally, discussing literature, reading and education.

A native of Cleveland, OH, she studied at Pepperdine University in California and now makes her home in Cincinnati, where she maintains her membership in the National Council of Teachers of English and is the mother of 12 children. 

                         “I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching,” she said.  “I shall always be a dreamer.”

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A Writer's Moment: Writing That's 'Out of This World'

A Writer's Moment: Writing That's 'Out of This World': “It's kind of a misnomer about science fiction that science fiction is about anything other than people. It's ...

Writing That's 'Out of This World'

“It's kind of a misnomer about science fiction that science fiction is about anything other than people. It's about people doing stuff, sometimes doing extraordinary stuff.” – Greg Bear

Sci-Fi writer and illustrator Bear was born in San Diego on this date in 1951, and is one of the 5 co-founders of the San Diego Comic-Con phenomenon.  Among the best known of his 44 books are the Forge of God and The Way series, and his works on “accelerated evolution” – Blood Music, Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children. His artistic work has appeared on a wide range of Science Fiction and Science magazines, books and journals.

Bear is often classified as a “hard” science fiction author due to the level of scientific detail in his work.      He often addresses major questions in contemporary science and culture and proposes solutions. The Forge of God offers an explanation for the Fermi paradox, supposing that the galaxy is filled with potentially predatory intelligences and that young civilizations that survive are those that don't attract their attention—by staying quiet.

Blood Music, first published as a short story, has been credited as the first use of nanotechnology.  The short story version is the first in science fiction to describe microscopic medical machines and to treat DNA as a computational system capable of being reprogrammed.  

The winner of numerous awards and prizes, Bear said he welcomes the conversations his ideas generate.   “Science fiction works best when it stimulates debate.”

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A Writer's Moment: Where Your Writing Resides

A Writer's Moment: Where Your Writing Resides: “I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.” –...

Where Your Writing Resides

“I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.” – Nicole Krauss

Born on Aug. 18, 1974, Krauss is perhaps best known for her novels Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love, and Forest Dark, although her short fiction has also been widely published in everything from The New Yorker to Best American Short Stories. She is currently working on a book of short stories with the working title, How To Be A Man.

A writer since childhood, she said she always wrote little things when she was younger.  “My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations. “      A native of New York City, Krauss “officially” started writing – mostly poetry – in her teens and had her first novel published in 2001.  Her award-winning novels, two of which have been adapted into films, have now been translated into 35 languages.

“What interests me (most) in writing a novel,” she said, “is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.”

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A Writer's Moment: Writing In Rare Air

A Writer's Moment: Writing In Rare Air: “How to Write a Poem?   Catch the air around the butterfly.” – Katerina Stoykova-Klemer Stoykova-Klemer’s poems...

Writing In Rare Air

“How to Write a Poem?  Catch the air around the butterfly.”

– Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Stoykova-Klemer’s poems have appeared in publications throughout the U.S. and Europe, including The Louisville Review, Margie, and Adirondack Review.   The leader of a poetry group in Lexington, KY, she also hosts “Accents,” a radio show for literature, art and culture and operates the independent Accents Publishing “for brilliant voices.”      A native of Bulgaria, she holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Stoykova-Klemer’s,

The Most

Welcome,
Last Resort.

We meet at last,
Plan Z.

I’ve heard a lot about you,
Worst Case Scenario.

I look forward to
working with you,
When-all-else-fails.

It’s going to be you and I now.
Do you feel lucky to end up with me?
Hey, it’s okay.

After the initial shock
wears off,
you too,
will try to make
the most of me.

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A Writer's Moment: A Writer's Best Inspiration

A Writer's Moment: A Writer's Best Inspiration: “Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.” – Edna Ferber B...

A Writer's Best Inspiration

“Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.” – Edna Ferber

Born this day in 1885, Edna Ferber was a novelist, short story writer and playwright, whose novels were wildly popular and won her a remarkable four Pulitzer Prizes – for So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron and Giant, the latter three also made into award-winning movies.  Show Boat also was adapted for the stage as a Broadway musical and Cimarron won the Academy Award for Best Picture. 

  

Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons, demonstrating her belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty people have the best character.

“I like to look at all sides of people and be open to any idea,” she said.  “A closed mind is a dying mind.”