A Writer's Moment: 'Great Ideas Surround The World's Ignorance'

A Writer's Moment: 'Great Ideas Surround The World's Ignorance':   “A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world&...

'Great Ideas Surround The World's Ignorance'

 “A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.” – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Phelps (born on this date in 1844) was the daughter of a Congregational minister and writer mother.  She began her own writing as a young girl and was noted for her “gift for telling stories.”   One source noted, "She spun amazing yarns for the children she played with.  And her schoolmates of the time and a little farther on talk with vivid interest of the stories she used to improvise for their entertainment.^”  At age 13, she had a story published in the national reader Youth's Companion, and from that point through her teens her youth stories appeared in various national publications.

As an adult, after studying at Abbot Academy, she continued her writing career and became one of America’s most popular writers.  In addition to her hundreds of short stories, she penned 57 volumes of fiction, poetry and essays.  In all of these works she challenged the prevailing view that woman's place and fulfillment resided in the home. Instead Phelps' work depicted women as succeeding in nontraditional careers as physicians, ministers, artists and, of course, writers. 

                                    

A modest person despite her great successes and influence, she noted, “It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: 'The Most Nourishing Forms of Meditation'

A Writer's Moment: 'The Most Nourishing Forms of Meditation': “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the mos...

'The Most Nourishing Forms of Meditation'

“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.

Vonnegut, born in 1922 (he died in 2007), 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: Viewpoint of the Farmer

A Writer's Moment: Viewpoint of the Farmer: “How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?” –   Edgar Lee Masters Masters wrote 12 plays, 6 novels, 6 biographi...

Viewpoint of the Farmer

“How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?” –  Edgar Lee Masters

Masters wrote 12 plays, 6 novels, 6 biographies and an amazing 21 books of poetry.  Among his works were Songs and Satires, Spleen,  Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems.

An attorney, he practiced with Clarence Darrow in Chicago and was well-known as a defender of the poor and downtrodden.  But writing was his passion and his best-known pieces grew out of his growing-up years in Lewiston, IL.  The culture around Lewiston, in addition to the town's cemetery at Oak Hill, and the nearby Spoon River were the inspirations for many of his works, most notably the Spoon River Anthology.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is one of the 260 poems in Spoon River from the viewpoint of the farmer,

 

                     Abel Melveny

I bought every kind of machine that's known --
Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers --
And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
Getting rusted, warped and battered,
For I had no sheds to store them in,
And no use for most of them.
And toward the last, when I thought it over,
There by my window, growing clearer
About myself, as my pulse slowed down,
And looked at one of the mills I bought --
Which I didn't have the slightest need of,
As things turned out, and I never ran --
A fine machine, once brightly varnished,
And eager to do its work,
Now with its paint washed off --
I saw myself as a good machine
That Life had never used.

A Writer's Moment: 'Makng Magic Without Tricks'

A Writer's Moment: 'Makng Magic Without Tricks': “The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks .” –   Humphrey Carpenter...

'Makng Magic Without Tricks'

“The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.” –  Humphrey Carpenter

Carpenter, who was born in 1946, is noted for his writing but was also very well-known in England for his long career on BBC Radio before his death in 2005.   An accomplished player of the piano, the saxophone, and the double-bass, he did the last instrument professionally in a dance band in the 1970s.   And, in 1983, he formed the 1930s style jazz band, Vile Bodies, which for many years enjoyed a residency at the Ritz Hotel in London.

Carpenter also founded the Mushy Pea Theatre Group, a children's drama group based in Oxford, which premiered his Mr Majeika: The Musical in 1991 and Babes, a musical about Hollywood child stars. 

Carpenter’s notable writing output was primarily biographies, including The Inklings: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends (winner of the 1978 Somerset Maugham Award); J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography; Ezra Pound (winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize); and Benjamin Britten.   He won numerous friends for himself and his writing with a humorous autobiography.                               

“Autobiography,” he told an interviewer, “is probably the most respectable form of lying.”

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A Writer's Moment: Communicating Ideas and Making Bridges

A Writer's Moment: Communicating Ideas and Making Bridges:   “I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.” – Jeanette Winterson Winterson, the award-winn...

Communicating Ideas and Making Bridges

 “I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.” – Jeanette Winterson

Winterson, the award-winning English writer who celebrates her 62^nd birthday this week, first became famous for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values.

Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity. Winterson is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing.  “My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected,” Winterson said.

After winning a basketful of top awards for Oranges, Winterson followed up by winning the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion, a novel set in Napoleonic Europe.  

A two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award,                      

 Winterson was made an officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) “For services to literature.”  One of the best of those “services” is her sensitivity to the lives of others and her terrific portrayal of what she’s witnessed and heard.

“Everything in writing begins with language,” she said, “and language begins with listening.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Creating 'Breathing Opportunities'

A Writer's Moment: Creating 'Breathing Opportunities': “Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room...

Creating 'Breathing Opportunities'

“Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin” – Virginia Euwer Wolff

Euwer Wolff, born in Oregon on this date in 1937, is the author of the award-winning series Make Lemonade, featuring a 14-year-old girl named LaVaughn who babysits for the children of a 17-year-old single mother.  True Believer, the second in the three-book series (they’re not really a trilogy), won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.   And, in 2011, she was the recipient of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature.

Wolff, who grew up on an apple and pear orchard while living in a log house with no electricity, said she uses her own teenage years as the foundation for her writing.  “The teenage years are the years to examine faith - the need to be independent and the need to be anchored,” she said. “It’s a time to ask, ‘Who made all this? And what do I have to do with it?’”

  

  “No one writes as slowly as I do, I'm convinced,” she said.  “It's so hard for me. I learn slowly; I make decisions at a snail's pace.”  And, as for her writing routine:

“I work early in the morning before my nasty critic gets up - he rises about noon.  By then, I've put in much of a day's work.”  

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Those Surprising Discoveries

A Writer's Moment: Those Surprising Discoveries: When traveling through the Midwest we’re always amazed at the beauty of the landscapes that we encounter in a region oft...

Those Surprising Discoveries

When traveling through the Midwest we’re always amazed at the beauty of the landscapes that we encounter in a region often overlooked by those who seek tranquility and beauty in their journeys or 

 inspiration for their writing.  

 

Whether it’s cornfields and soybean fields sweeping for miles across Iowa, the waving wheat fields and prairielands of Nebraska and the Dakotas, the lush farms of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio (like this one pictured that we saw in Ohio), or the lakes and forests of Minnesota, each leaves us with a renewed feeling of well-being. 

 

We’ve traveled these roads many times over the years and find ourselves always inspired to be even more creative with the things on which to write after having made the trek.  As an old saying goes, “A good traveler should have no fixed plans or specific intentions, especially about the final destination.”   Sometimes the oldest, most well worn trails can lead to the most surprising discoveries.  Happy trails.

 

 

 

 

 

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