A Writer's Moment: 'Never an uninteresting life'

A Writer's Moment: 'Never an uninteresting life':   “There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, ...

'Never an uninteresting life'

 

“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.   (As writers) We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we put the right focus on them.” – Mark Twain

 

Mark Twain

 When I was a kid I found myself mesmerized by Mark Twain’s writing.  I clearly could become Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn or any of the other characters he brought to life.  I wished not only to be them but to be in the places in which they were living, and when I opened one of his books I was immediately transported from my South Dakota farm to the streets of Hannibal, Missouri or onto the Mississippi River.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on this date in 1835, shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet, he famously predicted he would "go out with it" too.   He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. 

 

Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner called him the "Father of American Literature," and he’s been lauded as one of America's greatest humorists.  Despite some controversy about things he said or wrote, there’s little doubt that he brought words to life through his vivid gift of writing.  In a letter to another author, he once wrote:

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself.

 

"Anybody can have ideas - the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

A Writer's Moment: 'The virtues of the writer'

A Writer's Moment: 'The virtues of the writer':   “Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.” ...

'The virtues of the writer'

 

“Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.” – Dawn Powell

A prolific satirical novelist and short story writer, Powell also was a popular playwright who frequently set her stories in Midwestern towns and/or created plots that involved the transplantation of Midwesterners to New York City.

Best known for her novels She Walks in Beauty and A Time to be Born, Powell was born on this date in 1896 in Mt. Gilead.  She moved to New York City in 1918 to begin her writing career, first working as a freelance essayist and short story writer.  

Already creative as a child, she learned to read at age 4 and started writing diaries and journals at age 6.  It was those journals that fostered her further creativity after an abusive stepmother destroyed all of her writings out of spite.  The then 13-year-old Powell ran away from home, and was taken in by a sympathetic aunt who encouraged her to resume writing.  Powell later fictionalized that tale in her novel My Home Is Far Away.

 

Over her nearly 50-year writing career, she produced           

 a dozen novels, 10 plays, hundreds of short stories, and an extended diary starting in 1931 until her death from cancer in 1965.   

 

“A writer’s business is minding other people’s business,” she once said.  “All the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's how we use the talents we're given'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's how we use the talents we're given':   “A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I...

'It's how we use the talents we're given'

 

“A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.” – Madeleine L'Engle

Born on this date in 1918, L’Engle is best known for her young-adult fiction, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door and the National Book Award-winning A Swiftly Tilting Planet.   Her works reflect both her faith and her interest in science.

L'Engle wrote her first story at age 5 and began keeping a journal at age 8, but despite writing frequently, she had little financial success and decided to give up writing as a career at age 40.  But her family encouraged her to keep going and she penned A Wrinkle in Time while on a family camping excursion.  The book was rejected 30 times before publisher John Farrar decided to give it a chance, and the rest, as old the saying goes . . . 

Once she made her breakthrough, L’Engle wrote     

dozens of successful books for children and adults and earned multiple writing awards.  In 1998, she received the annual Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association recognizing her body of work "for its significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.”

“We can't take any credit for our talents,” L’Engle, who died in 2007, said.  “It's how we use them that counts.”

A Writer's Moment: 'December Moon' on the horizon

A Writer's Moment: 'December Moon' on the horizon:   I heard on the radio that December’s “Cold Moon” was coming, signaling winter’s arrival.   That reminded me of May Sarton’s poem “Decembe...

'December Moon' on the horizon

 

I heard on the radio that December’s “Cold Moon” was coming, signaling winter’s arrival.  That reminded me of May Sarton’s poem “December Moon.”

So, on this Black Friday weekend as we leave Thanksgiving Day and autumn behind and spiral toward our first “winter month,” here for Saturday’s Poem is the prolific Sarton’s,

December Moon

Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Criss-crossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.

A Writer's Moment: 'Explore ideas . . . and imagination'

A Writer's Moment: 'Explore ideas . . . and imagination':   “We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us dow...

'Explore ideas . . . and imagination'

 

“We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.” –  Alexis Wright

Born on this date in 1950, Wright is an Indigenous Australian writer and champion for native Australian people. 

An award nominee for a number of her writings, but particularly Carpentaria, she has published both fiction and nonfiction and is a noted essayist and novelist.  Her major nonfiction books are Take Power, an anthology on the history of the land rights movement, and Grog War on the introduction of alcohol restrictions in her native Tennant Creek area. 

 

Carpentaria, which tells the interconnected stories of several inhabitants of the fictional town of Desperance on Austrailia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, was rejected by every major publisher in Australia before independent publisher Giramondo published it in 2006. Giramondo chose wisely.  The book won the Miles Franklin Award (Austrailia’s premiere writing prize), the Fiction Book award in the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards competition, the ALS Gold Medal, and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.  It also has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

In addition to her writing, Wright is a Distinguished

 Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney.                          

 

 “My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination,” Wright said.  “Hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in dreams.”

A Writer's Moment: Imagine that . . . then write it!

A Writer's Moment: Imagine that . . . then write it!:   “Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked l...

Imagine that . . . then write it!

 

“Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.” – Guy Davenport 

 

Writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, Davenport was both a Rhodes Scholar and a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, one of the few people in the world to achieve both major honors.  Born in the Appalachian region of South Carolina on this date in 1927, he was a self-taught reader and writer who graduated from high school by age 16, then went on to earn degrees at both Duke and Harvard.

Over his lifetime he had more than 400 nationally published essays and reviews, wrote 17 books of fiction and a dozen books of poetry, and contributed to several dozen other books or collections.  And, he did all that while teaching full time at a number of prestigious colleges and universities and drawing or painting nearly every day of his life from age 11 on.  A number of his art works are on display in galleries across the country.

Indefatigable was often a word used to describe him, but he said it was “just something I felt I had to do to keep my life in balance.”  He wrote right up until his death in 2005.  He said that of all his writings, he most enjoyed fictionalizing historical events and figures – a sort-of “What If?” scenario that make his works both fast-paced and intriguing.

                                                                                                              

“As long as you have ideas, you can keep going,” he said.  “That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.”

A Writer's Moment: 'The property of all'

A Writer's Moment: 'The property of all':   “The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to o...

'The property of all'

 

“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.” – Voltaire

 

One of history’s great thinkers and writers, François-Marie Arouet, known simply as Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state.   Born on this date in 1694, he wrote down or espoused many of the ideas that influenced our own nation’s founding fathers (He was a longtime close friend of Benjamin Franklin, for example).

 

A versatile writer, Voltaire produced over 2,000 books and pamphlets, and wrote plays, poems, essays, and historical and scientific works. He also wrote more than 20,000 letters and was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in with the leadership of his time.  He is often credited with the quote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  Others say that what he really wrote, or said, was "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write it." 

                                  

Either way that thought serves as a foundation for America’s 1^st Amendment rights.

Fluent in five languages, including English, he also was a voracious reader and often said that while he was flattered by people thinking highly of his works, it was the thoughts and ideas of others that were the base for his own writings.    

 

“Originality,” he said,  “is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers have always borrowed one from another.”

A Writer's Moment: 'A brand on the imagination'

A Writer's Moment: 'A brand on the imagination':   “The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize...

'A brand on the imagination'

 

“The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.” – Nadine Gordimer

Nobel Prize winning writer Gordimer was born on this date in 1923 and became the first South African writer to win the world’s top writing award in 1991.  Recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity” she was a political and humanitarian force in South Africa for 60 years.

Active in the anti-apartheid movement, many of Gordimer's writings such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned.  She joined Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the days when that organization also was banned and was among the leading advocates for his release from prison.   She helped edit his famous trial speech “I Am Prepared To Die” and remained his close friend until his death.  She died just a few months later in 2014.

Gordimer’s first novel was published in 1953 and by the early 1960s she had gained both international acclaim and the ire of the government. 

 On several occasions she left to do visiting professorships 

in both Great Britain and the U.S. and it was while in the 

U.S. that she also became active in HIV/AIDS causes, something she further championed in her home country in her later years.  

While Mandela hailed her willingness to stand up for what was right and just, she said the censorship she endured was life-scarring.  “Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it,” she said.  “It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.”