A Writer's Moment: A legacy for the ages

A Writer's Moment: A legacy for the ages:   “I started writing poetry when I was about 13.” – Al Purdy   Canadian poet Purdy's writing career spanned 56 ...

A legacy for the ages

 

“I started writing poetry when I was about 13.” – Al Purdy

 

Canadian poet Purdy's writing career spanned 56 years. His works included a remarkable 39 books of poetry, 1 novel, 2 volumes of memoirs and 4 books of correspondence. He has been called Canada's "unofficial poet laureate” and "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in the life of a culture."   Born on Dec. 30, 1918, he lived to be 81 and wrote almost daily.  His death bed, in fact, was cluttered with pieces he was composing. 

 

For Saturday’s Poem, here is Purdy’s.

Listening to Myself  

    I see myself staggering through deep snow
lugging blocks of wood yesterday
an old man
almost falling from bodily weakness
— look down on myself from above
then front and both sides
white hair — wrinkled face and hands
it's really not very surprising
that love spoken by my voice
should be when I am listening
ridiculous
yet there it is
a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow

— the loss of love
that comes to mean more
than the love itself
and how explain that?
— a still pool in the forest
that has ceased to reflect anything
except the past
— remains a sort of half-love
that is akin to kindness
and I am angry remembering
remembering the song of flesh
to flesh and bone to bone
the loss is better

 

A Writer's Moment: 'If life's a song, what are your lyrics?'

A Writer's Moment: 'If life's a song, what are your lyrics?':   “Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where pr...

'If life's a song, what are your lyrics?'

 

“Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.” – Douglas Coupland

Coupland, born on this date in 1960, is widely credited with creating the term "Generation X" after using the term in his international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.    He's the author of numerous novels, short story collections, non-fiction books, and dramatic works and screenplays for film and television.   Oh, and, in his “spare time” he is a columnist for Financial Times.

One of the great satirists of modern day consumerism,           

 Coupland advises, “Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.”

As for sharing his thoughts with up and coming writers, he says simply to think about how you’re leading your life and what people will remember about you.  Put it into the context of a song.   

 

“Think that if your life had lyrics, would they be any good?”

A Writer's Moment: Opportunity and adventure

A Writer's Moment: Opportunity and adventure:   Driving along a snow-packed road – with crosswind buffeting the car with an urgency that indicates it doesn’t like the idea that you’re f...

Opportunity and adventure

 

Driving along a snow-packed road – with crosswind buffeting the car with an urgency that indicates it doesn’t like the idea that you’re filling up part of the space through which it hopes to pass – has a way of “heightening” the driver's senses.

I always start such trips with the feeling that this time the snow, ice and wind are not going to be an issue; that I’ve learned from my past and know what I have to do.  But Mother Nature always has a new twist or a few new tricks to make sure that the experience is not a repeat, but instead a new “opportunity."

So even if you’ve made the trip many times before, it always ends up as a whole new adventure.

Writing often is that way, too, especially when you’re using time-tested techniques or concepts.  You start out thinking you’ve been along this path, and this will be an easy opportunity to fill up space en route to your new story’s destination.  But, lo and behold, a new pathway emerges and you find yourself drawn in that direction – “just to have a peek.” 

And the journey, while sometimes a bit harrowing, is always worthy of the effort.  Once you arrive, you’re glad you made the trip.   Happy writing.

 

Reaching the destination sometimes 

involves an “interesting” journey

A Writer's Moment: 'The opportunity to consider things'

A Writer's Moment: 'The opportunity to consider things':   “The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.” —Chris Abani   Abani, who is...

'The opportunity to consider things'

 

“The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.”—Chris Abani 

Abani, who is celebrating his 57^th birthday today, is an award-winning Nigerian and U.S. author of many novels, novellas, short stories, plays, and books of poetry.  He started writing young and was so good at skewering those in power that he was imprisoned 3 times by the Nigerian government.  The first time came after his first novel– Masters of the Board – came out at age 16.   

 

His second novel, Sirocco, published shortly after his release, got him right back in jail where he continued writing and produced a number of anti-government plays.  Their production got him sentenced to death, but he escaped to England where he continued his education and writing after being awarded a PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, the literary world’s response to those injustices. 

He has won three dozen major awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a California Book Award, given while he served as a Professor of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside.  

He is an avid supporter of the World Wide Web as writing and publishing resource, and selections of his poetry have often appeared in the online journal Blackbird.  “Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction,” he said.  “Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?”

A Writer's Moment: Only limited by imagination

A Writer's Moment: Only limited by imagination:   “Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.” – Rod Serling   Serling was born in Syracuse, NY, ...

Only limited by imagination

 

“Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.” – Rod Serling

 

Serling was born in Syracuse, NY, on Christmas Day 1924 and had a vast and multi-talented imagination, producing some of the most creative and lasting pieces ever written.

  

Known best for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science-fiction anthology TV series The Twilight Zone, Serling also was active in politics, both on and off the screen, and helped form television industry standards. He was known as “the angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues including censorship, racism, and war.

 

A World War II Army veteran who was badly wounded, Serling had strong opinions about war and the use of military force and became one of the most outspoken anti-war activists up until his sudden death in 1975 at age 50.    His lead-in piece to what would become The Twilight Zone actually dealt with America’s entrance into World War II.   His story concerned a man who has vivid nightmares of the attack on Pearl Harbor and goes to a psychiatrist.  The “twist ending” to the story (a device for which Serling became famous) reveals that the "patient" actually had died at Pearl Harbor, and the psychiatrist is the one having the vivid dreams.

 

Serling had ambitions to be an actor but “had some things to get off my chest,” which led to his writing career and, ultimately a place in America’s cultural history.  He is indelibly woven into modern popular culture because of The Twilight Zone. Even youth of today can hum its haunting theme song, and the title itself is a synonym for all things unexplainable.  

 

"I think," he once said, "every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."

 

A Writer's Moment: 'A kind of welcome mat'

A Writer's Moment: 'A kind of welcome mat':   “Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even ...

'A kind of welcome mat'

 

“Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.” – Billy Collins

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Collins is a distinguished professor in New York where he has been affiliated with the faculties of several colleges and universities and currently is at Stony Brook Southampton.   Among his many honors and awards are The Norman Mailer Prize for Poetry, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and The Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry.   For Saturday’s Poem, here is Collins',

 

         Christmas Sparrow

 

The first thing I heard this morning
was a soft, insistent rustle,
the rapid flapping of wings
against glass as it turned out,

a small bird rioting
in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of transparency into the spacious light.

A noise in the throat of the cat
hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap in a basement door,
and later released from the soft clench of teeth.

Up on a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a small towel and carried it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, it burst
from my uncupped hands into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
and disappearing over a tall row of hemlocks.

Still, for the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms whenever I thought
about the hours the bird must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,

its eyes open, like mine as I lie here tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

A Writer's Moment: 'Touch the heart of the world'

A Writer's Moment: 'Touch the heart of the world':   “Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.” – Charles de ...

'Touch the heart of the world'

 

“Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.” – Charles de Lint
 

Multi-talented and multi-faceted, de Lint has told many, many stories in various genres, although fantasy is highest on his list.  To date he has published a remarkable 73 books (and counting) plus numerous novellas, short stories, works of poetry, and song lyrics.  Among his many works are the best-selling The Newford series (Dreams Underfoot, Widdershins, The Blue Girl, The Onion Girl, Moonlight and Vines, and Someplace to be Flying), and stand-alone novels like Moonheart, The Mystery of Grace, and A Circle of Cats. 

  

Also a noted essayist, critic and folklorist he frequently writes book reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and has served as a judge for the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award.  

Born on this date in 1951, the talented Canadian is a frequent lecturer and teacher at creative writing workshops in both Canada and the U.S., and together with his wife MaryAnn Harris has produced several musical albums as both a lyricist and a musician (he plays several different instruments).  And, he maintains a wonderful exuberance about his writing.

“Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning,” de Lint said.

“I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.”              

A Writer's Moment: Kill that 'adjective' habit

A Writer's Moment: Kill that 'adjective' habit:   "An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” ...

Kill that 'adjective' habit

 

"An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” - Mark Twain

While he was not averse to having nice things said about his writing, Twain (born in 1835) abhorred flowery adjectives in those descriptions just as he disdained using them in his own writing.  “Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in,” he advised. “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart."

While he was pleased when he coined a word or phrase that others liked to use (mentioning that it came from him, of course), he also noted that the use of “a pregnant pause” also could be a great writing style.  “The right word may be effective,” he wrote, “but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”

 

Twain said that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.  For Twain, obviously, the reason was to write and he had a lot to say about how to use words, not the least being that you should write using plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences.