A Writer's Moment: 'That's language and the rest is just filler'

A Writer's Moment: 'The rest is just filler':   “Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.” – Mark Strand    Born in April 1934 on Prince Edward I...

'That's language and the rest is just filler'

 

“Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.” – Mark Strand

  

Born in April 1934 on Prince Edward Island (where Anne of Green Gables was set), Strand moved to the U.S. in the 1950s and had a distinguished career as a poet, essayist and translator.  He died in 2014 at age 80.

 

In 1990 Strand was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and in 2004 he received the Wallace Stevens Award, given to "recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”   Known for his highly personal touch, he said "Pain is filtered in a poem so that, in the end, it becomes pleasure."  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Strand’s,

 

 

The Everyday Enchantment of Music

 

A rough sound was polished until it became
a smoother sound, which was polished until
it became music.
Then the music was polished until
it became the memory of a night in Venice
when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs,
which in turn was polished until it ceased
to be and in its place stood the empty home
of a heart in trouble.
Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back
and traffic was moving and off in the distance,
at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared,
and there was thunder, which, however menacing,
would become music, and the memory of what happened after
Venice would begin, and what happened
after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Becoming a spectator of life'

A Writer's Moment: 'Becoming a spectator of life':   “A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.” – Bernard Malamud Born on this date in 1914, Malamud ...

'Becoming a spectator of life'

 “A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.” – Bernard Malamud

Born on this date in 1914, Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer best known for his baseball novel, The Natural,  although it was his book The Fixer about anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia that won him both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.     

 

The Natural recounts the experiences of Roy Hobbs, an individual with great "natural" baseball talent, and spans decades of Hobb's successes and sufferings.   A movie made from his books stars Robert Redford and has the distinction of being the first film produced by TriStar Pictures.  It earned 4 Academy Awards.

A young man during the Depression, Malamud          scraped together the money to study writing at City College of New York and went on to earn a Master’s degree at Columbia University before teaching for many years at Oregon State.  Malamud was known for writing slowly and carefully, ultimately authoring 8 novels and 4 short story collections before his death in 1986.  

The son of Russian immigrants, Malamud was also known for his honest depiction of the immigrant experience, ranging from despair and difficulty to the hope of dreams fulfilled.  “When you write about life, reflect about life," he said, "you see in others who you yourself are.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Writing - You, in a Partnership'

A Writer's Moment: 'Writing - You, in a Partnership':   “Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it'...

'Writing - You, in a Partnership'

 

“Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in a partnership.” — Marilyn Nelson

Born in April of 1946, poet, translator and children's book writer Nelson is the author or translator of 12 books and three chapbooks.  Professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut, she is the founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a retreat center for new or emerging writers, especially poets.  

Born in Cleveland, the daughter of one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, she was brought up living on military bases, and began writing while in elementary school.  She said she gravitated to poetry and never looked back, although readers of her kids’ books say they’re glad she continued in that genre, too.   After earning a Ph.D. in English, she taught at Connecticut for many years and ultimately was honored with a 5-year stint as Connecticut's Poet Laureate.

Nelson’s poetry collections include the terrific The Homeplace, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was the first of three of her books to be finalists for the National Book Award.  In 2012, the Poetry Society of America awarded her the Frost Medal “for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry,” and in 2013, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 

                                 

  

Soft spoken and thoughtful in all she says and does, Nelson said a person’s voice is as important in presenting a poem as are the words on paper.  

 

“Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible,” she said. “They are wrong.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Writing - You, in a Partnership'

A Writer's Moment: 'Writing - You, in a Partnership':   “Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it'...

A Writer's Moment: Having that 'stick-to-itist' factor

A Writer's Moment: Having that 'stick-to-itist' factor:   “Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally go...

Having that 'stick-to-itist' factor

 

“Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.” –  Janet Evanovich

Born April 22,1943, Evanovich now has over two hundred million books in print worldwide and is translated into over 40 languages.  After those initial struggles, she gained fame and loyal readers with her contemporary mysteries featuring Stephanie Plum, a former lingerie buyer from Trenton, NJ, who becomes a bounty hunter to make ends meet.

Evanovich’s writing has combined a terrific and sometimes droll sense of humor (“If you want to cry, you're not going to like my books”) with a knack for setting up mystery, suspense and keeping her readers totally involved.  “I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles,” she explained. 

  “What we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.”

Evanovich is testament to perserverance.  During those first years of trying she had dozens of rejection letters for her first books before she finally connected with a romance novel for which she received $2,000.  “I thought it was an astounding sum,” she recalled.  Today, she is worth nearly $150 million.

A Writer's Moment: 'The breathings of your heart'

A Writer's Moment: 'The breathings of your heart':   “That best portion of a man's life are his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” – William Wordsworth Words...

'The breathings of your heart'

 

“That best portion of a man's life are his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” – William Wordsworth

Wordsworth, born in England’s Lake Country in April of 1770, was mostly self-taught as both a reader and writer, but his immense natural talent led to his becoming Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in April of 1850.   Along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped launch the Romantic Age in English        literature with a joint publication of their 1798 masterpiece, Lyrical Ballads.  

                         When asked by rising young Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie what advice a young poet might take from him, he replied,  “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”   Indeed. 

                        For Saturday’s Poem, here is Wordsworth’s,

 My Heart Leaps Up

                                                My heart leaps up when I behold
                                                A rainbow in the sky:
                                                So was it when my life began;
                                                So is it now I am a man;
                                                So be it when I shall grow old,
                                                Or let me die!
                                                The Child is father of the Man;
                                                And I could wish my days to be
                                                Bound each to each by natural piety.

A Writer's Moment: 'An environment of decency for all living creatures'

A Writer's Moment: 'An environment of decency for all living creatures':   "Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality a...

'An environment of decency for all living creatures'

 

"Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures." Gaylord Nelson

I was just out of college and only a month ahead of a stint in the Army when I was assigned to report on the first Earth Day in 1970.   My editor was skeptical that anything might happen, but it soon became clear that people, especially young people, were organizing dozens of projects and I was on the front line reporting about them.

In 1990, I persuaded Senator Nelson to be the Earth Day guest speaker at the small college campus where I was working as Director of Public Relations.  He spoke eloquently and passionately about why we must continue to carry it forward and expand upon it each and every year.

 

 

Gaylord Nelson

“Earth Day achieved what I had hoped for and then some,” he told the students.   “The purpose of Earth Day was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and, finally, force this issue permanently into the political arena.

“It was truly an astonishing grassroots explosion."

If ever there was a Writer’s Moment for me, it was the first Earth Day.  It has remained so ever since.

A Writer's Moment: 'First . . . Be Accessible'

A Writer's Moment: 'First . . . Be Accessible':   “ I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - ...

'First . . . Be Accessible'

 

“I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed.” – Sebastian Faulks

  

Born on this date in 1953, British novelist, journalist and broadcaster Faulks is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He also has published such contemporary novels as Paris Echo,  A Week in December and the James Bond continuation novel Devil May Care for which he won the British Book Awards' “Popular Fiction Award.”

Honored by the British Crown for his lifetime contributions to English Literature, he has had the rare accolade of being tabbed as both “popular and literary at the same time.” English theatre, film and television director Trevor Nunn called Faulks' novel, Human Traces "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century."      

Faulks advises writers to be "strong readers" first.   “I don't know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven't read a lot of books," he said.  "I just don't think you're equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly in your dealings with other people.”

A Writer's Moment: Enjoying creative writing's pace

A Writer's Moment: Enjoying creative writing's pace:   “The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment ri...

Enjoying creative writing's pace

 

“The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon.” – Margaret Haddix

Anyone who’s ever worked in journalism – particularly on “breaking news” – knows the reporter’s daily mantra:  “Write tight and write quick.”  Born on this day in 1964, Haddix studied at Miami of Ohio before starting her writing career as a reporter in Fort Wayne, IND, and Indianapolis before switching to the creative side in the mid-1990s.

Today she’s best known for her series’ Shadow Children and The Missing and her best-selling standalone books Running Out of Time and The Girl With 500 Middle Names.  She has authored more than 30 books and won the          International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award for her body of work. 

As most journalists know, creative writing is a luxury after dealing with the daily deadlines of the reporting world.  “Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.   I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.”

She said she prefers the ‘Creative’ world.    “It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story,” she said.  “I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.”

A Writer's Moment: Writing words that 'fit' for all

A Writer's Moment: Writing words that 'fit' for all:   “I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too sma...

Writing words that 'fit' for all

 

“I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!” – Nick Hornby

Hornby, born in England on this date in 1957, writes about ordinary people in ways that translate into best-sellers, like Fever Pitch, About a Boy and High Fidelity.    Fever Pitch, while written about a fan’s obsession (based on his own) with English soccer, was made into an even bigger hit as an American movie adaptation focusing on Jimmy Fallon’s character’s obsession with the Boston Red Sox.

 

Music also plays a big role in Hornby's writing, again based on his own experiences.  Hornby has had long and fruitful collaborations with the rock band Marah and even toured in the United States and Europe with the band, joining them on stage to read from his essays.   And, he's had great collaborations with singer/songwriter Ben Folds, known to many as chief judge on the hit TV show “The Sing Off.”   Songwriters like using the universality of the words he writes.

Dedicated to helping kids with special needs, Hornby has donated all of his royalties from some of his 100-plus books to helping kids with autism.   He co-founded Ministry of Stories, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children and young adults develop their writing skills, and to support teachers who inspire students to write, both literature and music lyrics.

 

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward,” Hornby commented about the songs he enjoys.   “You (can) feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.”

A Writer's Moment: 'I want to please you'

A Writer's Moment: 'I want to please you':   “Taking the time to polish a pun or fine-tune a practical joke is a way of saying, 'I'm thinking about you and ...

'I want to please you'

 

“Taking the time to polish a pun or fine-tune a practical joke is a way of saying, 'I'm thinking about you and I want to please you.” – Andrew Hudgins

Born into a military family in April 1951, Hudgins moved around the American South for much of his childhood, attending Huntingdon College and the University of Alabama and earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first book of poetry, Saints and Strangers, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and his third, The Never-Ending, was a finalist for the National Book Award.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Hudgins’,

 

   Day Job and Night Job

After my night job, I sat in class
and ate, every thirteen minutes,
an orange peanut-butter cracker.
Bright grease adorned my notes.

At noon I rushed to my day job
and pushed a broom enough
to keep the boss calm if not happy.
In a hiding place, walled off

by bolts of calico and serge,
I read my masters and copied
Donne, Marlowe, Dickinson, and Frost,
scrawling the words I envied,

so my hand could move as theirs had moved
and learn outside of logic
how the masters wrote. But why? Words
would never heal the sick,

feed the hungry, clothe the naked,
blah, blah, blah.
Why couldn't I be practical,
Dad asked, and study law—

or take a single business class?
I stewed on what and why
till driving into work one day,
a burger on my thigh

and a sweating Coke between my knees,
I yelled, 'Because I want to!'—
pained—thrilled!—as I looked down
from somewhere in the blue

and saw beneath my chastened gaze
another slack romantic
chasing his heart like an unleashed dog
chasing a pickup truck.

And then I spilled my Coke. In sugar
I sat and fought a smirk.
I could see my new life clear before me.
lt looked the same. Like work.

A Writer's Moment: 'Start your writing where it's most vivid'

A Writer's Moment: 'Start your writing where it's most vivid':   “I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagi...

'Start your writing where it's most vivid'

 

“I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.” – Beverly Cleary 

Cleary, born on April 12, 1916, created vivid, outstanding characters and had an outsized

 impact on generations of young people  

 who might not have had the impetus to pick up a book or listen to a story until they saw or heard something she had written.

“The world has changed, especially for kids, but kids' needs haven't changed,” Cleary reflected on the occasion of her 100th birthday (she lived to nearly 105).   “They still need to feel safe, be close to their families, like their teachers, and have friends to play with.”

“Quite often,” Cleary noted,  “somebody will say to me, ‘What year do your books take place?’ and the only answer I can give is, ‘In childhood’.”

A Writer's Moment: 'All serious daring starts from within'

A Writer's Moment: 'All serious daring starts from within':   “Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a w...

'All serious daring starts from within'

 

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.” –  Eudora Welty

Welty went on the trail of such writing and self-discovery in the early 1930s, diving into journalism and photojournalism to help care for her family after her father died from leukemia.  Ultimately, she became one of America’s premiere writers about the American Southern Experience.  Honored just before her death in 2001 with the Medal of Freedom (for her life’s work), she also won a Pulitzer for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter.

Born on this date in 1909, Welty's love of reading was reinforced by her mother who believed "any room in the house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to."   

             

A Works Progress Administration employee in the mid-‘30s, Welty documented daily life and the effect of WPA efforts in Mississippi through both her words and photos.  In 1971 she published one of the definitive photo books about the experience, One Time, One Place.   Many of her books and short stories are reflective of the hard times and individual hardships she  observed. 

Never afraid to speak out against injustice, Welty said “All serious daring starts from within.  To imagine yourself inside the life of another person... is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what I do, every day'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what I do, every day':   “Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to ...

'It's what I do, every day'

 

“Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I do, every day.” – Tama Janowitz

 

Born on this date in 1957, Janowitz is part of the celebrated “Brat Pack” group of authors – along with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney – from the 1980s.   A novelist, short story writer, and close friend of artist Andy Warhol, she first gained acclaim through her short story collection Slaves of New York, later adapted into a film starring Bernadette Peters.

 

Author of 7 novels, that short story collection, and 3 nonfiction books, including a celebrated memoir, she lived in both Manhattan and Brooklyn before settling near Ithaca, NY, where she continues to write and sometimes teach. 

 

Among her many awards are the graduate fellowship that led to an MFA degree from Columbia, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship in the Humanities at Princeton University, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.   While she’s been chastised for her seeming obsession with money – a focus of many of her works – she says it’s just the part of life she’s chosen for her writings.

 

Her book, Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction, not only touches on that but also her somewhat “wild child” early life that often put her into the gossip columns and (some say) helped her book sales. But Janowitz has no deep desire to relive those years. “I did not particularly like being semi-famous,” she said.  “I did not write books to be liked.”

 

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Stories evolve, so just write'

A Writer's Moment: 'Stories evolve, so just write':   “I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one woul...

'Stories evolve, so just write'

 

“I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual.” – David A. Adler

Born on this date in 1947, Adler is an American writer of more than 250 books for children and young adults, most notably the Cam Jansen mystery series, and the "Picture Book of . . ." series. 

Adler came up with a terrific kids’ protagonist in the form of fifth-grader Jennifer "Cam" Jansen, nicknamed Cam for her photographic memory.    At various points in a “Cam” story, she closes her eyes and says "click,” mimicking the noise of a camera while memorizing a scene in front of her.  She later recalls these scenes to aid in solving a mystery.   

Cam is based on an elementary school classmate of Adler's.   

A native New Yorker, Adler was teaching math there when his writing career evolved after a nephew had a question about a topic and couldn't find anything that had been published.  Adler decided to write something himself, and the rest, as the saying goes . . .

“In my office I have a sign that says, 'Don't think. Just write!' and that's how I work,” Adler says in offering writing advice.   “I try not to worry about each word, or even each sentence or paragraph. For me, stories evolve. Writing is a process. I rewrite each sentence, each manuscript, many times.”

A Writer's Moment: The best time to write a poem

A Writer's Moment: The best time to write a poem:   “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that ho...

The best time to write a poem

 

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.” — Barbara Kingsolver

 

Kingsolver’s poems are (one critic said) “songs of hope and longing as opposed to howls of protest and despair.”   

 

As for why she sometimes writes poetry, she said, “In my opinion when you find yourself laughing and crying both at once, that is the time to write a poem. Probably, it's the only honest living there is.”  For Saturday’s Poem here is Kingsolver’s,

 

Apotheosis

There are days when I am envious of my hens:
when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure
as a single daily egg.

If I could only stand in the sun,
scratch the gravel and blink and wait
for the elements within me to assemble,
asking only grain I would
surrender myself to the miracle
of everyday incarnation: a day of my soul
captured in yolk and shell.

And I would have no need
for the visions that come to others
on bat’s wings, to carry them
face to face with nothingness.
The howl of the coyote in the night
would not raise my feathers, for I,
drowsy on my roost, would dream
of the replicated fruits of my life
nested safe in cartons.

And yet I am never seduced,
for I have seen what a hen knows of omnipotence:
nothing of the miracles in twelves,
only of the hand that feeds
and, daily, robs the nest.