A Writer's Moment: 'The value of everyday things'

A Writer's Moment: 'The value of everyday things':   “A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All t...

'The value of everyday things'

 

“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” – Jorge Luis Borges

 

Born on Aug. 24, 1899 Borges was an Argentine poet who knew the value and power of the things within our own world and how beneficial they could be to a writer.   For Saturday’s Poem, here is Borges’,

 

                                                            Things

 

                                    My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,

The docile lock and the belated

Notes my few days left will grant

No time to read, the cards, the table,

A book, in its pages, that pressed

Violet, the leavings of an afternoon

Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,

The reddened mirror facing to the west

Where burns illusory dawn. Many things,

Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,

Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,

So blind and so mysteriously secret!

They’ll long outlast our oblivion;

And never know that we are gone.

A Writer's Moment: 'Two kinds of adventurers'

A Writer's Moment: 'Two kinds of adventurers':   “There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.” – Will...

'Two kinds of adventurers'

 “There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.” – William Least Heat-Moon

 

Born William Lewis Trogdon in Kansas City, MO on Aug. 27, 1939 Least Heat-Moon is a writer and historian of European and Osage ancestry and the author of a dozen books – many chronicling his unusual journeys around the United States – including the mega-bestsellers River Horse and Blue Highways.

 

A graduate of the University of Missouri's Journalism School, Least Heat-Moon's works have been labeled “literary naturalism” with the ecosystem serving as a foundation. 

 

Also a Travel and Travelogue writer, he often illustrates the hybrid relationship between humans and the environment and how each entity influences the other, presenting critiques of how societal progress can negatively affect the ecosystem. 

 

“Often,” Least Heat-Moon said about his stories, “I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.”

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Doing the little things better each day'

A Writer's Moment: 'Doing the little things better each day':   “A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas ...

'Doing the little things better each day'

 

“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

Born in Boston on Aug. 31, 1844 Phelps began 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 talked with vivid interest of the stories she used to improvise for their entertainment.^”  

 

One of America’s most popular 19th century writers, she wrote hundreds of short stories, 57 volumes of fiction and poetry and many essays.  She challenged the prevailing view that a woman's place and fulfillment resided only in the home and depicted women succeeding as physicians, ministers, artists and, of course, writers. 

 

Also widely sought after as a speaker, she was the first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University (in 1876) on the topic “Representative Modern Fiction.”

 

“It is not the straining for great things that is most effective," she said of her success. "It is doing the little things better and better every day.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Drawing from all the moments of your life'

A Writer's Moment: 'Drawing from all the moments of your life':   “Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of yo...

'Drawing from all the moments of your life'

 

“Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.” – Neil Simon
 

Simon, who was born on the Fourth of July 1927 and died on this date in 2018, grew up during the Great Depression, a time that was a "great shaper" for his life and his art.  Writing “life” became the grist for his creative mill.

 

One of America’s most prolific stage and screenwriters, he wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, earning more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.   After breaking onto the playwriting scene with Come Blow Your Horn (in 1961), Simon won his first Tony for the long-running, and one of the most widely performed plays in history, The Odd Couple. 

 

The first playwright to earn 15 “Best Play” awards, he also was given a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement and won a Pulitzer Prize for Lost in Yonkers.  In 2006 he was presented America’s top humor award, the Mark Twain Prize.  A Broadway theater also has been named in his honor.   

 

Simon's advice to writers is try new things.    “If no one ever took risks,” he said,  “Michelangelo probably would have painted the Sistine floor.”

A Writer's Moment: 'If you have the itch you might as well use it'

A Writer's Moment: 'If you have the itch you might as well use it':   “You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do?   You might as well use...

'If you have the itch you might as well use it'

 

“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

 

Montgomery, who rocketed to worldwide acclaim with her very first book Anne of Green Gables, was born in Canada in the Fall of 1874.  Over a 45-year writing career, she ended up publishing 20 novels, many featuring her lead character Anne Shirley.  She also wrote a remarkable 530 short stories, some 500 poems and 30 essays.   Anne of Green Gables has now sold more than 50 million copies and been published in two dozen languages.

 

By the time of her death in 1942, Montgomery also had been honored as the first Canadian female named a Fellow of England’s Royal Society of Arts and had been invested into the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) one of Britain’s highest honors. 

 

“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: 'To love with the mind'

A Writer's Moment: 'To love with the mind':   “To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.” – Theophile Gautier Born in August of 1811, Pierre Jules ...

'To love with the mind'

 

“To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.” – Theophile Gautier

Born in August of 1811, Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist and journalist, excelling as an art critic.  Gautier spent the majority of his career at La Presse and later on at Le Moniteur universel after starting his career as an artist.  Because of that experience, he became one of the premier art critics of the 19^th Century. 

 

Gautier was strongly committed to the idea that the critic should have the ability to describe the art so that the reader might "see" the piece through his description.

 Of his poetic writing, he said, “I like to think that art and poetry are intertwined.   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 is an excerpt 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?

Ah child, if that star shines;
is in chartless skies,
I do not know of such!

 

But come, where will you go?

A Writer's Moment: Mastering 'The Understated Style'

A Writer's Moment: Mastering 'The Understated Style':   Hemingway, born in Illinois in July of 1899, began as a journalist and first popularized the journalistic “unde...

Mastering 'The Understated Style'

 

Hemingway, born in Illinois in July of 1899, began as a journalist and first popularized the journalistic “understated style” in creative writing.  He often focused on sensations rather than ideas and wrote about what he “lived.”

A great observer of life, the human condition and nature, he wrote 9 bestselling books and 6 collections of short stories.  Many of his stories, such as Hills Like White Elephants and The Killers, have often been rated among the best in the English language. 

 Almost always to the point in what he wrote, he once famously said:  "The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."