A Writer's Moment: What first must burn inside

A Writer's Moment: What first must burn inside:   “I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.” – Charlotte Bronte   Born in England on this date in 1816, Bronte lived to ju...

What first must burn inside

 

“I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.” – Charlotte Bronte

 

Born in England on this date in 1816, Bronte lived to just age 39 before dying of typhus during pregnancy.  The oldest of 3 Bronte sisters who survived into adulthood (2 others died of tuberculosis), she and her surviving sisters Emily and Anne each wrote novels that are considered classics of English literature. 

Her writing career formally began when she, Emily and Anne co-published a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bell – Charlotte as Currer; Emily as Ellis; and Anne as Acton.  Their poems did not succeed but the three women’s subsequent novels – Jane Eyre from Charlotte; Wuthering Heights from Emily; and Agnes Grey from Anne – were wildly successful and led to their revealing their real names to the writing world.   With an innovative style that combined naturalism with gothic melodrama, Charlotte’s writing especially plowed new ground.

Her remarkable lyrical style gave us such statements as “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye.”  And “The human heart has hidden treasures, in secret kept, in silence sealed; the thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, whose charms were broken if revealed.”

“What you want to ignite in others,” she said of her hopes as a writer, “must first burn inside yourself.” 

A Writer's Moment: 'Fighting through life's travails'

A Writer's Moment: 'Fighting through life's travails':   “To throw oneself to the side of the oppressed is the only dignified thing to do in life.” – Edwin Markham Born in Oregon on this date ...

'Fighting through life's travails'

 

“To throw oneself to the side of the oppressed is the only dignified thing to do in life.” – Edwin Markham

Born in Oregon on this date in 1852, Markham grew up in a broken home, worked the family farm as a child, was mostly self-educated, and against the wishes of his family (he was youngest of 10 children) decided to go to college and study literature.

 

After earning degrees in The Classics and teaching literature for several years, Markham fell in love with poetry and began writing full time in his late 40s, the start of a 40-year career.  His two most famous poems are "The Man with the Hoe," inspired by the painting by the artist Jean-Francois Millet, and "Lincoln, the Man of the People," read at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.  The author of 7 poetry collections, he was named Poet Laureate of Oregon in the 1930s when he also published his highly regarded Eighty Poems at Eighty. 

 

Shortly before his death in 1940, he was named as the first recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award for his “contributions to American literature and impact on the poetic landscape.”

 

A prolific letter writer and book collector, Markham amassed more than 15,000 books.  He bequeathed them and his personal papers and letters, including years of correspondence with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, and fellow poets Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell, to tiny Wagner College in New York City.  

 

“Great it is to believe in the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream," he wrote, "but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true!”

A Writer's Moment: 'Having a genuine adventure'

A Writer's Moment: 'Having a genuine adventure':   “I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from t...

'Having a genuine adventure'

 

“I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.” – Robert Kurson 

Born on April 18, 1963 Kurson wrote Shadow Divers, the blockbuster bestselling true story of two Americans who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey.  Shadow Divers spent 24 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and was awarded an American Booksellers Association’s "Book of the Year Award."

 

A one-time lawyer with a degree from Harvard Law School, Kurson said he always thought writing would be his real profession and first decided to give it a try at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he wrote both sports stories and features. 

 

A self-proclaimed “adventure seeker,” Kurson also wrote Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship, a gripping account of the search for the wreck of the 17th-century pirate ship Golden Fleece.

 

“I think that pirates represent every person's ability to get up and leave their current daily situation and go on an adventure, and maybe to see things and do things they've never done before or even dreamed of doing," Kurson said.   “It's never too late in life to have a genuine adventure.”

A Writer's Moment: 'How you fortify your inner life'

A Writer's Moment: 'How you fortify your inner life':   ‘If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.’ – Seamus Heaney   Born in Northern Ireland on...

'How you fortify your inner life'

 

‘If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.’ – Seamus Heaney

 

Born in Northern Ireland on April 13, 1939 Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th Century.  He authored more than two-dozen volumes of poetry and criticism, 2 plays and numerous translations and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.  

 

A 12-volume collection of his poems titled The Poems of Seamus Heaney, encompassing all the poems Heaney published in his lifetime as well as some that appeared after his death in 2013 – was released in 2025. For Saturday’s Poem, here is Heaney’s,  

                                                              Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

A Writer's Moment: 'Stimulating the urge to write'

A Writer's Moment: 'That urge to write':   “No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write...

'That helpless urge to write'

 

“No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.” –  Cynthia Ozick

  

Born in New York City on April 17, 1928, Ozick has written fiction and a wide range of nonfiction, including politics, history, literary criticism, and The Holocaust.  Ozick’s lyrical fiction style has earned such accolades as “The greatest living American writer” (from several of her contemporaries), and the title “The Emily Dickinson of The Bronx.”  And her essay style has been called everything from “uncompromising” to “biting” to “brilliant.”  

 

She has authored 7 novels, 8 short-story collections (her short stories have won multiple O. Henry Award first prizes), and 10 books of essays.  Still going strong on the eve of her 98^th birthday, she released In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays in 2025.

 

 Recipient of a National Jewish Book Council Award for Lifetime a=Achievement, she also was a finalist for the National Book Award (for her Puttermesser Papers), won both the PEN/Nabokov and PEN/Malamud Awards, and earned the Presidential Medal for the Humanities.  Her works have been translated into 17 languages.   

 

“In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery,” she said.  “But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph.  That is the pleasure of it."

A Writer's Moment: 'Your topic? It's the whole world'

A Writer's Moment: 'Your topic? It's the whole world':   “Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rath...

'Your topic? It's the whole world'

 

“Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.” – Paul Theroux

 

Born in Medford, Mass., in April of 1941, Theroux has become both an accomplished novelist AND travel writer.  His best-known works are The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast, adapted into both a popular movie and Apple TV series.   

 

Winner of the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Mosquito Coast, he also earned the Royal Geographic Society’s Patron Medal (in 2015) and the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (for Picture Palace) in 1978.  And, his novels Saint Jack, Half-Moon Street and The Chinese Box have been adapted into films.  The prolific Theroux has authored some 80 books, including a 2024 novel Burma Sahib and a 2025 collection, The Vanishing Point: Stories.

 

To Theroux, the whole world is a book topic.  “Everything is fiction,” he said.  “You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.”  And, as for his travel writing: “The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide . . .make voluminous notes . . . and tell the truth.”

A Writer's Moment: Giving ideas 'emotional reality'

A Writer's Moment: Giving ideas 'emotional reality':   “Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an ide...

Giving ideas 'emotional reality'

 

“Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.” –  Anne Michaels

 

Born in Toronto on this date in 1958, Michaels is a poet, novelist and teacher whose numerous writing awards include a handful for her both her book of poetry The Weight of Oranges and her novel Fugitive Pieces.  The latter not only earned a Books in Canada First Novel Award, but also the Trillium Book Award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian Fiction Prize.  

When she's not writing, she also enjoys composing – particularly musical scores for theater.  But, it's fiction that Michaels most enjoys.

 

“It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader,” she said.  “You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.”

A Writer's Moment: 'The ultimate job' for good writers

A Writer's Moment: 'The ultimate job' for good writers:   “Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful. ” – Eudora Welty   Born i...

'The ultimate job' for good writers

 

“Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful.” – Eudora Welty

 

Born in Jackson, Miss., on this date in 1909, Welty spent most of her life in and wrote about the American South, sharing a love of the region and its unique communities and bringing its stories to life for the world to see.  

 

Primarily a writer of short stories and honored in 1992 for her lifetime contributions to the genre, she also penned one of the all-time best American novels – the 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Optimist’s Daughter.  And, she did a series of lectures released in the 1980s as a New York Times bestselling nonfiction book, One Writer's Beginnings, runner-up for the National Book Award.

 

“Place” was always vitally important to Welty.   “It is,” she said, “what makes fiction seem real, because with it come customs, feelings, and associations.   Place answers the questions: ‘What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?’”   And that, she said, is the job of the storyteller.  

 

“Long before I wrote stories, I ‘listened’ for stories,” she said.  “Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what a poem can offer'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what a poem can offer':   “We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you...

'It's what a poem can offer'

 

“We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.” – Tracy K. Smith

 

Smith, who was born in Massachusetts on April 16, 1972, started writing poetry as a 5^th grader and became our nation’s 22^nd Poet Laureate (2017-19) and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her poems Life On Mars.   For Saturday’s Poem here is Smith’s,

 

                                                            The Good Life

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Driven to communicate'

A Writer's Moment: 'Driven to communicate': A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate . . . to share . . . to be understood." ...

'Driven to communicate'

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate . . . to share . . . to be understood." -  Leo Rosten

Born on April 10, 1908, Rosten was a novelist, scriptwriter and humorist who also had a deep interest in the relationship of politics and the media and the intricacies of their connections.  

 

An immigrant from Russia who grew up in New York City, he worked his way through school, earning a doctorate degree from the University of Chicago.   After starting his career as an economist while  simultaneously writing stories for The New Yorker and Look magazines, he took on a series of government information jobs during WWII and wrote the first of his screenplays, The Conspirators.  From 1944 to 1987, the year of his death, he wrote more than three dozen books, numerous feature stories and essays, and was a much sought-after speaker.

 

His quotes often were shared, including this one (a version of which is often mis-attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson):  

 

"The purpose of life . . . is to be useful; to be honorable . . . to be compassionate . . . to matter; to have it make some difference that you have lived."

A Writer's Moment: Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments'

A Writer's Moment: Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments':   “I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talkin...

Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments'

 

“I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.” – Miller Williams

 

Born in Hoxie, Arkansas on April 8, 1930, Williams planned to become a natural scientist – especially working with animals – and earned a master’s degree in zoology.  But, ultimately, his love of writing got in the way of his planned career.  By the time of his death in 2015 he had produced nearly 40 books, created and read a poem at the Presidential Inauguration of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, and helped found The University of Arkansas Press.

 

He had his first collection of poems Et Cetera published while he was still an undergraduate student in biology at Arkansas State University.  His treatise on writing poetry, Making a Poem: Some Thoughts About Poetry and the People Who Write It, is regularly studied in colleges and universities around the world.   A critic once wrote that Miller had "a terrible honesty" and "(wrote) about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives."   

 

Among his many awards were the Porter Prize Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement in Writing, the National Poets’ Prize – for his collection Living on the Surface – and the National Arts Award for his lifelong contribution to the arts. 

 

“I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm,” he once said of his writing style.  “I always have pen and paper with me.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Look through the eyes of another person'

A Writer's Moment: 'Look through the eyes of another person':   “Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.”...

'Look through the eyes of another person'

 

“Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.” – Barbara Kingsolver

 

Born in Annapolis, MD on April 8, 1955, Kingsolver intended to be a classical musician and, in fact, had a college scholarship to become one.  But, she said she realized that “only about 6 people a year get hired in that world.”  So she switched her focus to the study of science before trying her hand at writing.   Since 1988, the year her first novel The Bean Trees was published, she has written 18 books, including 2022’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead and this year’s Partita.

 

A graduate of DePauw University in Indiana, Kingsolver makes her home in southeast Kentucky after living many years in Arizona. There, she wrote some of her most memorable works like The Poisonwood Bible and Pigs in Heaven, earning her a reputation as a writer who focused on topics of social justice and biodiversity, and the interaction between humans, communities and the environment.

 

Kingsolver said her readers seem to like that she puts herself inside her stories.  “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Laborers of the word; passionate in presentation'

A Writer's Moment: 'Laborers of the word; passionate in presentation':   “I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.”  – Marguerit...

'Laborers of the word; passionate in presentation'

 

“I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.” – Marguerite Duras

 

Duras, a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker, was born in French Indochina (Vietnam) on April 4, 1914 and grew up there in poverty before running away from home as a teenager to live and write in France. 

 

While she was, indeed, a "passionate" journalist, she also was the author of many novels, plays, films and works of short fiction.  Her best-known tales recalled her affair with a rich landowner’s son while still living in Vietnam, led by the best-selling, fictionalized autobiographical work L'Amant, translated into English as The Lover.  That book won her the prestigious Goncourt Prize.   Variations on her teenage affair also appear in The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover.

 

Awarded France's national theater prize, “The Grand Prix du Théâtre de l’Académie Française,” in recognition of her lifetime body of work, she also was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for her film Hiroshima mon amour.

 

Duras's many essays often spoke to human rights and issues of social justice.  “Journalism without a moral position is impossible,” she said.  “I believe every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.”

A Writer's Moment: How to 'fortify your inner life'

A Writer's Moment: How to 'fortify your inner life':   “If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.” – Seamus Heaney   Born in Ireland in April o...

How to 'fortify your inner life'

 

“If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.” – Seamus Heaney

 

Born in Ireland in April of 1939, Heaney is widely recognized as one the 20th century’s major poets. Author of more than 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."     For Saturday’s Poem, here is Heaney’s,

 

                                                                        Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

 

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Our most precious gifts'

A Writer's Moment: 'Our most precious gifts':   “A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.”  –  Washington Irving    Born in New York...

'Our most precious gifts'

 “A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.” –  Washington Irving

 

 Born in New York City on this date in 1783, Irving wrote from 1820 up until just before his death in 1859.   In fact, just eight months before his death (at age 76, in Tarrytown, NY), he completed a definitive five-volume biography The Life of George Washington.

 

Along with James Fenimore Cooper, Irving was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe.  And, he offered encouragement and support to upcoming American authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe, leading to the development of a true “American” literary style.  His writings, like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, have stood the test of time, read, referenced and studied by generations of students.

 

Irving also was one of America’s leading diplomats and his thoughtful attention to other cultures and religions helped establish our young nation on the world stage.  In his later years, he offered this sage advice to fellow diplomats and writers alike:

 

“Remember, an inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in even the roughest weather.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Maddening, and yet so fascinating'

A Writer's Moment: 'Maddening, and yet so fascinating':   “For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.” – Joan D. Vinge   Born in Baltimore on this date in ...

'Maddening, and yet so fascinating'

 “For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.” – Joan D. Vinge

 

Born in Baltimore on this date in 1948, Vinge is best known for such works as her Hugo Award-winning novel The Snow Queen and its sequels, and her novelization of movies like Tarzan: King of the Apes, Lost In Space and Cowboys & Aliens. 

 

After studying at San Diego State and starting her career as an anthropologist, Vinge turned to writing and made it a full-time career change after the success of Snow Queen in 1980.  Besides her award for that novel, she also won a Hugo for Best Novelette for her tale "Eyes of Amber” and has been nominated for several other Hugo and Nebula Awards.   Her novel Psion was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.   She has written 11 novels, 3 collections of short stories, 4 of poetry and 12 TV and movie adaptations.   She has been lauded for her strong, engrossing characters.  

 

“The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening,” she said, “and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.”

A Writer's Moment: 'What writing is all about, after all'

A Writer's Moment: 'What writing is all about, after all':   “The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still ...

'What writing is all about, after all'

 

“The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.” – Anne McCaffrey

 

 Born in Massachusetts on this date in 1926, McCaffrey was one of the all-time great writers of fantasy and science fiction (she died in 2011).  Best known for her Dragonriders of Pern fantasy series, she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction and a Nebula Award for excellence in science fiction. Her 1978 novel The White Dragon was one of the first science-fiction books to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.

 

A Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductee, she was only the 22^nd person ever selected as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  

 

A graduate of Radcliffe, McCaffrey studied music and contemplated an operatic career before becoming a writer.  After achieving her writing success, she moved to Ireland where she became a naturalized citizen and lived until her death in 2011.    

 

McCaffrey set Sci-Fi standards for writing with emotion and putting the reader directly into the worlds she created. “That's what writing is all about, after all,” she said, “making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.”