'It's definitely NOT for the money'

 

 “Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon, then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar." – Donald Miller

 

Miller, born in August 1971, is an author, public speaker and CEO of StoryBrand, a marketing company. Best known for his personal essays and reflections he also authored the bestselling book Blue Like Jazz and a series of business/marketing books, the latest (in 2021) being Business Made Simple.  A native of Texas, he now makes his home in Tennessee.

 

“I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are,” Miller said.  “I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.”

 

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: 'A Comfortable Voice'

A Writer's Moment: 'A Comfortable Voice':   “The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a p...

'A Comfortable Voice'

 

“The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.” – Anne Fadiman

The daughter of renowned literary, radio, and television personality Clifton Fadimam and World War II correspondent and author Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, Anne Fadiman has been comfortable around celebrity since she was a child.  A Radcliffe grad, she roomed with novelist Wendy Lesser and in the same dorm with Benazir Bhutto and Kathleen Kennedy – all great fodder for her terrific essays.

Fadiman, born this date in 1953, was a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization, and has had a great career as a writer, editor and teacher of essays.  But it was her award-winning book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down that brought her the most acclaim (and many awards). Researched in a small county hospital in California, it examines a Hmong immigrant family and their cultural, linguistic, and medical struggles in seeking treatment for their epileptic child.

 

She said she is grateful for modern electronics and e-books but prefers a text copy in her hands.

“There is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of association,” she said. “Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, I think it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Fostering the Earth's renewal

A Writer's Moment: Fostering the Earth's renewal:   “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it...

Fostering the Earth's renewal

 

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.” – Wendell Berry

A native Kentuckian, born Aug. 5, 1934 he grew up on a farm and continues to farm yet today, although writing and speaking are important and busy parts of his life.     A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays, and is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.                              

  Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2013, he also is a recipient of The National Humanities Medal.  

Berry's lyric poetry often appears as a contemporary eclogue, pastoral, or elegy; but he also composes dramatic and historical narratives, and I encourage you to look up his works "Bringer of Water" and "July, 1773."   Or for a wonderful view of his view of farm life and nature, read his book Clearing.  For Berry, poetry exists "at the center of a complex reminding.”  Here, for Saturday’s Poem, is Berry’s:

Water

I was born in a drought year. That summer
my mother waited in the house, enclosed
in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind,
for the men to come back in the evenings,
bringing water from a distant spring.

Veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank.
And all my life I have dreaded the return
of that year, sure that it still is
somewhere, like a dead enemy’s soul.
Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me,
and I am the faithful husband of the rain,
I love the water of wells and springs
and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns.

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise
of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup.
My sweetness is to wake in the night
after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

 

 

 

  

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A Writer's Moment: 'A place to be anyone'

A Writer's Moment: 'A place to be anyone':   “I read, because one life is not enough, and in the page of a book I can be anyone.”   – Richard Peck And, as prolific as he was as...

'A place to be anyone'

 

“I read, because one life is not enough, and in the page of a book I can be anyone.”

 – Richard Peck

And, as prolific as he was as a reader, Peck - born in Illinois in 1934 - was equally prolific as a writer of Young Adult literature.   He won dozens of awards, picking up both a Newbery Medal  (for his novel A Year Down Yonder) and the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for his cumulative contributions to the genre’. 

Peck’s career as a writer started when he was sidetracked from what he thought was going to be a career as a high school teacher.  He was happily teaching high school in the 1950s when he was transferred to a junior high to teach English.  Upset about the move, he decided to take time away from teaching to try writing, focusing on his observations about the junior high school students he didn’t want to teach.  "Ironically,” he said,  “it was my students who taught me to be a writer, though I was hired to teach them."

While his highest accolades come for his Newbery winner, I highly recommend his book Amanda/Miranda, a twist on both the old Prince and the Pauper story and the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic. 

 

  

Richard Peck

Peck, who died in 2018, said he believed each book should be a question, not an answer and that before anything else could happen a book needed to be entertaining. “A young adult novel ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning,” he said, “with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.”

 

 

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