'Atmosphere, Imagery and Adventure'

 

“I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.” – Ann Beattie

 

Born in Washington, DC on this date in 1947, Beattie is a short story writer and novelist noted for her dry, matter-of-fact irony – particularly in writing about the members of the Baby Boom generation.  Distortions, her first collection of short stories (she’s now authored 12 collections), won her several awards for excellence, as did her novel Chilly Scenes of Winter, also was made into a well-received film called “Head Over Heels.”

 

Beattie’s most recent book of short stories, Onlookers: Stories was published in 2023, the same year her nonfiction book More to Say: Essays and Appreciations was released.  The author of numerous essays, her papers are housed at the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, where she served as Chair of the English and Creative Writing Department for many years. 

 

“I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home,” she said.  “It just wouldn't be an adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.”

A Writer's Moment: 'In the silent garden'

A Writer's Moment: 'In the silent garden':   “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say and say it hot.”  – D. H. Lawrence   ...

'In the silent garden'

 

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say and say it hot.” – D. H. Lawrence

 

David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, was born in England in September 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic.   For Saturday’s Poem, here is Lawrence’s,

                               Trees in the Garden      

                               Ah in the thunder air

                               the trees are! 

 

                               And the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf

                               silent

                               hardly looses even a last breath of perfume. 

 

                               And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of

                              leaves

                              white, ivory white among the rambling greens

                               evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates

                               on the green grass

                               as if, in another moment, she would disappear

                               with all her grace of foam! 

 

                               And the larch that is only a column, it goes up

                               too tall to see:

                               and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-

                               blue blueness of     

                                           things from the sea,

                               and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy

                               at the ends

                               how still they are together, they stand so still

                               in the thunder air, all strangers to one another

                               as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in

                               the silent garden.

A Writer's Moment: 'A book that writes itself'

A Writer's Moment: 'A book that writes itself':   “Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always...

'A book that writes itself'

 

“Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.” – Julien Green

 

Green was born on Sept. 6, 1900 to American parents living in France.  After spending time in America in his late teens, he returned to France and in 1922 – after a false start as a painter – began a nearly 80-year career - mostly living in France - as a writer.

 

By 1927 he had established himself in the world of French literature and probably would have remained there for the rest of his long life (he died in 1998) except for the outbreak of World War II.  Returning to the U.S., he joined the United States Office of War Information, becoming the “French” voice for Voice of America, crucial in keeping up the French Resistance and ultimately leading to Germany’s defeat. 

 

While he wrote numerous essays on faith and religion, he is most noted for his 19-volume diary.  Spanning 80 years, the diary provided the world with a unique window on the artistic and literary scene in Paris.  The popularity of his diary was, he said, based on his free form and spontaneous writing style, folksy and highly readable.

 

“The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything,” he said, “because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Write from your center . . . to the world'

A Writer's Moment: 'Write from your center . . . to the world':   “God would not give us the same talent if what were right for men were wrong for women.”  – Sarah Orne Jewett   Born in South Berwick,...

'Write from your center . . . to the world'

 

“God would not give us the same talent if what were right for men were wrong for women.” – Sarah Orne Jewett

 

Born in South Berwick, Maine on Sept. 3, 1849 Jewett was a novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast of Maine.  She is recognized as an important practitioner of what became known as American Literary Regionalism.

 

Educated in Boston, where she met many of New England’s leading writers while still in her teens, Jewett was first published in Atlantic Monthly in 1868 and went on to become one of the most-read short story writers of the 1870s and ‘80s.  Fellow author William Dean Howells said Jewett possessed “an uncommon feeling for talk — I hear your people.”

 

Best known among her 20 books are The Country of the Pointed Firs; A Country Doctor; and a collection of her best short stories titled A White Heron.  Many of her poems are collected in the book Verses.  

 

“You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world,” she said about the importance of self-reflection and authenticity in writing and life.  “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper is whether – little or great – it belongs to Literature.”