Seeking out the answers

“I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.”  – Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke, a native of Great Britain who lived 60 years in Sri Lanka, was born on this date in 1917.  He is perhaps most famous for co-writing the screenplay for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely considered one of the most influential films of all time.    His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, which along with a large readership made him one of the towering figures of science fiction.

Clarke started writing as a journalist, focusing on science writing.  He was a lifelong proponent of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability.  He also was one of the early “pushers” for nations to “get into that business.”  In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society, and as early as1945, he proposed a satellite communication system remarkably similar to the one we all use today. 

He wrote over a dozen books about space and space travel proposing ideas that have become reality in today’s scientific world.  Those books along with his myriad essays in popular and scientific journals and magazines earned him the moniker “Prophet of the Space Age.” “Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories,” he once said.  “Then maybe we’d get some things done.”

 

Arthur C. Clarke was 90

when he died in 2008.  His shirt reads:  "I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"

In the 1980s Clarke became well known to many for his television programs Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, and Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe.  The popularity of those shows was influential on both writers and scientists around the world as he urged both to “look at the impossible and then find ways to make it possible.  The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.”

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'Breathe-in' experiences

“A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.” – Muriel Rukeyser

Born on this date in 1913, Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.  Critic and fellow writer Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation."

One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident in West Virginia, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.   That followed closely on the heels of her coverage of the Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama (as a journalist), and her work for the International Labor Defense, 

 

 which handled the defendants' appeals.   Her writings on the case were among those used in the creation of the award-winning Broadway show by the same name.

Throughout her life (she died in 1980) she traveled to all the world’s hot spots, including the Spanish Civil War in the ‘30s, the war fronts during World War II and Korea, and to Vietnam, primarily using her powerful poetic style to speak out on behalf of what she considered to be injustice or mistreatment.   A play about her life with a working title of Throat of These Hours is being developed from her poem Speed of Darkness.

The key to powerful and expressive writing, she said, was experience.  “Breathe-in experience.  Breathe-out poetry.”

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Writing right -- no wrong ways

“Most important of all, there is no right or wrong way to write - there's only what works for you. I was taught to write every day, but I know a writer (a bestseller at that!) who only writes on weekends.” – Tamora Pierce

 

A native of Pennsylvania, Tamora Pierce, born on this date in 1954, is a writer of fantasy fiction for teens, and best known for stories featuring young heroines. She made a name for herself with her first book series, The Song of the Lioness (1983–1988), which followed the main character Alanna through the trials and triumphs of training as a knight.   Since then she’s written a dozen more books and several series, and in 2013 she was the recipient of the American Library Association’s “Margaret A. Edwards Award” for her significant

and lasting contributions to young adult literature.

Pierce draws on elements of people and animals around her for inspiration. She said she gets most ideas from things she stumbles upon and then “adapts.”  Her concept of magic as a tapestry of threads comes from her experiences in crocheting, and in her world all images are somehow based on British naturalist David Attenborough after watching his nature documentaries.

  

“What people tell me they take away from my books is that they can shape their lives, they can achieve their own dreams,” she said.  “And certainly that's what I want them to take away.”

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Catching those 'everyday reflections'

“What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives.” – Tracy Kidder

John “Tracy” Kidder, who just turned 70, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of nonfiction focusing on – as he says – the lives of “everyday people.”  He has explored a wide range of topics through his books, ranging from his award winner, The Soul of a New Machine  (about a breakthrough development of a computer) to House, a "biography" of a couple having their first house built, to Among Schoolchildren, reflecting on U.S. education through the lives of  20 children and their teacher.  His Old Friends was a poignant study of a pair of elderly men in a nursing home.

Considered a literary journalist because of the strong story line and 

personal voice in his writing, he wrote in a 1994 essay 

for The Atlantic that "In fiction, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even plausibility. It has everything to do with those things in nonfiction. I think that the nonfiction writer's fundamental job is to make what is true believable."

A native of New York City, Kidder served two years in Vietnam, but said that unlike other veterans who became writers he didn’t think that had much influence on him.  “I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell,” he said.  “You just have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.  Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.”

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And miles to go

On a snowy early winter morning here in Colorado (and across much of the nation, it seems), this Robert Frost poem seems like an apropos selection for today’s blog entry. Frost actually wrote the poem on an early June morning after staying up working all night on his long poem New Hampshire, the foundation poem for his 1923 book by the same name – and a book that would win the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 

After the long night at his desk, he went outdoors to view the sunrise and instead, clearly saw 

(in his mind) the scene that became this poem.   

  He quickly went back indoors and wrote it down in just a few minutes.  

  

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though.

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

  

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

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Lovin' those words ... and songs

“I always loved reading. I always was the spelling bee champion. I always loved words. I always wanted to know what they meant, why you used them, who first said them. I was always interested in that.” – Brenda Lee

‘Tis the season … to hear the terrific voice and words of Brenda Lee as one of the all-time biggest holiday hit songs “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree”  makes its annual appearance.   I grew up listening the Brenda Lee’s songs – both on the radio and from my mother who didn’t hesitate to “rock out” herself while bopping around the kitchen and singing them – especially the wonderful “I’m Sorry,” which Brenda wrote at age 15.   Her Christmas song, by the way, was recorded when she was just 13, hard to fathom when you hear her big booming voice.  It was written by Johnny Marks, who also wrote "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Holly, Jolly Christmas."

Lee was a child prodigy, appearing on national television by the age of 10, and making her first recordings for Decca at age 11 (in 1956). Her first few Decca singles, in fact, make a pretty fair bid for the best preteen rock & roll performances this side of Michael Jackson.  Between 1960 and 1962 she had a remarkable 9 Top Ten hit songs, most of which she wrote herself.

 

 

 Brenda in 1960 …. and at a recent Grammy Awards ceremony

Still singing and writing both music and memoir-type pieces, she celebrates her 71^st birthday today and said “I don’t think anyone ever gets tired of well-written, well-crafted songs.  (And) I still sing because I love the sound of applause.  It’s who I am … and because I still can.”

We should all be grateful.  Rock on Brenda.

Here’s a link to “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.”  As I noted.  ‘Tis the Season.  Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idl-K8s1GYo

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Creating places for children to go

“There are so many magical places in books that you can't go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.” – Cornelia Funke

A German author of young adult fiction, Funke (pronounced Foon-ka) was born on this day in 1958 and is perhaps best known for her Inkheart trilogy, published in 2004–2008. The books chronicle the adventures of teen Meggie Folchart whose life changes dramatically when she realizes that she and her father, a bookbinder named Mo, have the unusual ability to bring characters from books into the real world when reading aloud.

Mostly set in Northern Italy and its parallel world of the fictional Inkheart, the central story's arc  concerns the magic of books, their characters and creatures – and the art of reading.

 

 An avid reader herself, beginning during her “growing up years in northern Germany," she said she always wanted to be either an astronaut or a pilot but then gravitated toward social work and working with children.  And that, she said, led to her writing for kids.

As for her ideas, she said "they come from everywhere and nowhere, from outside and inside. I have so many, I won't be able to write them down in one lifetime."  As for her characters, Cornelia said, "Mostly they step into my writing room and are so much alive, that I ask myself, where did they come from?”

A worldwide advocate for strong libraries, she said she encourages every child and every aspiring young writer to “Read – and be curious.   If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids,” she said.  “A library book, I imagine, is a very happy book.”

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