A Writer's Moment: From 'Pictures' To 'Murals'

A Writer's Moment: From 'Pictures' To 'Murals': “I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back...

From 'Pictures' To 'Murals'

“I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.” – Rebecca Makkai

Born in Illinois on this date in 1978, Makkai not only lived up to what was expected but excelled at it as well.  Her novel about the 1980s AIDS epidemic, The Great Believers, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Those accolades came on the heels of a basketful of awards for her novel The Hundred-Year House, winner of the 2015 Novel of the Year award from the Chicago Writers Association. 

Also an exemplary short story writer and essayist her fiction has appeared in such magazines as Ploughshares, New England Review and Shenandoah.  Her nonfiction has been in places like Harpers and the New Yorker website. Makkai's stories also have been featured on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and This American Life.    The winner of the prestigious Pushcart Prize, she said she enjoys both fictional genres in which she writes.

“Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible,” she said.  “Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.”

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A Writer's Moment: Reflecting On The World

A Writer's Moment: Reflecting On The World: “A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.” – Stendhal Born in 1783, Marie-Henri Beyle – who used the pseudonym Stendhal – is on...

Reflecting On The World

“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.” – Stendhal

Born in 1783, Marie-Henri Beyle – who used the pseudonym Stendhal – is one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction.  His finest novel is the 1830 work The Red and the Black from which the above quote comes.

A century and a half later, Tim O’Brien, born in 1946, said that he thought about writers like Stendhal and what they said about creating good fiction, and that helped guide him in  creating such acclaimed works as Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carrie.   

 Reflecting on those writings and more, O’Brien noted:

“A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.” 

  

O’Brien                                                       Stendhal

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A Writer's Moment: 'What A Poem Can Offer'

A Writer's Moment: '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...

'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.   A graduate of Harvard, she currently serves as Chair of Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts.       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.

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A Writer's Moment: Being Born A Writer

A Writer's Moment: Being Born A Writer: “All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.” - Cynthia Ozick Ozick was born...