A Writer's Moment: His Life's Vocation

A Writer's Moment: His Life's Vocation:   “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.” – Derek Wal...

His Life's Vocation

 “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.” – Derek Walcott

Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucian on this date in 1930, Walcott was a poet and playwright who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.  

The University of Alberta’s (Canada) first distinguished scholar in residence (for writing), he also served from 2010-13 as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex (England).  He was named for the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Walcott’s, 

 

Love After Love

 

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Writing as a ‘Therapeutic’ Response

A Writer's Moment: Writing as a ‘Therapeutic’ Response: “Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.” – Ralph Keyes    Keyes, bo...

Writing as a ‘Therapeutic’ Response

“Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.” – Ralph Keyes 

 

Keyes, born in Ohio in 1945, is an author and lecturer who has written 16 books including Is There Life After High School?, which was adapted as a musical that opened on Broadway in 1982 and is still produced by theater groups across the United States. His 1995 book The Courage to Write has become a standard work among aspiring writers.  He graduated from Antioch College and still makes his home near there in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

 

A frequent guest on NPR shows such as All Things Considered and On the Media, he also has appeared on TV shows like 20/20 and The Oprah Winfrey Show.    And he’s a regular presenter to professional, corporate and educational groups.

 

In The Courage to Write, Keyes said, “I’m often asked why I write so often about ‘negative’ subjects: tensions between fathers and sons, adolescent angst, time pressure. My answer is that exploring such topics on paper helps me get rid of them. Writing can be wonderful therapy, and cheap at the price. At the very least, you eventually get bored by thinking about anxious topics and want to move on.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Deepening Our Wonder

A Writer's Moment: Deepening Our Wonder: “As knowledge increases, wonder deepens.” – Charles Morgan Born in England on this date in 1894, Morgan was a Welsh-English playwright ...

Deepening Our Wonder

“As knowledge increases, wonder deepens.” – Charles Morgan

Born in England on this date in 1894, Morgan was a Welsh-English playwright and novelist had successful career writing on the themes of "Art, Love, and Death” and how they related to one another.

 

His 11 novels ranged from the paradoxes of freedom (The Voyage, The River Line), to passionate love seen from within (Portrait in a Mirror) and without (A Breeze of Morning).  He also wrote 3 plays, 6 books of essays, and 2 books of poetry.

 

Top of Form

Morgan enjoyed an immense reputation during his lifetime (he died in 1958) in both France and Great Britain, winning the coveted James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, although he was sometimes criticized for “excessive seriousness.”

 

He served as Drama critic for The Times of London from the 1920s until 1938.  He also contributed weekly articles on the London theatre scene to The New York Times and wrote many articles for London’s Sunday Times.  Two of his plays, The Flashing Stream and The River Line received high praise and had long runs on stages in London, Paris and (in the case of the latter one) New York.  

 

 

"There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved,” he wrote.   “It is God's finger on man's shoulder."Bottom of Form

A Writer's Moment: Real Life, Real Characters

A Writer's Moment: Real Life, Real Characters: Each writer’s characters grow as her or his story does and the writer has to react to and with them. As the award-winn...