'It's the scaffold beneath the structure'

“The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.” – Geraldine Brooks

 

Born in Sydney, Australia on this date in 1955, Brooks –  now a citizen of both Australia and the United States – started her career as an award-winning journalist, primarily writing for the Wall Street Journal.  Her first novel, Year of Wonders, set in a 1666 village stricken by the bubonic plague, was a massive international bestseller and started her along a creative writing path. 

 

Her second novel, March – imagining the Civil War service of the “absent” father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – won her the Pulitizer Prize for Fiction.   She has now written 6 novels and 4 nonfiction books, her most recent being 2025’s Memorial Days: A Memoir. 

  

“Writing is like bricklaying,” Brooks said.  “You put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Words like music'

A Writer's Moment: 'Words like music':   “I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself ...

'Words like music'

 

“I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.” — Mary Oliver

 

Earlier this week I posted about Oliver - born on Sept. 10, 1935 in Ohio - and the impact she had on poetry and writing in general.   For Saturday’s Poem, here is Oliver’s,

                                     A Dream of Trees

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world's artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

A Writer's Moment: 'Incredibly important images for kids'

A Writer's Moment: 'Incredibly important images for kids':   "The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. Wh...

'Incredibly important images for kids'

 

"The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life."  – Anthony Browne

  

Born in Sheffield, England on this date in 1946, Browne said he started drawing and writing when he was 5 and “never really stopped.”  With more than 50 books to his credit – headed by the multiple award-winning Gorilla – he is perhaps the preeminent member of the genre today.  He’s twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal (for his illustrations) and the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international honor that can be bestowed on creators of children's books.

 

His first book Through the Magic Mirror and another of his award-winners A Walk in the Park remain worldwide favorites, especially with his works translated into more than two dozen languages.  His most recent book is Our Girl.

 

While he enjoyed art as a boy and used to draw with his father, Browne also was active in sports, playing rugby, soccer and cricket.  He said as a teenager his goals were to be either a journalist, a cartoonist, or a boxer, but he always gravitated back to writing and illustrating things for kids and he’s glad he reaches a worldwide audience.  

 

 “I don’t like narrowing my readers down – there’s not a particular age or gender or nationality,” he said.  “I suppose I’m aiming at the child I was. I never want to make a child worried or afraid, and I don't think I do.  My pictures are born from the belief that children are far more capable and aware of social complexities than we give them credit for.”

A Writer's Moment: It's 'our duty as writers'

A Writer's Moment: It's 'our duty as writers':   “I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with...

It's 'our duty as writers'

 

“I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.” – Mary Oliver

 

Born in Maple Heights, Ohio on this date in 1935, Oliver said people want poetry and that’s why she started writing it, becoming one of the best ever in the genre.  “They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work,” she said.

Oliver won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her poetic stylings, and The New York Times described her as "far and away, [America's] best-selling poet.”

 

She began writing poetry at age 14, and at 17 visited the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in upstate New York where she and the poet's sister Norma became friends.   Oliver "more or less lived there for the next six or seven years, running around the 800 acres like a child, helping Norma, or at least being company to her," and assisting with organizing St. Vincent Millay's papers – another writing obsession.

 

Oliver's poetry often turned to nature for its inspiration, describing the sense of wonder it instilled in her.  She wrote 33 books of poetry and 4 nonfiction books, the first No Voyage, and Other Poems published in 1963 and the last Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver in 2017.  She died in 2019.

 

"When it's over," she said, "I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.  I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."