Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 160

A Writer's Moment: 'Knowledge: Child of your Efforts'

A Writer's Moment: 'Knowledge: Child of your Efforts':   “It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.   He who has a sun in himself won’t seek for it...

'Knowledge: Child of your Efforts'

 

“It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.  He who has a sun in himself won’t seek for it somewhere else.” – Romain Rolland

 

Born on this date in 1866, Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.”

He advocated for making the theater accessible to all and often expressed frustration with those he was trying to convince that this was a good idea.  “Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth but already to possess it,” he once noted. 

 

His friend Sigmund Freud said he was profoundly influenced by Rolland’s views, especially on mysticism.  Freud also was a great admirer of Rolland’s 10-volume novel Jean-Christophe, written over an 8-year period. 

  

“The main thing is not to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, but to make sure that this knowledge is the child of your own efforts,” Rolland said.  “Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepares the way for the faith of tomorrow.”

 

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A Writer's Moment: 'The fate of poetry'

A Writer's Moment: 'The fate of poetry':   “The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.” – Derek Walcott   Born in January, 1930, Walcott authored ...

'The fate of poetry'

 

“The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.”– Derek Walcott

 

Born in January, 1930, Walcott authored two dozen books of poetry, 25 plays and several novels and earned the Nobel Prize in Literature for his efforts.  He also was a MacArthur genius grant recipient and winner of the coveted T.S. Elliot Prize in Poetry.  Here for Saturday’s Poem 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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The stuff of fiction is . . . life

 

Settings for novels take place … well, literally everywhere.  And, as P.D. James (born in 1920) once noted, all fiction is largely autobiographical for the writer, and much autobiography is, of course, the stuff of fiction. 
Someone, like you or me, sits down and starts thinking about where and how to “set” a book or a short story or even to tell the story of his or her own life – and pretty soon we have something new to read.  It usually doesn’t happen overnight and it often is a messy process, but regardless of who is doing the writing, it’s yet another completion of a creative process that has led to everything from our neighbor’s “memoirs” to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
 “(Writing) is undoubtedly a lonely career,” James said.   “But I suspect that people who find it lonely are not writers.  I think if you are a writer you realize how valuable the time is when you are absolutely alone with your characters in complete peace.”

A Writer's Moment: The stuff of fiction is . . . life

A Writer's Moment: The stuff of fiction is . . . life:   Settings for novels take place … well, literally everywhere.   And, as P.D. James (born in 1920) once noted, all fiction is largely autob...

A Writer's Moment: 'Actual writing is required'

A Writer's Moment: 'Actual writing is required':   “If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must not be to write.” – Hugh Prather   An American se...

'Actual writing is required'

 

“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must not be to write.” – Hugh Prather  An American self-help writer, lay minister, and counselor, Prather was most famous for his book, Notes to Myself, a work that underscored the importance of gentleness, forgiveness, and loyalty. 
Prather, born during this week in 1938 (he died in 2010), also wrote or co-wrote over a dozen other books that touched on thoughts about life, love and spirituality, one of the most well-known being I Touch The Earth; The Earth Touches Me. “It's this simple: If I never try anything, I never learn anything,” he wrote in that book.   “If I never take a risk, I stay where I am.”
While many readers loved his work, others scorned it as thoughts seen through rose-colored glasses.  
 

“Negative feedback is better that none,” Prather responded.  “I would rather have a man hate me than overlook me. As long as he hates me I figure I must’ve made a difference.”

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A Writer's Moment: A champion of 'telling your own story'

A Writer's Moment: A champion of 'telling your own story':   “Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.” – Gloria Naylor ...

A champion of 'telling your own story'

 

“Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.” – Gloria Naylor
The daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers who migrated to New York City’s Harlem area to escape southern segregation, Naylor was born on this date in 1950.  She grew up keenly aware of life in “the mean streets” and kept track of those stories in a daily journal that became a wonderful resource for her writing. 
While her parents had little education, they encouraged their daughter’s writing and further study.  She earned her bachelor’s degree in English at the City University of New York in 1981, and master’s in African American Studies from Yale University in 1983 sandwiched around her first novel, the award-winning The Women of Brewster Place.  That 1982 work also was made into a movie.
She had a long and award-filled career in university teaching while also writing 6 more novels, drawing frequently on both her own life and the lives of African American women from the communities in which she lived.  She died in the Virgin Islands in 2016. 
“I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either,” she said.  “Life is just supposed to make you feel.  Life is accepting what is and working from that.”