Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 385

Our 'soul' of the past

“In every phenomenon, the beginning remains always the most notable moment.  Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.” – Thomas Carlyle  
Carlyle, born this day in 1795, was a Scottish philosopher, teacher and journalist whose work was influential on a generation of Victorian era writers, including Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  He was mesmerized by the concept of how it was the heroes in our world who shaped people’s hopes and aspirations and created the basis for great writing – or writer’s moments, if you will.  Primarily an essayist for several major newspapers, he also wrote a dozen books, the most famous being On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 
Beyond his writing he was a champion for the establishment of great libraries.  Often frustrated with the lack of good books in society, he was instrumental in founding the London Library and making books available to a broader reading public.                        “In books,” he wrote,  “lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.  The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”  


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Writing's transformative effects

“Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It's neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic.” – Francesca Lia Block 
Born in Los Angeles on this date in1962, Block is the author of numerous books (both fiction and non-fiction), and dozens of short stories and poems, many of which have been translated into a wide range of languages around the globe.   
Among her many writing awards are the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, the Spectrum Award and the Phoenix Award as well as citations from the American Library Association, the School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly.    She is perhaps best known for her Weetzie Bat young adult series – for which she’s also written a screenplay now under production.  She also earned international accolades for her novel Blood Roses, and for her poetry collection Fairy Tales in Electri-City.                                        A frequent writing workshop instructor and guest speaker at both UCLA Extension and Antioch College, she also has served as writer-in-residence at Pasadena City College, (not far from her current Los Angeles home) and privately in Los Angeles.   
Her advice to students is simple.    "Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don't be afraid to make your characters suffer.  Read what you love.  Write what you love.” 



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Powerful poetic remembrances

“Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.” – Tahar Ben Jelloun
Born in Morocco on this date in 1944, Ben Jelloun now makes his home in Paris where he writes poetry, novels, essays and short stories.Recipient of a special U.N. prize for "peace and friendship between people,” he also has been awarded France’s Légion d'honneur (Cross of Grand Officer) and been short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature.              His The Rising of the Ashes,is a poetic remembrance to victims of Middle East conflicts.  It ends with eight numbered stanzas that reflect on the region’s lingering losses.  For Saturday’s Poem, here are two of those stanzas from that award-winning book.
4.
Is it the tree or the infamy of long insomnia
that leans over to spell out the shredding of time?
A word falls slowly in a tomb where
the dawns accumulate.
This eternal body
is a shore that advances: the sea is here, at its feet.6.
Neither lemon tree, nor absinthe, or night, but
         absence:
a wet dress, set on a white stone bench;
this is the memory of hands separated from land
         and face:
and the land is a face
the tree a voice
and the coat a sky washed of its clouds. 


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Good Books; Good Friends

“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.” – Louisa May Alcott
Born in Philadelphia on this date in 1832, Alcott grew up in Massachusetts to become one of America’s iconic writers.   While she worked to help support her somewhat impoverished family from an early age, she also sought a career as a writer in her teens and began to receive critical acclaim for her writing before age 30.    An abolitionist and a feminist, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly but when the Civil War broke out, she served as a nurse in a Union Hospital before contracting typhoid fever and nearly dying.  Her letters home – revised and published in the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches – brought her first critical writing recognition and led to her first novel, Moods, based on her own experience.      In the mid-1860s, she wrote a series of passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories under the pen name A. M. Barnard, but after the success of Little Women she concentrated her writing on books for children.
Loosely based on her childhood experiences (in Concord, Mass.), Little Women has been rated one of the top 100 books in U.S. history and remains one of America’s most popular.  The story also has been filmed many times and brought to the stage in various forms, including on Broadway.   It’s been continuously in print for 150 years.
Alcott died of a stroke at age 55 and is buried on “Authors’ Ridge” in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.  Buried near her are 3 other iconic American writers – Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau – all her lifelong friends and mentors.

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Unleashing the hidden power of writing

“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”– Rita Mae Brown

Born on this date in 1944, Brown has excelled in every type of writing she’s attempted, ranging from screenplays to television scripting to novels and poetry.  After a string of stand-alone novels, led by the award-winning Rubyfruit Jungle, she has written a remarkable 55 more novels, 4 nonfiction books, and 9 screenplays.  Twenty-eight of her titles are in the “Mrs. Murphy Mysteries” series and 11 in her “Sister Mysteries" series.  Since the 1990s she has published at least a title every year, including last year’s best-selling Crazy Like A Fox and this year’s Probable Claws.
Raised first in an orphanage and then by her aunt and uncle, she grew up in Pennsylvania, went to school at the University of Florida, and lived for a time as a homeless person in New York City before earning degrees in Classics, English and Cinematography.  Ultimately she went on to earn two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D.        Her first attempt at writing was ultimately made into a television special, I Love Liberty, which earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Musical or Variety.  She followed that with a screenplay parody of “slasher” movies called The Slumber Party Massacre, a film that not only appeared on TV but also in limited release and spawned two sequels and a cult following that continues to this day.
Inspired by her writing success, she wrote her first novel and has never looked back and said every time she thinks about easing up, a deadline from her publisher seems to loom. "A deadline is just negative inspiration," she said.  "Still, it's better than no inspiration at all."


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Feeling that 'writing energy'

“Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.” – Marilyn Hacker
Born in New York on this date in 1942, Hacker grew up in the city, attended New York University in the early 1960s, and started writing poetry in the early 1970s.  Beginning with her National Book Award-winning Presentation Piece in 1974, she has since established herself as a preeminent voice in the tradition of Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich.  Hacker also won the prestigious PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by French writer Marie Étienne.       Since 1976 she has divided her time between the United States and France, editing literary periodicals such as Ploughsharesand the Kenyon Review, and teaching at a number of colleges and universities but primarily at City College of New York, where she currently is an emeritus professor.   “The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem,” she said.  “It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.”



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Find a sense of adventure

A good start to another week of writing are these wise words from Canadian Cheryl Alleway, author of the novels Of Blade and Valor and Inverness Skies.  

 “Reading and writing are fundamental to this day no matter how technology grows," Alleway said.  "The ability to communicate a story that stirs emotions within others is a gift to both the writer and the reader. We need storytellers in the world. It allows us to discover, learn, feel and find our sense of adventure." 
   [image error] Cheryl Alleway and her dog Loma
May your week be filled with "Writer's Moments."

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Exploring ideas and imagination

“My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination, and hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in dreams.”– Alexis Wright
An indigenous Australian, Wright was born on this date in 1950, grew up in Queensland, and broke onto the writing scene in the 1990s, making an immediate splash with her novel Plains of Promise, published in 1997, nominated for several literary awards, and on the market in numerous editions.    But it was her novel Carpentaria that earned her the biggest accolades.   Despite being rejected multiple times, it finally was picked up by an independent publisher and achieved Australia’s highest honor, the Miles Franklin Award.  

This year, her biography Tracker, a tribute to economist Tracker Tilmouth, won the prestigious Stella Prize, Australia’s richest award for the leading female writer in all genres.  The book also earned the Margery Medal – the leading award for nonfiction – and a Queensland Literary Award.  Wright is currently a member of the Australian Research Council research project on literary forms, her theme focusing on forms of Aboriginal oral storytelling.  
Despite her ongoing success, she said she feels she hasn’t changed as a person or how she interacts with people around her.  “No matter what happens to you,” she said,  “you can maintain your own control about what you believe and who you are.”



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The 'Orphan of Silence'

 “Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” – Charles Simic
Despite his disclaimer, Simic, who recently turned 80, won a Pulitzer Prize for The World Doesn’t End and was a finalist for another of his poetic works.   Critics often refer to Simic’s terse, imagistic poems as “tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes.”
Simic said he loves what words can do, and once stated: "Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat, and the poet is merely the bemused spectator."     For Saturday’s Poem, here is Simic’s,
    The Wooden Toy                                                   The wooden toy sitting pretty.
No … quieter than that.              
Like the sound of eyebrows
                                 Raised by a villain 

                                 In a silent movie.
Psst, someone said behind my back.

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Copland's 'Simple Gifts' - A Thanksgiving Feast

“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.” – Aaron Copland
Born in November 1900, Copland often was referred to as the Dean of American composers by both his peers and music critics across the nation.  He wrote prolifically about music, including pieces on music criticism analysis, on musical trends, and on his own compositions.   An avid lecturer and lecturer-performer, Copland eventually collected his presentation notes into three books, What to Listen for in Music, Our New Music, and Music and Imagination. 
In the 1980s, he collaborated with Vivian Perlis on a two-volume autobiography, Copland: 1900 Through 1942and Copland Since 1943.  He died in 1990 leaving a legacy as “America’s musician.”  He wrote a total of about 100 works which covered a diverse range of genres, and many, especially orchestral pieces, have remained part of the standard American repertoire.   Copland was awarded the New York Music Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in composition for Appalachian Spring, which includes his variation on the beautiful Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.”
On this Thanksgiving Day, I hope you will take a few moments to listen once again to this song of thanks and joy.  Happy Thanksgiving!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMtCh0VuoKg
(P.S.  For some added joy today, listen to the song that immediately follows – a mashup of "Simple Gifts" and "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."  Amazing!)

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