Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 386

Both thanks and giving

“My father said there are two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers,” Thomas noted.  “The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.” – Marlo Thomas  
Tomorrow we celebrate both Thanksgiving and the anniversary of a program called “Thanks & Giving All Year Long.”   Started by Thomas, whose 81stbirthday is today, it provides ongoing support for the wonderful work of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital – the world’s leading center for research on treating catastrophic illnesses in children. 
In 2004 Thomas had the idea of writing a children’s book and album that would both inspire young people and help fund St. Jude’s work.  For her effort Thomas won a Grammy Award; but more importantly she started a project that may go on for decades, continuing to both inspire kids and draw attention to St. Jude’s – which was founded by her father Danny Thomas. 
While winning a Grammy would be a capstone of some artists’ careers, it was only one of many, many awards for this tireless actress and writer, who has received four Emmys, a Golden Globe, the George Foster Peabody Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“I’ve always been a champion of kids pursuing their dreams,” she said.   “But sometimes in life, extraordinary circumstances may force us to temporarily put our dreams on hold. The most important thing is to never lose sight of that dream, no matter what punches life may throw in our way.”

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Intensely writing about ordinary life

“I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.”– Sharon Olds
  Born in San Francisco on this date in 1942, Olds has established herself as a leading poetic voice and an often controversial writer, loved by some, hated by others, but always interesting.  In the process, she has won National Book Critics Circle Award for her amazing The Dead and The Living and both the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Stag’s Leap – the first American woman to win these dual honors.                                   She began her writing career after earning degrees from both Stanford and Columbia and is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events.   Always interested in the “construct” of writing, she has taught writing for many years as a professor at New York University. 
“I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker,” Olds said.  “I am not a… How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess. It’s not really simple, I don’t think, but it’s about ordinary things—feeling about things, about people. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not an abstract thinker. And I’m interested in ordinary life.”

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Intensely writing about ordinary life

“I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.”– Sharon Olds
  Born in San Francisco on this date in 1942, Olds has established herself as a leading poetic voice and an often controversial writer, loved by some, hated by others, but always interesting.  In the process, she has won National Book Critics Circle Award for her amazing The Dead and The Living and both the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Stag’s Leap – the first American woman to win these dual honors.                                   She began her writing career after earning degrees from both Stanford and Columbia and is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events.   Always interested in the “construct” of writing, she has taught writing for many years as a professor at New York University. 
“I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker,” Olds said.  “I am not a… How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess. It’s not really simple, I don’t think, but it’s about ordinary things—feeling about things, about people. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not an abstract thinker. And I’m interested in ordinary life.”

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Respecting readers, developing characters

“Over the years, my students influenced me greatly, and I've learned many lessons from them. I have an immense amount of respect for them, and I think that respect for your audience is the foremost requirement for anyone who wants to write.” – Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Bartoletti, born in Pennsylvania on this date in 1958, taught school for 20 years before turning to writing.  She started in junior high, a choice she not only enjoyed but also which inspired her to do her own writing.  Watching and working with kids also has given her many of the traits and patterns she uses in developing her characters.
"I felt immense satisfaction in watching my students grow as writers and I wanted to practice what I preached,” she said.   Her first short story sold in 1989, her first children’s book, Silver at Night, in 1992, and three longer children’s books, Growing Up in Coal Country, Dancing With Dziadziu, and Kids on Strike in the mid-1990s, prompting her to pursue writing full time.
The winner of numerous awards including the SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award, and the Newberry Honor Medal, she still teaches, but now her students are master’s degree candidates in various writing programs or students in writing workshops around the nation.                                  And character development remains at the heart of every piece that she does and what she stresses to her writing students.   “When I create a character, it happens in layers,” she said.  “The more I write and revise, the better I understand my characters.”

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Saluting Roy Clark

"The next chance you get, do somethin' nice for somebody - say 'good day,' hold a door open - and don't wait around for a thank you... you don't need it." — Roy Clark
Three-time Country Music Association "Entertainer of the Year" and "International Friendship Ambassador" for his worldwide tours and support of numerous causes, especially on behalf of children, Clark died this week at the age of 85.  He leaves us with a lasting legacy as both a musician and a poetic writer.   Inducted into the CMA Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame, he is one of the few musicians to have an elementary school named in his honor – primarily in recognition of his lifelong support for the needs of children around the globe.
Co-host of the long-running TV show “Hee Haw,” he also became the first musician to found a performance venue when he opened The Roy Clark Celebrity Theater in Branson, MO, a move that helped Branson toward its current status as a Midwestern entertainment mecca.  While he wrote, produced and sang numerous country hits, he might be best known for his worldwide pop ballad hit, the beautiful and heart-rending “Yesterday When I Was Young.”  For Saturday’s Poem, here are the words and link to that song. 
Yesterday When I Was YoungSeems the love I've known has always been
The most destructive kind
Yes, that's why now I feel so old
Before my time.

Yesterday when I was young
The taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue.
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game,
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame.
The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned
I'd always built to last on weak and shifting sand.
I lived by night and shunned the naked light of the day
And only now I see how the years ran away.

Yesterday when I was young
So many happy songs were waiting to be sung,
So many wild pleasures lay in store for me
And so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see.
I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out,
I never stopped to think what life was all about
And every conversation I can now recall
Concerned itself with me and nothing else at all.

Yesterday the moon was blue
And every crazy day brought something new to do.
I used my magic age as if it were a wand
And never saw the waste and emptiness beyond.
The game of love I played with arrogance and pride
And every flame I lit too quickly, quickly died.
The friends I made all seemed somehow to drift away
And only I am left on stage to end the play.

There are so many songs in me that won't be sung,
I feel the bitter taste of tears upon my tongue.
The time has come for me to pay for
Yesterday … when I was young …****** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xNbtnQb31c

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Capable of magic

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you." - Carl Sagan Born in November of 1934, Sagan was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist who also wrote more than 600 articles and was author, co-author or editor of 20 books.  His novel Contact was the basis for a popular movie, and he co-wrote and narrated Cosmos, the most widely watched series in the history of American public television.  He died of pneumonia at the young age of 61, but just before his death he spoke the wonderful words above about the power and mystery of books.
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“Writing," Sagan said, "is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." ****Today’s post is the 1,500thfor A Writer’s Moment.  Please share if you enjoy learning about writers and what made (or makes) them an interesting segment of the writing profession.  And, thanks for reading. Share A Writer’s Moment with a friend by clicking the g+1 button below.

The capability to work magic

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you." - Carl Sagan  Born in November of 1934, Sagan was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist who also wrote more than 600 articles and was author, co-author or editor of 20 books.  His novel Contact was the basis for a popular movie, and he co-wrote and narrated Cosmos, the most widely watched series in the history of American public television.  He died of pneumonia at the young age of 61, but just before his death he spoke the wonderful words above about the power and mystery of books. [image error]“Writing," Sagan said, "is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."  **** Today’s post is the 1,500thfor A Writer’s Moment.  Please share if you enjoy learning about writers and what made (or makes) them an interesting segment of the writing profession.  And, thanks for reading.  Share A Writer’s Moment with a friend by clicking the g+1 button below.

The heights of imagination

“Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody’s imagination.”  – Astrid Lindgren 
Born in rural Sweden on this date in1907, Lindgren created one of the world’s most beloved – and iconic – figures in children’s literature, Pippi Longstocking.  Pippi actually emerged in the late 1930s from a bedside conversation Astrid had with her daughter Karin.  Karin was ill and as Lindgren sat with her, Karin suddenly said, "Tell me a story about Pippi Longstocking."   Astrid said she had no idea where the name came from but she created a tale as a response, and the rest, as they say …
Pippi opened the creative writing door for Lindgren to ultimately become the third most translated writer of all time – trailing only Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm – with more than 160 million “Pippi” books in print in 95 languages worldwide.
Lindgren’s writing career started in journalism, working for a small newspaper in her rural Swedish community.  She continued writing journalisticly as well as creatively for most of her long life.      She won numerous awards for her literature and her feature stories and following her death in 2002, the government of Sweden instituted the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in her honor.  It is the world's largest annual monetary award given for children's and youth literature.
“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood,” Lindgren once said.  “That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”

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The 'surprising' act of writing

“The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.” – Janette Turner Hospital
Born in Australia on this date in 1942, Hospital has lived most of her adult life in the U.S. and Canada, particularly since beginning her writing career in the late 1970s (with short stories) and early 1980s with her first novel, the award-winning The Ivory Swing.     Since then her numerous stories and novels – led by Borderline and Orpheus Lost – have won many international literary awards, including the Steele Rudd Award for Best Collection of Short Stories in 2012.      She’s also been a much sought-after speaker and has served as a professor of writing and as distinguished writer-in-residence at major universities in Australia, Canada, France, England and the U.S.
Hospital said that themes of dislocation and connection are constant in her work, and she likes to combine them with themes of moral choice and moral courage.  “I am always putting my characters into situations of acute moral dilemma to find out what they will do,” she said.  “I would like to think that my writing forces the reader to make inner moral and political choices and alignments, but does not tell the reader what such alignments should be.”

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Share their stories on Veterans Day

“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”– Czeslaw Milosz    First celebrated as Armistice Day to commemorate the end of World War I, our current “Veterans Day” is due to the efforts of Alvin King of Emporia, KS, who thought the day shouldn’t just honor the end of the first great war but should, instead, honor all U.S. veterans for their sacrifice and service and to remember their stories.    He was particularly moved to do something after his nephew died during World War II.  King’s idea caught fire in Emporia, which on Nov. 11, 1953, observed "Veterans" Day while the rest of the country still celebrated Armistice Day.   U.S. Rep. Ed Rees, also from Emporia, supported King’s idea and introduced a bill in Congress to officially change the name.  It was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also grew up in Kansas. 
All of the United States joined in celebrating that first national Veterans Day on Nov. 11, 1954.   When King died in 1960, he was buried in the one and only suit he owned and had worn to that White House signing ceremony.  In 2003, Congress adopted a resolution declaring Emporia “The founding city of Veterans Day” and recognizing King as the Day’s founder. 
Shortly after King’s death newly elected President John F. Kennedy, also a WWII veteran, shared these words on Veterans Day.  "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."

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