Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 393

Extolling Literary Social Justice

“I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.” – Jonathan Kozol 

Born on Sept. 5, 1936 Kozol is an American writer, educator, and activist best known for his books on public education in the United States.

Death at an Early Age,  his first non-fiction book, is a description of his first year as a teacher in the Boston Public Schools. It was published in 1967 and won the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion.  It has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.  

      His book Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America received the Robert F. Kennedy Book award and the Conscience-in-Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.   And those were just two of his many books and essays. [image error]“I don't know if anything I write will endure," Kozol said,  "but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.” 



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Literary Social Justice At Its Finest

“I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.” – Jonathan Kozol 

Born on Sept. 5, 1936 Kozol is an American writer, educator, and activist best known for his books on public education in the United States.

Death at an Early Age,  his first non-fiction book, is a description of his first year as a teacher in the Boston Public Schools. It was published in 1967 and won the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion.  It has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.  

      His book Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America received the Robert F. Kennedy Book award and the Conscience-in-Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.   And those were just two of his many books and essays. [image error]“I don't know if anything I write will endure," Kozol said,  "but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.” 



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Drawn To Complicated Tales

“As a writer, the best mindset is to be unafraid.”– Malcolm Gladwell
While reading my first Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers: The Story of Success, I couldn’t wait to share things from it with anyone who would listen.  Thus, when Gladwell’s next book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, was released, I rushed to get that one, too, and was not disappointed. 
Gladwell, born on this date in 1963, is a Canadian journalist (born in England) whose books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences.  He also makes frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology.  While that might sound dry, it’s absolutely the opposite and some of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking reading you might encounter.
Also optimistic.  “All my books are optimistic,” Gladwell said.  “I wrote my first book when I was in my late 30s, and I had so much optimism to share by that time.”  He said he may have gone through the angst of youth, but he didn’t write about it.     He has written 5 books now and all have been on the New York Times bestseller list.   He has been a regular for The New Yorker since 1996 where most of his stories have originated.
When asked about the process behind his writing, he said "I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is, I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap.  Actually, I've had the most un-traumatic life a human being can have.  But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.” 

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The Poems Happening Around Us

“The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.” – Rita Dove

Born in August 1952, Dove is both a poet and essayist who served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in the mid-1990s.  A native of Ohio, she now lives with her family in Charlottesville, VA.        “I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life,” she said.  “It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.”  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Dove’s,
Golden OldieI made it home early, only to get
stalled in the driveway-swaying
at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune
meant for more than two hands playing.
The words were easy, crooned
by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover
a pain majestic enough
to live by. I turned the air conditioning off,
leaned back to float on a film of sweat,
and listened to her sentiment:
Baby, where did our love go?-a lament
I greedily took in
without a clue who my lover
might be, or where to start looking.


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Taking Care of the Little Things

“It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.”– Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Born in Massachusetts on this date in 1844, Phelps was the daughter of one of the nation’s leading theologians, the Rev. Dr. Austin Phelps, and the writer Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps, author of a series of books for girls called The Kitty Brown stories.  Rev. Phelps also was a noted writer, his works becoming standard textbooks for Christian theological education and still in print today.
The younger Elizabeth had a storytelling gift even as a child and by age 13 had had stories published in Youth's Companion and many Sunday school publications.   Prominent literary figures like John Greenleaf Whittier lauded her early writings which put her on the path to author a remarkable 57 volumes of fiction, poetry and essays in her lifetime. 
Her most popular novel, The Gates Ajar – her vision of what Heaven might be like and published right after the Civil War – was a runaway bestseller and established her as a leading writer and a well-known speaker advocating for social reform and women’s rights.      Her1877 book, The Story of Avis, was way ahead of its time, focusing on issues that would be among the leading feminist causes at the end of the 19thand beginning of the 20th centuries.
“Happiness must be cultivated,” she advised shortly before her death in 1911.  “It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.”



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Writing 'Life With Its Teeth Out'

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.” – Janet Frame
Born in August of 1924, Nene Janet Paterson Clutha was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame, authoring novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, essays and several bestselling nonfiction books.
After dealing with depression and anxiety and spending several years of hospitalization as a young adult, Frame decided to start anew by traveling abroad.  In London, she began therapy with London doctor Robert Hugh Cawley, who encouraged her to pursue what would become one of the great writing careers.  She later dedicated 7 of her novels to Cawley.          During her lifetime (she died in 2004), Frame's work garnered numerous literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Carpathians.   Also a gifted writer of nonfiction, she was one of the most widely published essayists of the late 20thCentury and two of her nonfiction books, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City, earned Book of the Year Awards in several nations.
Noted for her hard-hitting realism, she once noted, “I like to see life with its teeth out.”



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Writing In Imagination's Cathedrals

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.” – Janet Frame
Born in August of 1924, Nene Janet Paterson Clutha was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame, authoring novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, essays and several bestselling nonfiction books.
After dealing with depression and anxiety and spending several years of hospitalization as a young adult, Frame decided to start anew by traveling abroad.  In London, she began therapy with London doctor Robert Hugh Cawley, who encouraged her to pursue what would become one of the great writing careers.  She later dedicated 7 of her novels to Cawley.          During her lifetime (she died in 2004), Frame's work garnered numerous literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the novel, The Carpathians.   Also a gifted writer of nonfiction, she was one of the most widely published essayists of the late 20thCentury and two of her nonfiction books, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City, earned Book of the Year Awards in several nations.
Noted for her hard-hitting realism, she once noted, “I like to see life with its teeth out.”



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Saluting The Great Neil Simon*

“Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.”– Neil Simon
  Simon, who died earlier this week at the age of 91, grew up during the Great Depression, a time that was a great shaper of not only his life but also his art.  Writing “life” became the grist for his creative mill, beginning with work on comedy scripts for radio and then gravitating to the Broadway stage in the early 1960s. 
As one of America’s most prolific stage and screenwriters, he wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, earning more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.   After breaking onto the playwriting scene with Come Blow Your Horn (in 1961), Simon won his first Tony for the long-running, and one of the most widely performed plays in history, The Odd Couple.   
The first playwright to earn 15 “Best Play” awards, he also was given a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Lost in Yonkers.    In 2006 he was presented America’s top humor award, the Mark Twain Prize.  And, Simon was the first living playwright to have a Broadway theater named in his honor (now, of course, in his memory).   

        Literary Critic Robert Johnson said that while humor was Simon’s forte’, “(Simon’s plays) have given us a rich variety of entertaining, memorable characters who portray the human experience, often with serious themes."   Simon says his willingness to try new things was key to his success.    “If no one ever took risks,” he said,  “Michelangelo probably would have painted the Sistine floor.”

           *A variation of this blog post first appeared this past July 4th on the anniversary of Simon’s birthdate in 1927.

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A Thought For The Day

 ... And Week

                      “Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.” – Ben Okri (B. 1959)

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Creating 'Room' For Your Writing

“Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin”– Virginia Euwer Wolff
Not to be confused with British author Virginia Woolf, Euwer Wolff, born this day in 1937, is an American author of children's literature.   Her award-winning series Make Lemonadefeatures a 14-year-old girl named LaVaughn, who babysits for the children of a 17-year-old single mother.  True Believer, the second in the three-book series (they’re not really a trilogy), won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.   
Wolff said she uses her own teenage years as the foundation for her writing.  “The teenage years are the years to examine faith - the need to be independent and the need to be anchored,” she said. “It’s a time to ask, ‘Who made all this? And what do I have to do with it?’”
She does her creative writing slowly.  “No one writes as slowly as I do, I'm convinced,” she said.  “It's so hard for me. I learn slowly; I make decisions at a snail's pace.”                                        “I work early in the morning,” she noted, “before my nasty critic gets up - he rises about noon. By,  then I've put in much of a day's work.”
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