Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 395

Bearing Witness To Life

“Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.”– Herta Müller

A Romanian-born German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Müller was born on this date in 1953.   Since the early 1990s she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Many of Müller's literary works address an individual's vulnerability under oppression and persecution, rooted in her experiences as one of Romania's German-speaking ethnic minority under the brutal dictator Ceaușescu.      Perhaps best-known among her many novels are The Passport and The Hunger Angel, along with several best-selling books of poetry and an award-winning book of essays, Hunger and Silk.
“I write in order to bear witness to life,” she said.  “What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.”


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In Love With Writing

“Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.” – Edna Ferber


Born this day in 1885, Edna Ferber was a novelist, short story writer and playwright, whose novels were wildly popular and won her a remarkable four Pulitzer Prizes – for So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron and Giant, the latter three also made into award-winning movies.  Show Boat also was adapted for the stage as a Broadway musical and Cimarronwon the Academy Award for Best Picture.  [image error]  Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons, demonstrating her belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty people have the best character.

“I like to look at all sides of people and be open to any idea,” she said.  “A closed mind is a dying mind.”

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'A Writer's Best Lover'

“Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.” – Edna Ferber


Born this day in 1885, Edna Ferber was a novelist, short story writer and playwright, whose novels were wildly popular and won her a remarkable four Pulitzer Prizes – for So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron and Giant, the latter three also made into award-winning movies.  Show Boat also was adapted for the stage as a Broadway musical and Cimarronwon the Academy Award for Best Picture.  [image error]  Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons, demonstrating her belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty people have the best character.

“I like to look at all sides of people and be open to any idea,” she said.  “A closed mind is a dying mind.” Share A Writer’s Moment with a friend by clicking the g+1 button below.

Verifying A Writer's Authenticity

“My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.” – Bryce Courtenay A South African novelist who also held Australian citizenship. Courtenay, born this day in 1933, became one of Australia's best-selling authors, although most of his notoriety came from his South African-based book The Power of One.     Published in 1989 and, despite Courtenay's fears that it would never sell, The Power of One quickly became one of Australia's best-selling books by any living author. The story was made into a film, as well as being re-released in an edition for children.The author of 23 books, mostly novels, Courtenay was one of Australia's most commercially successful authors. A career advertising director, he helped build his own success over the long term by promoting himself and developing a relationship with readers as much as marketing his books; for instance, he gave away up to 2,500 books free each year to readers he met in the street. [image error]  Many of his works are written from first person narrative, allowing the reader to put himself or herself into the lead role as if the story could become their own.  “I like to share my thoughts and perspectives,” he said.  “And remember, the only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.  Everything else belongs to us all.”




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A Unique Writing Formula

“If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.” – Neil Gaiman
English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films, Gaiman's work The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted 2014 Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards.  The story follows an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers events that began 40 years earlier.
A prolific (to say the least) writer, Gaiman has won some 100 top writing awards and is also one of the top speakers on writing, traveling the world to talk about the hows, wheres and whys of his craft. 
And he found an interesting way to get into the writing world, working as a journalist and focusing on reading and reviewing other writers’ books, all the while studying what made their work great and why he might like to try to attempt something like it himself. Thus, his "style" incorporates a sort-of "best of" look.                                                          "I always was a reader. I loved reading. Reading things gave me pleasure. I was very good at most subjects in school, not because I had any particular aptitude in them, but because normally on the first day of school they'd hand out schoolbooks, and I'd read them—which would mean that I'd know what was coming up, because I'd read it."  




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First Be A Good Reader

“I never know how to give advice to a writer because there's so much you could say, and it's hard to translate your own experience. But of course, I always try. The main thing that I usually end up saying is to read a lot. To read a great deal and to learn from that.” – Sue Monk Kidd

Author of a dozen top-selling books, Monk Kidd is perhaps best known for her novel The Secret Life of Bees, which tells the story the story of a white girl who runs away from home to live with her deceased mother's former black nanny, who now works as an independent bee-keeper and honey-maker with many of her sisters.  This terrific book – a wonderful study of relationships and understanding – has also been made into both a long-running Broadway play and popular movie.

Born on this date in 1948, Monk Kidd got her start in writing when a personal essay she wrote for a class was published in Guideposts, then reprinted in Readers’ Digest.  She went on to become a Contributing Editor at Guideposts and a regular writer for many other magazines and journals.

[image error]   A strong advocate for keeping daily journals, she not only writes down daily things about her life but also about her writing process.  “Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase,” she said. “In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.”


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Living Life In Poetry

“Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.”– Philip Larkin
Born on this date in 1922, Larkin was one of post-war England’s most famous poets, and was commonly referred to as “England’s other Poet Laureate” until his death in 1985.  Larkin’s best-known and most popular collections – The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows – present “a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry . . . can take comfort and delight.”  
For this weekend’s poem, here is Larkin’s,
     Afternoons Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.



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Writing For Growth, And Hope

“Each of my books is different from the last, each with its own characters, its own setting, its own themes. As a writer, I need the variety. I sense my readers do, too.” – Barbara Delinsky

Born on this date in 1945, Delinsky has authored dozens and dozens of romance novels, under her own name and under the pen names Bonnie Drake and Billie Douglass.  Her books have sold over 30 million copies worldwide and 20 have made the New York Times bestseller list. 
A native of Boston, Delinsky earned degrees from Tufts University and Boston College and got into writing “by fluke. My twins were four when, by chance, I happened on a newspaper article profiling three female writers. Intrigued, I spent three months researching, plotting, and writing my own book – and it sold.”  She writes primarily about emotional crises; everyday people facing not so everyday challenges.                                               A breast cancer survivor, she also has written two nonfiction books, including the mega-bestseller Secrets of the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors, with proceeds going toward cancer research. 
 “I believe in growth,” she said, “in myself and in the characters I create.”



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Drawn Into Life Page By Page

“I read, because one life is not enough, and in the page of a book I can be anyone.” – Richard Peck
Prolific Young Adult writer Peck, who was born in 1934 and died this past Spring, had the distinction of winning both a Newbery Medal (for his novel A Year Down Yonder) and the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for his cumulative contributions to YA literature.    
Peck’s career as a writer actually started when he was sidetracked from what he thought was going to be a career as a high school teacher.  He was happily teaching high school in the 1950s when he was transferred to a junior high to teach English.  Upset about the move, he decided to take time away from teaching to try writing, focusing on his observations about the junior high-aged students he didn’t want to teach.  "Ironically,” he said,  “it was my students who taught me to be a writer, even though I was hired to teach them."                               While his highest accolades are for his Newbery winner, I would recommend any of his 40-plus titles, particularly Amanda/Miranda.   It’s a twist on Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper story and the sinking of the Titanic – a gripping and heartfelt story.    Peck believed each book should be a question, not an answer and that before anything else it needed to be entertaining.
“A young adult novel ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.”


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Finding Your 'Comfortable' Voice

“The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.” – Anne Fadiman   Born on this date in 1953, Fadiman was a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilizationand has had a great career as a writer, editor and teacher of essays.  But it was her award-winning book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down that brought her the most acclaim (and many awards). Researched in a small county hospital in California, it examines a Hmong immigrant family and their cultural, linguistic, and medical struggles in seeking treatment for their epileptic child.                                  An intense reader as well as writer, she noted that she is grateful for electronics and how they have improved the lives of writers and readers alike.  But while she reads e-books, she prefers a text copy in her hands.
“There is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of association,” she said. “Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, I think it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.”



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