Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 399

The Tricks to Writing Biography

“To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.”– Blake Bailey

Born in Oklahoma on this date in 1963, Bailey is widely known for his literary biographies, especially of writer John Cheever.  He’s also editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels.  Bailey’s book, Cheever:  A Life, won numerous awards, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
Bailey also has earned acclaim for a series of articles he wrote on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – which cost him and his family their house and most of their possessions – and for his memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait, another multi-award winner for the prolific author.                                           Bailey’s advice for writers is simple:  “If possible,” he said,  “be funny.”

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Poems Teach Us How To Feel

“Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.”– Donald Hall
Hall – onetime Poet Laureate of the U.S. – was a prolific, award-winning man of letters widely admired for his sharp humor and painful candor about nature, mortality, baseball and the distant past.  Author of 50 books, including 22 books of verse, Hall died this week at age 89.            For Saturday’s Poem, here is Hall’s
         An Old LifeSnow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day's lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.


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Facing Down Writing Obstacles

“Everyone has to face obstacles. Everybody has to face hurdles. It's what you do with those that determines how successful you're going to be.”– Craig Sager
Sager, born on this date in 1951, is best-known for his having worked as a TNT Sports sideline reporter who paced the floors of the National Basketball Association, as he invariably sported a specimen from his vast collection of preposterously garish jackets and suits.  A Dec. 13, 2016 inductee of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, he died from leukemia just two days later.
A native of Batavia, Ill., he grew up loving sports and writing and was first published on the national scene as a high school sophomore.   Shortly before his death he noted, “I'm a kid from the small Illinois town of Batavia, who grew up on the Chicago Cubs and made sports his life's work, although there's never been a day where it actually seemed like work.”
A graduate of Northwestern, he started his career as a $95-a-week reporter for a small station in Florida and ultimately served in almost every sports broadcast capacity, including play-by-play at the NBA finals and the Olympics.  The National Academy of Television Arts and Science posthumously awarded Sager with his first Sports Emmy Award for "Outstanding Sports Personality, Sports Reporter" at the 2017 Emmy Ceremony.                                          Noted for his hope-filled attitude, Sager once remarked, “Hope is not just... out in the sky, or accepting the facts or reality. Hope is having optimistic, positive expectations.” 

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The 'Nourishment' of Writing

“When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It's nourishing; it's rejuvenating.” – Aimee Bender
Born on this date in 1969, Bender is both a novelist and short story writer who studied creative writing at the University of San Diego and California Irvine then went into simultaneous careers as a writer and teacher.  She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and was Director of the USC PhD in Creative Writing & Literature for several years.  She enjoys writing, she said, because “The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.”                  Known for her stories about young people, Bender said, “I love to write about people in their 20s. It's such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.”  She is the winner of two Pushcart Prizes, and her novel An Invisible Sign of My Own, was named as a Los Angeles Times “Pick of the Year.”    Her collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, spent several months on both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists.

While she has done several novels, she said she prefers short stories.  “Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.”



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A 'Kinship' Of Readers

“When I write, I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don't know each other but each of whom, when they read my book, feels at home in it. So I write for those readers. It's almost a sense of writing for a specific person, but it's a specific person who I don't know.”– Teju Cole  Born on this date in 1975 to Nigerian parents living in Michigan, where his father was studying for an advanced degree at Western Michigan, Cole grew up in Nigeria.  He returned to America in 1993 to do his own education and begin his writing and artistic career (he’s also a noted, award-winning photographer). 
Author of the novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and the novel, Open City, Cole also wrote an award winning essay collection, Known and Strange Things.  Author Salmon Rushdie has called Cole “one of the most gifted writers of his generation.”  Cole is a regular contributor to many leading U.S. publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Transition, and The New Inquiry.  His monthly column for The New York Times Magazine, "On Photography," was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2016.             His advice to young writers is advice similar to that given by many established writers.                                      “The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing. You know, they really badly want to write a book but they are not writing it. The only advice I can give them is to just write it, get to the end of it. And, you know, if it's not good enough, write another one.”

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Images 'Dancing In His Mind'

“My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?” – Yann Martel
Born in Spain on this date in 1963, Martel is now a Canadian citizen and perhaps best known for his multi-award winning novel, Life of Pi, the international phenomenon that has sold more than 12 million copies and been translated into 50 languages.  The book spent more than a year on both the New York Times and The Globe and Mail bestseller lists and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie directed Ang Lee.
Martel started writing while studying at Canada’s Trent University and broke onto the writing scene with several successful short stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  He credits the Canada Council for the Arts in fostering his success, awarding him two grants in the ‘90s that gave him time and resources to create many works, including Life of Pi.                                  Martel said he enjoys history and using it in his writings.  “Most of us get our history through story,” he said.  His most recent success is the 2016 novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, a tale of three characters in Portugal in three different time periods, who cope with love and loss each in their own way.  He said he encourages writers, regardless of their genre choices, to first write what most interests them.
“Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something,” he said,  “and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.”



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Writing Everyday Life; Sharing History

“When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.” – Kathryn Lasky

Lasky, who was born on this date in 1944, grew up in Indianapolis where she was encouraged to become a writer by her mother at an early age “because of my vivid imagination.”  While she didn’t start writing early, she got very interested in it while an undergrad at the University of Michigan, majoring in English and studying any type of writing that was offered.  She combined that love with a love of kids, earning an advanced degree in early childhood education.
To date, her writing career, which began at a magazine but then was “on hold” while she taught school, has produced over 100 books of all types, but many of them written for children.  Among her numerous awards is the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature.                                       “I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind,” she said about what inspires her diverse writing repertoire.  “I often like to choose historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.”   Lasky’s latest “hit” is the 2017 historical fiction Night Witches, based on women pilots from the Soviet Union’s WWII 588th Night Bomber Regiment.
“To me,” she said, “the most important thing is to tell a good story. If I can do that, I think that enlightenment, respect of nature, etc. follows.”



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'Creating' A World With Poetry

“We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”– Anne Carson

Carson, born on this date in 1950, is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and Professor of Classics, who has taught at Montreal’s McGill University, and at the University of Michigan and Princeton.   She holds the distinction of winning three of the most distinguished and richest writing awards – the Guggenheim, the MacArthur, and the Lannan.                                For Saturday’s Poem, here is Carson’s
Short Talk on Chromo-Luminarism
      Sunlight slows down Europeans. Look at all those
      spellbound people in Seurat. Look at Monsieur,
     sitting deeply. Where does a European go when he
     is ‘lost in thought'? Seurat has painted that
     place—the old dazzler! It lies on the other
     side of attention, a long lazy boatride from here.
     It is A Sunday rather than A Saturday afternoon
     there. Seurat has made this clear by a special
     method. "Ma méthode," he called it, rather testily,
     when we asked him. He caught us hurrying through
     the chill green shadows like adulterers. The
     river was opening and closing its stone lips.
     The river was pressing Seurat to its lips.


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'Creating' Our World With Poetry

“We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”– Anne Carson

Carson, born on this date in 1950, is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and Professor of Classics, who has taught at Montreal’s McGill University, and at the University of Michigan and Princeton.   She holds the distinction of winning three of the most distinguished and richest writing awards – the Guggenheim, the MacArthur, and the Lannan.                                For Saturday’s Poem, here is Carson’s
Short Talk on Chromo-Luminarism
      Sunlight slows down Europeans. Look at all those
      spellbound people in Seurat. Look at Monsieur,
     sitting deeply. Where does a European go when he
     is ‘lost in thought'? Seurat has painted that
     place—the old dazzler! It lies on the other
     side of attention, a long lazy boatride from here.
     It is A Sunday rather than A Saturday afternoon
     there. Seurat has made this clear by a special
     method. "Ma méthode," he called it, rather testily,
     when we asked him. He caught us hurrying through
     the chill green shadows like adulterers. The
     river was opening and closing its stone lips.
     The river was pressing Seurat to its lips.


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Persistence Leads To Excellence

“Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.”– Octavia Butler
Born on this date in 1947, Butler was a multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards for her science fiction writing.  And in 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur foundation award.
The daughter of a housemaid and shoeshine man, she also was one of the first – if not the first – African-American SciFi writers and definitely the first female African-American in the field.  A shy child who avoided socializing whenever possible, she immersed herself in reading and got hooked on fairy tales and horse stories before gravitating to popular SciFi magazines such as Amazing Stories.  “No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction,” she said.  “It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.”

By age 12 she was formulating ideas for stories that would work themselves into a series that in the 1970s became known as her Patternist tales:  Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, and Survivor.  They were followed by a string of successful short stories and novellas before she cemented her place in writing history with the two-book series Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, earning the prestigious MacArthur in the process.                                          “You don't start out writing good stuff,” Butler said shortly before her early death from a stroke (at age 58). “You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits for any writer is persistence.”

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