Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 415

Writing to 'create sunshine'

“It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.”– Romain Rolland
Born on this date in 1866, Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, and art historian who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915.  Also known as “The People’s Playwright,” Rolland's most significant contribution to the theatre might lie in his advocacy for a "popular theatre."   He won acclaim for his essay The People's Theatre (Le Théâtre du people).
His novels and works of nonfiction also were widely read and quoted, and he authored noted biographical works on German composer Ludwig von Beethoven and French poet and essayist Charles Péguy.  A professor as well as writer and critic, he and psychologist Sigmund Freud were good friends and longtime correspondents.  Rolland died in 1944, shortly after the publication of his book Péguy.                                           Rolland's dramas were staged by some of the most influential theatre directors of the 20th century, including Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, who directed the world première of Rolland's pacifist drama The Time Will Come.  

A lifelong pacifist, Rolland wrote from his home in occupied France during WWII, “I find war detestable, but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.”



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Taking risks, making strides

“If you sell yourself short before you even start, you'll never know how far you could have gone. Ambition is a wonderful thing and has gotten me farther than I ever thought I'd go.” – Carrie Vaughn

Born into a military family on this date in 1973, Vaughan is both a novelist and short story writer, author of the YA “Kitty Norville” series and of more than 60 stories for science fiction, fantasy and internet (zine) magazines.   She also is part of a writing team for the “Wild Card” Sci-Fi Superhero books, edited by Game of Thrones’author George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass (Both of who I had the opportunity to meet and discuss writing with at last Fall’s Historical Writers of America conference in Albuquerque).
A graduate of and writer-in-residence for the acclaimed Odyssey Writing Workshop, Vaughan earned her Master’s in English Literature from CU-Boulder and now makes her home in Boulder, CO.  She was recently honored (2017) as a Hugo Award finalist for her short story "That Game We Played During the War."                                              “Don't hold back in your writing,” is her advice for new writers.  “Take risks. Go ahead and tackle that crazy idea that you think will never fly, because that may be the one that makes you stand out from the crowd. Keep pushing the envelope.”

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Poetry mends the broken parts

“There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.”– Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Born on this date in 1945, Estés is the recipient of numerous awards for her life's work, including the first Joseph Campbell Keeper of the Lore Award for her books and many spoken word series.    She has been a featured speaker around the globe including a much lauded performance with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison at Carnegie Hall. 
A writer, post-trauma specialist, and a certified psychoanalyst, her many books include The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About that Which Can Never Die and her much honored Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype.
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious,” she said.  “If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”                                  “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”
 
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Mending the parts within our reach

“There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.”– Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Born on this date in 1945, Estés is the recipient of numerous awards for her life's work, including the first Joseph Campbell Keeper of the Lore Award for her books and many spoken word series.    She has been a featured speaker around the globe including a much lauded performance with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison at Carnegie Hall. 
A writer, post-trauma specialist, and a certified psychoanalyst, her many books include The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About that Which Can Never Die and her much honored Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype.
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious,” she said.  “If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”                                  “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”
 
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Managing Life's Travails

“Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.” – Nick Flynn

Born in Massachusetts on this date in 1960, Flynn is the author of two award-winning memoirs, a play, and a number of poetry collections, including My Feelingsand Some Ether, which earned him the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.
Flynn said he always had the urge to become a writer, but out of high school he tried a number of other things before taking the plunge.  After working as an electrician for several years, he spent some time at sea, including serving as a ship’s captain before taking on a position at a homeless shelter in Boston.  While there, he resumed his studies and his writing.        After studying on a two-fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he earned his MFA from New York University and began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Project.  Today he teaches creative writing at the University of Houston while still living part time in Brooklyn, NY.
Some Ether, his debut work in 2000, focuses on his tumultuous family life and includes a detached yet affecting look at childhood and trauma.  “Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are,” Flynn said. “It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.”


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Making the Best of Life's Travails

“Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.” – Nick Flynn

Born in Massachusetts on this date in 1960, Flynn is the author of two award-winning memoirs, a play, and a number of poetry collections, including My Feelingsand Some Ether, which earned him the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.
Flynn said he always had the urge to become a writer, but out of high school he tried a number of other things before taking the plunge.  After working as an electrician for several years, he spent some time at sea, including serving as a ship’s captain before taking on a position at a homeless shelter in Boston.  While there, he resumed his studies and his writing.        After studying on a two-fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he earned his MFA from New York University and began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Project.  Today he teaches creative writing at the University of Houston while still living part time in Brooklyn, NY.
Some Ether, his debut work in 2000, focuses on his tumultuous family life and includes a detached yet affecting look at childhood and trauma.  “Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are,” Flynn said. “It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.”


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The Resonating Power of Words

“One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.” – Gloria Naylor
Born in New York City on this date in 1950, Naylor was a professor and novelist best known for The Women of Brewster Place and Mama Day.  She died from a heart attack in 2016.
 The daughter of sharecroppers from Mississippi who moved to New York to seek a better life, she grew up in Harlem and became the first member of her family to graduate from high school and attend college.  Even though Naylor's mother had little education, she loved to read, and encouraged her daughter to read and keep a journal.   Naylor started writing as a teenager, filling countless notebooks with her stories, poems and observations that formed the basis for her later writing.                                            While a student at Brooklyn College, she became immersed in the works of African-American female authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison and began writing stories centered on the lives of African-American women.  That led to her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which won the National Book Award for Best First Novel.
A teacher as well as writer, Naylor encouraged young writers to share their own life stories as a way to begin writing.  “Not only is your story worth telling,” she advised, “but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.”



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Attached at Life's Corners

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” – Virginia Woolf   Born on Jan. 25, 1882, English writer Virginia Woolf has often been credited with developing “stream of consciousness” writing genre', alongside her contemporaries James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.  Both a feminist and a modernist, her novels often ignored traditional plots to follow the inner lives and musings of her characters.   Her writing had (and has) many admirers and probably an equal number of haters.  In her own time (she died in 1941), her writing was banned (for a wide range of reasons) by some countries, including Adolf Hitler's Germany.    Her most well known works are To The Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own. 
A great essayist as well as novelist, she once noted “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”                                    But it was fiction writing where Woolf made her lasting mark and for which she is still studied today.  She said she found herself intrigued by and drawn into writing fiction because of how it so keenly wove together thoughts and reality.  “Fiction,” she said,  “is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.  Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”


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Power, Energy & Positive Thinking

  “Thoughts have power; thoughts are energy. And you can make your world or break it by your own thinking.”– Susan L. Taylor
Born on this date in 1946, Taylor is a writer and editor who helped grow the African-American magazine Essenceinto a force in American journalism.  During her tenure as editor-in-chief (from 1981-2000) she was called “the most influential black woman in journalism” by American Libraries magazine.
After starting at Essence as a freelance fashion and beauty editor, she simultaneously raised a family and went to night school at Fordham University where she earned her Bachelor's degree.   At the same time she helped produce the magazine's national television program and started Essence Books.   Her monthly inspirational column, "In the Spirit,” was one of the magazine’s most popular features, leading to 3 volumes of selected columns, all national bestsellers.
Among Taylor’s many awards are the Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women;         the Matrix Award from New York Women in Communication; and the Henry Johnson Fisher Award from The Magazine Publishers of America – the industry’s highest honor.  She was the first African-American woman to earn that honor.   In 2002, Taylor was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame
“We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly,” Taylor said.  “Spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order.”  

Building Worlds; Creating Characters

“Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story's characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That's why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.” – Tony Bradman
Born in a suburb of London on this date in 1954, Bradman gravitated to reading fantasies while still in primary school; started writing when he was in college (at Queens’ College, Cambridge where he earned his Master of Arts degree); and became a full time writer of children’s lit. and fantasy books of his own in the 1980s.
After college his first work was a both a music writer and children’s book reviewer for Parents magazine before beginning to write children's literature in 1984. Today, he is the author of more than 50 books for young people, led by his wildly popular Dilly the Dinosaur series, which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide.
Bradman said he first “discovered” books and stories by reading Thomas the Tank Engine stories, and then gravitating to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.  “That,” he said, “really got me hooked.”           “I loved words and language, but the key thing for me then – as it is now – was story,” Bradman said.   “I love the feeling of being drawn into a story, the delicious sense of tension that comes from wanting to know what is going to happen next and almost being afraid to find out. That happens when you read the best stories – and as I found out, it can happen when you write a story of your own, too.”
  
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