Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 497

Writing to be answerable

“The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.” – Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize winning writer Nadine Gordimer was born on this date in 1923 and became the first South African writer to win the world’s top writing award in 1991.  Recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity” she was a political and humanitarian force in South Africa for 60 years.
Active in the anti-apartheid movement, many of Gordimer's writings such as Burger's Daughter and July's Peoplewere banned.  She joined Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the days when that organization also was banned and was among the leading advocates for his release from prison.   She helped edit his famous trial speech “I Am Prepared To Die” and remained his close friend until his death.  She died just a few months later in 2014.
Gordimer’s first novel was published in 1953 and by the early 1960s she had gained both international acclaim and the ire of the government.  On several occasions she left to do visiting professorships in both Great Britain and the U.S. and it was while in the [image error]U.S. that she also became active in HIV/AIDS causes, something she further championed in her home country in her later years.  She died in 2014.
Virtually all of Gordimer's works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterization is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs. 
While Mandela hailed her willingness to stand up for what was right and just, she said the censorship she endured was life-scarring.  “Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it,” she said.  “It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.”

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Finding words for the puzzle

“I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.” – Paul Simon
This year Simon added the latest in a long list of honors and awards to his resume’ when he was named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the 100 greatest musicians who ever lived.  That came on the heels of being named one of the 100 greatest songwriters and as the first recipient of the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. 
But, of course, those awards pale in comparison to Time Magazine’s naming him one of the “100 People Who Shaped The World.”   Not too bad for the son of immigrant parents who grew up playing stickball in the New York streets.  While most people believe he started his musical career in the early 1960s, his musical life really began in 1952 at age 11 when he and neighbor Art Garfunkel first performed together.  By age 12 they had “a neighborhood hit” with his song “The Girl for Me” (perhaps the only song by an 11-year-old enshrined in the Library of Congress).
That led to hundreds of songs – among them multiple Grammy Award winners and mega-hits like “Sounds of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme,” “Homeward Bound,” and, of course, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”    He also wrote a number of hit songs for other artists, like “Red Rubber Ball” for the Cyrcle and “Someday One Day” for The Seekers.
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[image error] Simon’s poignant written words accompany some of the most memorable music ever written.  His are the words of our times and places and will resonate with us for generations to come.   He told an interviewer that writing the right words is “…like a puzzle … to express what the music is saying.” 
To pick just a couple Simon songs would be like trying to select two from a sweeping display case of the world’s best candies.  So, here are links to two – one with Garfunkel and one from his solo years – as tasty “starter” treats – “My Little Town;” and “Still Crazy After All These Years.”    Enjoy. 
https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=My+Little+Town+on+YouTube&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001
https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=Paul+Simon+on+YouTube&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001
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It's a feeling, don't you know

“Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualize what we know, but to implement how we feel.”– Margaret Atwood
Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist, Atwood celebrates her 76th birthday today and is still going strong, following the super-active writing life that she has had since age 16. 
The winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award (for The Handmaid’s Tale), her writing has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize five times, winning once (for The Blind Assassin), and she has been a finalist for Canada’s Governor General's Award several times, winning twice.   In 2001 she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community, she said writers should never feel constricted by one writing form or another.  “Genres aren’t closed boxes,” she said.  “Stuff flows … and should … back and forth across the (genre) borders all the time.”
Toward that end she has written blends of science fiction, adventure, fantasy, historical fiction, mystery and drama – and when she wanted some diversion, she switched to poetry, ending up with 15 published books of poetry in the process.   For her, she said, storytelling is the end all, and she loves both the process and the outcome.[image error]
“You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan,” she said.  “We come with it.”
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Adversity or success, both are helpful

“I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.” – Shelby Foote
Historian and novelist Shelby Foote is best known as the writer of the massive 3-volume history of the Civil War.   A son of the South who grew up in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South.
 Relatively unknown until his appearance in Ken Burns’ award-winning PBS documentary The Civil War (in 1990), he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives.”  Although he was not one of America's best-known fiction writers, he did write half-a-dozen novels and gain the admiration of his more famous peers—among them Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and his literary hero William Faulkner.  His book Follow Me Down is often compared to Faulkner’s writing.
Foote did all his writing by hand with an old-fashioned nib pen, disdaining the typewriter. “I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper. I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.”

Born on this date, he started writing as a high schoolsophomore and really never stopped for the next 75 [image error]years until his death in 2005.  His advice to beginners: “If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.”


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It's for the love of the work

“When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.”– William Kent Krueger
I first got to know St. Paul, Minn.-based mystery writer Krueger when he would stop over to visit with English classes at Augsburg College – set up by his friend and my fellow professor Kathy Swanson.  She’d ask me to sit in from time-to-time when she had interesting guest speakers and after the first time I heard and spoke with him about writing and his techniques, I was hooked on his writing.  That was just shortly after he had Iron Lake, the first of his Cork O’Connor series, out on the market.  With his primary protagonist being half Ojibwe (the other half Irish) I was amazed to find out that he didn’t have any Ojibwe blood, since he does a remarkable job of incorporating great detail about Ojibwe culture into his stories. 
Since then, Krueger – who sets his tales in north-central Minnesota – has written more than a dozen other O’Connor mysteries.  With each, I’ve learned so much more about the Ojibwe, something he says he very much enjoys researching and writing.
“Readers anticipate that a significant element of every story will be additional exposure to the ways of the Ojibwe,” he said. “The truth is that I enjoy this aspect of the work.  Although I have no Indian blood running through my veins, in college I prepared to be a cultural anthropologist, so exploring other cultures is exciting to me.”                                                                 William Kent Krueger[image error] Born on this date and raised in Wyoming, he also has this sort-of “Old West” feel running through the way his lawman/private investigator O’Connor operates, another wonderful element of his writing style.   And, I love his advice to beginning writers and have kept it as a mantra of my own.
“Write because you love the work,” he advised, “not because of what might come from it. The journey is the purpose. Very Zen-like, I know, but (for me) honest to God it's the truth.”
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Compelled to write

“I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.”– Rick Riordan 
Wise words from a terrific writer, who I’ve profiled before in this blog.   Enjoy your Sunday and the writing week ahead as you follow the compelling muse that directs you.[image error]                                                             Rick Riordan
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Waiting for 'that music'

“Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity.  That's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry; waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.”– C.K. Williams

American poet, critic and translator, Charles Kenneth “C.K.,” Williams won nearly every major poetry award including the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood, the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Repair, the 2003 National Book Award for The Singing, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.  In 2012 the film Tar depicted Williams’ life using segments of his poem by the same name.
Fellow poet Stanley Kunitz once wrote of him that, “C. K. Williams is a wonderful poet, in the authentic American tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, who tells us on every page what it means to be alive in our time.”
Williams, who died in September just shy of his 79th birthday, also was also an acclaimed [image error]translator, notably of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Euripides’ The Bacchae, as well as of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and the French poet Francis Ponge.  But, he said, it was the writing of his own poetry that gave him the most pleasure.
“When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry,” he said,  “ the writing of poems becomes incredibly pleasurable and addictive.”
SILENCE by C.K. Williams
The heron methodically pacing like an old-time librarian down the stream through the patch of woods at the end of the field, those great wings tucked in as neatly as clean sheets, is so intent on keeping her silence, extracting one leg, bending it like a paper clip, placing it back, then bending the other, the first again, that her concentration radiates out into the listening world, and everything obediently hushes, the ragged grasses that rise from the water, the light-sliced vault of sparkling aspens.
Then abruptly a flurry, a flapping, her lifting from the gravitied earth, her swoop out over the field, her banking and settling on a lightning-stricken oak, such a gangly, unwieldy contraption up there in the barkless branches, like a still Adam's-appled adolescent; then the cry, cranky, coarse, and wouldn't the waiting world laugh aloud if it could with glee?



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Growing a long-lasting legacy

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
Today is the birth date of Stevenson, who in his short life (he lived to just age 44) became one of the world’s most versatile and “translated” authors.   This Scottish-born writer left us everything from Treasure Island to Kidnapped to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a host of great characters like the pirate Long John Silver, and Jekyll and Hyde (also a lasting descriptive phrase).   
Stevenson’s creativity also included essays, short stories and poetry for both adults and children (A Child’s Garden of Verses – with lasting poems like My Shadow:  “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.”), and music.   An accomplished pianist, he wrote or arranged more than 120 original pieces for various combinations of flageolet, flute, clarinet, violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano, including ten songs written to his own poetry.   [image error]Robert Louis StevensonStevenson’s many travels led to his connection with American Fanny Osbourne – their love story becoming one for the ages.  For a great read, check out my good friend Mark Wiederanders’ novel Stevenson’s Treasure – a truly wonderful tale.

Stevenson always seemed to be able to connect with readers from all walks of life and when asked why, he simply said, “The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”  He wrote clearly what he meant, and the world clearly understood.

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Total concentration; nothing less

“Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.” – Carlos Fuentes 
Fuentes, one of Mexico’s most celebrated authors, always liked to say that he was “a literary animal” and that reading was at the forefront of everything he did.  “For me,” he once said, “everything ends in literature.”
Both a novelist and an essayist, his most recognizable works in the English-speaking world were The Old Gringo (also made into a movie) and Christopher Unborn.  When he died in 2012, the New York Times described him as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion [image error]of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s.”  Carlos Fuentes
The son of a Mexican diplomat, he was born in Panama City on this date in 1928 and literally traveled the globe with his parents before the age of 18.  For 6 of those years he lived in Washington, DC, becoming fluent in English in the process.    It was there he first became interested in writing and even wrote and published his own magazine, developing his essay writing style in the process. 
When asked for his advice on the writing process, he said the first question every writer should ask himself or herself is “Who am I writing for?”  Once that is established, he added, the rest is easy.  “Writing requires the total concentration of the writer; demands that nothing else be done except for that.”


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A duty to share the stories

“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”– Czeslaw Milosz 
With that quote in mind, I write this brief note today about Veterans Day and to accompany this  photo from my recent trip to Emporia, Kansas. 
 [image error]  First celebrated as Armistice Day, to commemorate the end of World War I, today’s observance as “Veterans Day” is due to the efforts of Alvin King of Emporia, 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.    He was particularly moved to do something after his nephew died during World War II and he wanted to be sure that he and his comrades were not forgotten. 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 to officially change the name.  It was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also grew up in Kansas.  King was on hand at the White House when Ike signed the bill – wearing his one-and-only suit, purchased for him by grateful veterans of both World War II and Korea. 
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 that suit he wore to the White House ceremony.  In 2003, Congress adopted a resolution declaring Emporia as “The founding city of Veterans Day,” and recognizing King as the Day’s founder. 
Just one more quote to commemorate as well as provide a thought for the day.  "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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