Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 16

White Privilege and a Career as a Children’s Author

She is my cousin and a dear friend, someone I love very much.  And she was defending me as part of the support for her argument. We had tumbled into a conversation about Black Lives Matter, specifically about the term “white privilege,” which offended her.  I have heard the same from some other white friends.  […]

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Be Patient Toward all that is Unsolved in your Heart

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way some distant day into the […]

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In the Eye of the Beholder

I’ve had cataract surgery recently, and I am amazed at the results.  Cataract surgery could be the poster child for Western medicine.  It so perfectly exemplifies what we’re good at . . . upgrading the body’s mechanics.  There’s not much in an old lady’s operating system that can be improved, but my vision is now […]

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A Big Juicy Creative Life

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and […]

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Forget about Voice

Everyone knows the term voice as it refers to a piece of writing.  Defining what voice means in our own work, though, is an amorphous task, more difficult than our instinctive knowing. If you’re a writer and you find yourself thinking about voice, about trying to achieve such a thing in your work, you are […]

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Precious suffering?

It is not suffering that is precious, but the concentric pearlescence with which we contain it. The raw grit of anguish will never be in short supply. There is enough of it in the happiest life to serve these instructive purposes, and there always will be. We are more sympathetic to Holocaust survivors than to […]

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Storytelling Animals

I once had an adult writing student who had devoted her adolescent years to a journal.  She wrote tens of thousands of words.  Not an unusual scenario, except for one thing.  Her journal wasn’t a recording of her own life.  Instead she journaled through a character she had made up! Where does this compulsion come […]

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Accept Sorrow

Accept sorrow—for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem—but know that in resistance there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive. Chris Hedges

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The Muddle of the Middle

“Well,” I said to myself, “the day has come.  Your career is over, at least that major part of your career that is writing novels for young people.  You have lost the energy, the spark that keeps you deeply engaged with a story, a character.  You have lost the drive that takes you—and your readers—to […]

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A Life Raft

The artist, if true to his or her vocation, recovers the past and explains the present. The artist is the true chronicler of who we were and where we came from. Culture, in times of distress, is not a luxury but a life raft. Chris Hedges

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