Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 21

The natural warmth that emerges

The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form. It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear. . . . these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring. These feelings that we’ve become so accomplished at avoiding […]

The post The natural warmth that emerges appeared first on Just Thinking.

May the Wind

May the wind always be at your back. (An Irish blessing) I understand the blessing and the intent behind it. “May you always have help along the way” is what it says. And who could argue with that? We all need help from time to time. But when it comes to the real thing—wind, I […]

The post May the Wind appeared first on Just Thinking.

Life’s most painful event also its greatest?

What you say of your life—that its most painful event was also its greatest—that is, so to speak, the secret theme of these pages, indeed the inner belief that gave rise to them. It is the conviction that what is greatest in our existence, what makes it precious beyond words, has the modesty to use […]

The post Life’s most painful event also its greatest? appeared first on Just Thinking.

Serendipity

Serendipity began my career as a writer for children and young-adults. My first novel was published in 1976, and in 1976 the young-adult field wanted what was being called “the new realism in children’s literature.” What can it be called but serendipity that new realism was exactly what I needed to write? (I’ll pause to […]

The post Serendipity appeared first on Just Thinking.

Despair for the World

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the […]

The post Despair for the World appeared first on Just Thinking.

Who Am I?

A woman, a lover of this precious, crumbling world, my own fleshly world crumbling, precious, too. An infant born to a mother who adored infants, who needed an infant forever; a too-soon awkward child; an adolescent struggling toward the salvation of competence; a wife, certain she knew how she should be, how he should […]

The post Who Am I? appeared first on Just Thinking.

To Love Life

The thing is to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it, and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it… Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet […]

The post To Love Life appeared first on Just Thinking.

Animals in Stories, Animals in the World

Who doesn’t love a puppy? Well, admittedly there are some folks who don’t, especially considering how difficult both ends of such creatures are to keep under control. So let’s rephrase the question: Who doesn’t love a puppy in a children’s story? Or even a frog or a toad, for that matter? Something happens to […]

The post Animals in Stories, Animals in the World appeared first on Just Thinking.

A New Voice

But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do […]

The post A New Voice appeared first on Just Thinking.

VCFA: A Place that Grows Children’s Writers

Interested in moving your career as a writer for children and young adults forward? Would you like to learn amidst the lush mountains of Vermont? Or as part of a sojourn in Bath, England? And then return home carrying a mentor in your pocket and all the support of an MFA program into your daily […]

The post VCFA: A Place that Grows Children’s Writers appeared first on Just Thinking.