Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 3
March 17, 2020
Pandemic
What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when []
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March 10, 2020
The Lonely Prawn
It never surprises me when it happens. In fact, after nearly fifty years as a children’s writer, it usually gives me a good laugh. What am I talking about? The potshots “grown-up” writers love to take at anything written for the young. I watched the film Wonder Boys the other evening. Re-watched it would be […]
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March 3, 2020
Be of Good Cheer
Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may cometomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. […]
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February 25, 2020
A Writer’s Most Creative Act
I’ve said it before and I still believe it, so I might as well say it again. Letting go can be a writer’s most creative act. And the most difficult, too. I’ve offered this piece of advice to my students many times, but each time I do I’ve been reminding myself as well, hoping when […]
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February 18, 2020
Observations and Curiosity
Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d have never found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of my father’s—believing as he […]
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February 11, 2020
The Walking Solution
I have long known that if all the keyboards were to disappear off the face of the Earth my career would be over. I don’t know why, but the act of pushing words through a pencil onto a piece of paper has always been painfully difficult for me. Until I learned to type, my stories […]
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February 4, 2020
Look at the View
I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island many years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the homeless suffer in the winter months. He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me […]
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January 28, 2020
Both Science and Story
“The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains.” That statement is part of a passage I returned to again and again in my multiple readings of a fascinating book called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli, in that passage, talks first about “the […]
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January 21, 2020
Fixing the Entire World
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It […]
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January 14, 2020
No Answer at All
The last time I wrote here was New Years’ Eve, and I found myself musing on war, on the privilege of having lived a life essentially untouched by war. There have been so many other privileges, too, privileges I have too often taken for granted. But that one, the one in which I have never […]
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