Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 7

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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Going Home

Thomas Wolfe said it. You can’t go home again. And yet, of course, you can.  It’s just that when you go back, home will have changed.  And, of course, you will have changed, too, so the place may not feel even remotely familiar. I’ve just been back, though, back to Oglesby, the small town in […]

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Between a Writer and a Reader

There is a profound belonging and community, an unbreakable bond, between a writer and a reader that resides in that creation we call a book.  A book is a place of communion.  A book is a place of encounter.  A book is where a dead word is resurrected and becomes a living thing, as alive […]

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Larger Hearts

Two weeks ago I posed a question that Karen Cushman had brought to her fellow children’s writers a couple of years ago.  How, in these confusing, troubling times, do you keep writing? I may have responded to Karen at the time, but if I did, what I wrote is lost somewhere in the bowels of […]

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Come Alive

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive, and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.   Howard Thurman

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Confusing and Troubling Times

I find it profoundly difficult these days to be a writer.  My inspiration and enthusiasm have been buried so far below an onslaught of awful news headlines and downright hate, trauma, and tragedy that I struggle to reach them.  What’s a girl to do?  In a world so woeful and broken, how can I dig beneath the heartbreak […]

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The Most Regretful People

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.   Mary Oliver

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“Marvelous!”

“Marvelous!”  That’s what the editor said.  She was describing my revision of Sunshine, the novel I have been immersed in—bogged down in would probably be a better description—for the last two years and more. There will be more work to do, of course.  I can often send a picture-book manuscript in clean.  But with a […]

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Nature’s Imperative

The only imperative that nature utters is: ‘Look. Listen. Attend.’ C. S. Lewis

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Home

I’ve never felt so old! Of course, I’ve never been so old, but then everyone can say that, even a six-year-old.  We are always, on any day, the oldest we have ever been. The difference, I suppose, is that today I know I’m old.  I know it in my bones.  And I understand in a […]

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