Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 28
October 6, 2011
Steve Jobs on Life & Death
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important…You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart…Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important have the courage to follow your heart and intuition…Everything else is secondary. (Steve Jobs)
Filed under: Uplifting Tagged: Steve Jobs Stanford commencement
October 5, 2011
Interview with an Icon, Part II
A critic once said of A Jest of God
that Rachel really wasn't worth writing about because she was no more interesting than anybody you might sit next to in the streetcar. And I thought that doesn't say much about the book but it says a lot about that critic. (- Margaret Laurence)
It's interesting to compare the 1966 interview with this 1978 NFB vignette of Margaret Laurence. Here she's a literary icon in her early 50′s with a great body of prize-winning work behind her.
The Diviners
, my favourite of her books, had been published 4 years prior, and she would write no more novels. However, ahead of her were still several children's books and a memoir, which was published posthumously. What struck me most in this interview was her respect for ordinary people and her ability to see the extraordinary in them.
Filed under: CanLit, Interesting, Literary Tagged: A Jest of God, Margaret Laurence video, The Diviners
Interview with Margaret Laurence Part II
A critic once said of A Jest of God
It's interesting to compare the 1966 interview with this 1978 NFB vignette of Margaret Laurence. Here she's a literary icon in her early 50′s with a great body of prize-winning work behind her.
The Diviners, my favourite of her books, had been published 4 years prior, and she would write no more novels. However, ahead of her were still several children's books and a memoir, which was published posthumously. What struck me most in this interview was her respect for ordinary people and her ability to see the extraordinary in them.
Filed under: CanLit, Interesting, Literary Tagged: A Jest of God, Margaret Laurence video, The Diviners
October 4, 2011
Interview with an Icon, Part I
In a sense writing a novel is a sort of discovery . You know more or less where you're headed but everything could change in the doing of it. And, you know, you can be very surprised. (- Margaret Laurence)
This video interview dates from 1966 when Margaret Laurence was 40 years old and on the verge of fame. The conversation ranges from the culture of independent, repressed Presbyterians to issues of Colonialism and African independence. She's smoking, which would later kill her, but I loved seeing her at this stage of her life and relating to what she says about writing.
Filed under: CanLit, Interesting, Literary Tagged: Margaret Laurence video
Interview with Margaret Laurence, Part I
In a sense writing a novel is a sort of discovery . You know more or less where you're headed but everything could change in the doing of it. And, you know, you can be very surprised. (- Margaret Laurence)
This video interview dates from 1966 when Margaret Laurence was 40 years old and on the verge of fame. The conversation ranges from the culture of independent, repressed Presbyterians to issues of Colonialism and African independence. She's smoking, which would later kill her, but I loved seeing her at this stage of her life and relating to what she says about writing.
Filed under: CanLit, Interesting, Literary Tagged: Margaret Laurence video
Should I Combine 2 Blogs?
Okay friends, I'd like your input. After just starting Canlit Rocks, I'm wondering if I am biting off more than I can chew (especially with a still broken wisdom tooth!). What would you advise: should I combine that blog with this one or keep on with two?
Filed under: Personal
October 2, 2011
My Memories of the Literary Triumverate
When I was a teenager, 3 great literary icons were coming into prominence, all of them women writers: Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.
Of these Margaret Laurence was the oldest, and her writing career was a relatively brief flash. Her best known books were written in one decade, her last novel published when she was only in her early 50′s. That book, The Diviners, was a favourite of mine because the main character wanted to be a writer (much as Emily Of New Moon
by L.M. Montgomery had been my favourite at the age of 10).
In the 1980′s, I was working as an accountant and the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League was one of my clients. The chair of the board, Norma Scarborough, was a veteran feminist and a close friend of Margaret Laurence's. I very much wanted to meet her, and thought of asking if I could be introduced, but by the time I was getting close to working up my courage to do so, Laurence had been diagnosed with lung cancer. (The next year she committed suicide.)
Born a few years after Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro also married young, divorced, and achieved acclaim as a writer in her 40′s. But unlike Laurence, Alice Munro's career has spanned 40 years. Fairly early in her career, she was reading in Montreal, my home town, and still very nervous when appearing in public. At least that was what I was told by a teacher of mine, who was hosting her. It didn't occur to me then to even ask if I could meet her.
Margaret Atwood lives right here in Toronto, in fact on the same street as a family friend of ours. Eight years younger than Alice Munro, her first book, Edible Woman
, came out in 1969, not long after Munro began publishing in 1968. Of the triumverate, Atwood's writerly life has been the most blessed: she started young and kept going strong, writing in numerous genres, including poetry and essays as well as different types of fiction. I did meet her once, at TWUC (The Writer's Union of Canada) but couldn't think of anything noteworthy to say when she turned around to murmur something to me about the meeting.
It's strange to think that someone else might be thinking along those lines about me. I've met a lot of people, readers and would-be writers, online and off-line at readings and similar events. It's a challenge to say something meaningful to people I don't know and have only a couple of minutes with. That's why I've seldom asked other writers to sign their books, and have found it hard to overcome my bashfulness in order to meet them.
Yet I still wish that real contact was possible. And so when I'm the writer that people are there to see, I keep trying to make it meangingful, a real moment between people whose hearts have touched each other through the words on a page. Maybe that's what we all need to remember, that we are connecting, that we know each other already, not on the surface, but underneath, in the places where stories are made and taken in.
Whatever the form, print or digital, this place is of deep importance. That's why people line up to get their books signed. It matters: keep writing my friends; keep reading.
You can find an interview with Margaret Laurence here.
Filed under: Literary, Personal Tagged: Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence
October 1, 2011
September 29, 2011
authors # 4 on happiest jobs list
Why were these jobs with better pay and higher social status less likely to produce happiness? Todd May writing in the New York Times argues that "A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile. The person living the life must be engaged by it.
via The Ten Happiest Jobs – Forbes.
Fascinating list: clergy #1 in happiness with their jobs while #1 in most hated jobs are people who are directors of IT.
Filed under: Interesting Tagged: work satisfaction
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