From The Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of the writer who said, “My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.” Thornton Wilder (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). His father was a diplomat, so Wilder and his four brothers and sisters moved back and forth between Asia and the United States. His parents were supportive, but sometimes overbearing. They dictated what Wilder did with his time, and made him work on farms in the summer so that he would be more well-rounded. They decided where he would go to college: to Oberlin, in Ohio, and then to Yale.

After some time in Rome, Wilder got a job teaching French at a boys’ boarding school. In 1926, Wilder spent the summer at MacDowell Colony, a writers’ retreat in New Hampshire, and he started work on his second novel. It was set in the Spanish colonial era of the 18th century — the story of a bridge that collapses in Lima, Peru, while five people are crossing it. The collapse is witnessed by a Franciscan friar, who becomes obsessed by the tragedy and tries to figure out why those five people had to die. Wilder finished it less than a year later and sent it off to his publisher, who almost turned it down, complaining that it was written “for a small over-cultivated circle of readers.” But when The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) was published, it was an immediate success. It won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize, and by that time, it had sold nearly 300,000 copies and been through 17 printings.

Wilder earned enough from The Bridge of San Luis Rey to quit his job and build a house for himself, his parents, and his sisters in Hamden, Connecticut. He called it “the house the bridge built.” That house was his official residence for the rest of his life.

In 1962, Wilder was 65 years old, a famous writer. He was best known for his plays, like his Pulitzer-winning Our Town (1938) and The Matchmaker (1955), which was adapted into the musicalHello, Dolly!. He had not written a novel for almost 20 years. He was tired of being in the limelight, and he wanted to escape his comfortable life in Connecticut, so Wilder got in his Thunderbird convertible and headed southwest. The car broke down just outside of Douglas, Arizona, a town on the Mexican border, and that’s where Wilder stayed for a year and a half. He was happy to be somewhere where nobody knew much about him or his writing. He rented an apartment with one bed for himself and one for all his papers. During the days he wrote, read, and took walks, and in the evenings he hung around the bar asking questions — so many questions that everyone called him “Doc” or “Professor.” When he left Douglas at the end of 1963, he had a good start on a novel. In 1967 he published it as The Eighth Day, and it won a National Book Award.

He said, “There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.”

And: “The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.’ And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”

 

From the Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of of writer Émile Zola (books by this author), born in Paris in 1840. His father was an Italian engineer, and he died when Émile was seven, leaving the family to get by on a small pension. Émile’s mother hoped he would become a lawyer, but he failed the qualifying examination, and so he took a series of clerical jobs. He also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers.

In his early career, Zola generally followed the Romantic Movement in literature, but he later began a writing style he dubbed naturalism, for which he is best known. He defined naturalism as “nature seen through a temperament” and was inspired by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1839) to apply scientific principles of observation to the craft of fiction. Between 1871 and 1893, he wrote a 20-novel series called Les Rougon-Macquart about different members of the same fictional family during France’s Second Empire. He wrote of this project: “I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world.” The most famous books from the cycle are The Drunkard (1877), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885).

He was also involved in the famous Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongfully accused of passing military secrets to Germany and imprisoned on Devil’s Island. Evidence later came out that strongly implicated another man, but the evidence was suppressed to protect the original verdict. Zola published an open letter on January 13, 1898, entitled J’Accuse…!, on the front page of Paris daily L’Aurore. In it he accused the French army of obstruction of justice and anti-Semitism. He was convicted of criminal libel on February 7, but fled to England before he could be imprisoned, wearing only the clothes on his back. The following year, the government offered him a pardon, which he accepted, even though doing so implied that he was guilty. He was finally exonerated of all charges in 1906, four years after his accidental death of carbon monoxide poisoning from a stopped-up chimney.

I want to read Émile Zola’s A Lady’s Paradise.

 

John Green on the Boston Marathon Bombing

John Green comments on Flags and Helpers in light of the bombing.

 

Good Stories: What Christian Writers Can Offer

Yep, Barabara Nicolosi, founder of Act One and professional screenwriter, is right. I agree that we need to work and think really hard to offer the world the sort of stories Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Françoise Mauriac, Dostoevsky and Victor Hugo offered. But it would be worth it.

This weekend I finish my library class and start writing in earnest. Promise.

 

From the Writer’s Almanac

Theodore Roethke (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s the birthday of poet Theodore Roethke (books by this author), born in Saginaw, Michigan (1908). His father, Otto, and his uncle Charles ran a floral company that their own father had started. The brothers had large greenhouses in their backyards, and young Theodore spent his days weeding and harvesting moss for floral baskets. Many years later, he wrote to a friend: “The greenhouse — my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.”

Roethke graduated from high school and college and went on to graduate school at Harvard. He had always loved to write, and now he started writing poetry. One night while walking through Harvard yard, he spotted a respected professor and approached him with his work. The professor invited Roethke to his office the next day, and after reading his poems, exclaimed, “Any editor who wouldn’t buy this is a fool!” Roethke was overwhelmed: “I felt I had come to the end […] of a trail. I had learned how to get high grades, but that seemed meaningless. Now I didn’t have to go into advertising […] or the law. I wasn’t just a spoiled sad snob. I could write and people I respected printed the stuff.”

The Great Depression took its toll, and Roethke dropped out of Harvard to teach at Lafayette College, and finally the University of Washington. In recommending him for the University of Washington, the president of Bennington wrote: “He is an extremely complex, temperamental and somewhat eccentric person. If the University of Washington can take his eccentric personality, it will acquire one of the best teachers I have ever seen.”

Roethke was a big man, 225 pounds. He was fascinated by gangsters, and he even talked like one — he had a deep voice, a growl. He was manic-depressive, and he often drank too much. He wore fur coats and drove big cars. As a teacher, he was persuasive and emotional. When he wanted his students to write a description of a physical action, he told them to describe what he was about to do, then climbed out the window onto a narrow ledge and inched his way around the whole classroom, making faces at every window. He insisted students memorize poems so that they would have something to call on when they were going through a tough period in life. He continued teaching throughout his career.

His books of poetry include The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), The Waking (1953), and The Far Field (1964).

Related articles

• Heather McHugh Is Giving the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading at UW on Thursday (slog.thestranger.com)
• Pretzels and Bullfights: The Waking (dversepoets.com)
• Poetic Spotlight: The Waking and Saginaw Song (cianphelan.wordpress.com)
• In A Dark Time (by Theodore Roethke) (tranceworldnow.wordpress.com)
• Postal Service Immortalizes Literary Giants (sys-con.com)
• Rhymes with Everett finds the words that speak to us (heraldnet.com)

 

I Made It!

I finished the 100 pages for Script Frenzy 2012. Yep, 100 pages done.

It got me to find time for writing. But as I always say frenzy is the key word.

I’ll be the first to say that it’s a very rough piece.

As of today, 16,147 writers have written 244002 pages.

Related articles

• Script Frenzy Day 1 (diamandmoon.com)
• Script Frenzy! (procrastinatingpeople.wordpress.com)
• Script Frenzy Progress (diannwrites.wordpress.com)
• So about that whole Script Frenzy thing . . . (thotplaces.com)
• Script Frenzy (keystrokesandwordcounts.wordpress.com)
• Review first week Script Frenzy (diamandmoon.com)
• Script Frenzy: Are you in? (sedenman.wordpress.com)

 

From The Writer’s Almanac

Old washing machine in Bunratty, Ireland (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Beware!

I can’t fathom someone railing against refrigeration or washing machines. I get the preference for fresh food, but what about dairy? Must we get milk and cheese daily?

Today is the birthday of the poet R.S. Thomas, born Ronald Stuart Thomas in Cardiff, Wales (1913). Most of his poems were about the Welsh landscape and its people. He was an Anglican clergyman, as well as a poet, until 1978, when he retired and devoted himself to the cause of Welsh nationalism. He often grew frustrated with his fellow countrymen, though, blaming them for letting their culture fade away into history. In his poem “Welsh Landscape,” he called them “an impotent people, sick with inbreeding / worrying the carcass of an old song.” He didn’t learn the Welsh language until he was 30, and though he wrote his poetry in English, he wrote his autobiography in Welsh. He called it Neb (1985), meaning “nobody.”

He was a Luddite, viewing modern conveniences as distractions that cause us to neglect our spiritual health. He and his wife Elsi lived in a small and almost primitive stone cottage for much of their marriage, and their son, Gwydion, remembered his father preaching against the evils of the refrigerator and the washing machine from his pulpit. His poems were as austere as his lifestyle, and he once wrote: “A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes.”

That must have been some church. Was using a washing machine sinful? Or just dirty?

Related articles

• From the Writer’s Almanac (conjecturesguilty.wordpress.com)
• Is there more to Welsh literature than Dylan Thomas?, Arts and Literature (visitwales.co.uk)
• Collecting R.S. Thomas (finebooksmagazine.com)
• Welsh language ‘is dying out’ (independent.co.uk)
• Tolkien Festival in Mid Wales. 13 – 15 August 2010, Festivals (visitwales.co.uk)

 

Celebrating Another Law School Failure

It’s the birthday of Gustave Flaubert, born in Rouen, France (1821). His father was a surgeon, and the family was one of the most respected in Rouen. He was nonplussed about the prospect of leaving Rouen for to Paris to go to law school. He wrote to a friend:

“I’ll go study law, which, instead of opening all doors, leads nowhere. I’ll spend three years in Paris contracting venereal diseases. And then? All I want is to live out all my days in an old ruined castle near the sea.”

Although he enjoyed Paris for its brothels, he didn’t like much else. He failed his law exams and ended up collapsing, dizzy and then unconscious. It was the first of many such episodes throughout his life, probably epilepsy, and Flaubert gave up on law, left Paris, and moved to a house in Croisset, near Rouen.

He worked hard on his first novel, The Temptation of St. Anthony, and he thought it was a masterpiece. He spent four days reading it aloud to two friends, and he wouldn’t let them comment until the end, at which point they suggested that he burn it. So he stopped working on it although it was eventually published in its finished form more than 25 years later, and even then, he considered it his best novel.

Flaubert traveled for a while, and then he started a new project, a novel about a doctor’s wife named Emma who tries to fill her empty life by having affairs. He wrote carefully, working long hours, agonizing over each word. He wrote to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet: “Happy are they who don’t doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.” But after five years of work, he finished his novel, which he published in installments in 1856, and it was Madame Bovary.

In 1911, The New York Times reported that Madame Bovary had been voted by the French as the “best French novel.” In 2007, editor J. Peder Zane published a book called The Top Ten, in which he asked 125 contemporary writers to name what they consider “the ten greatest works of fiction of all time,” and Madame Bovary was number two, after Anna Karenina.

Gustave Flaubert, who said, “I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well-heated room, with the books one loves and the leisure one wants.”

From The Writers’ Almanac

 

From A Room of Her Own

I’ve been accepted to the writers’ retreat called A Room of Her Own. It’s a retreat for women inspired by the continued dominance of men in writing and art.

WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW SURVEY OF LITERARY LEADERS VOTED TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED THE SINGLE BEST WORK OF AMERICAN FICTION PUBLISHED IN THE LAST 25 YEARS.

HOW CAN IT BE THAT…?

• All four winners of the 2009 National Book Award (for Poetry, CNF, Fiction, and Youth Literature) were men
• 14 out of 57 winners of the National Book Award for Fiction are women (2007)
• 14 out of 55 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction are women (2008)
• 21 out of 85 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry are women (2008)
• Women writer’s won 63% of the awards but less than 30% of the money in awards and grants reported by Poet’s & Writers (Jan/Feb 2003)
• Only 21 women have won writing awards in the 80 years of the Oscars (2007)
• Of the major artists represented by major New York galleries only 16% are women
• A recent study by the Coalition of Women’s Arts Organizations showed that in all one-person shows for living artists in American museums, only 2% of the featured artists were women
• A 1992 study that only 17% of artists in galleries nationally were women, whereas the Bureau of Labor indicated that 48% of professional American artists were women
• 51% of all visual artists are female and women hold 53% of art degrees, but 80% of art faculty members are male
• 68% of total art income in the U.S goes to men and 73% of all grants and fellowships in the arts go to men

As I prepare this post I can imagine the whining about lowering the bar, etc. That’s a defense mechanism if ever there was one.

 

Behind the Screen

A good collection of articles on filmmaking and television written by Act One faculty, who each contributed an insightful essay on media, faith and culture. Perceptive and engaging.