Tag Archives: Writers

[Resources] Starlight Echoes

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 Starlight Echoes-A music, writing & art group* is an open, highly interactive community on Facebook. Whether you are a new or untried artist looking for a safe, supportive and encouraging community or a professional interested in expanding your network or widening your platform, you will find a warm reception. Artists, writers and musicians from around the world post their work. Taken as a whole the offerings are impressive; viewed individually, they are stunningly varied. It’s heartening to see strangers, united only by a common passion for creativity, be so open and eager to welcome the art of others. It is never easy to put yourself out there; it requires an emotional nudity and brazen nerve that never entirely resolves itself. If you are in need of a critique of your work, then you will have to look elsewhere. There are plenty of forums for that. Starlight Echoes is a place where positivity reigns; it is inclusive and inspiring. Who can’t use a little of that in their lives?

*FYI-This is NOT my Facebook group. It was started and is administered by a lovely, spirited woman named Angela Muchmore.

The Writing Life: Finding a Balance Between Creativity and ‘Mere Absorption’

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 “I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.”-George Eliot

George Eliot

George Eliot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sing it, sister! I could-and I do mean this to be taken at face value-spend all of my time reading. Yep, from classic and classically obscure literature to history and biography, I’m more than willing to sit on my a** 16 hours a day just taking it all in and enjoying the lovely, lovely words. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 100: Living Authors

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  • Title: Living Authors
  • Editor: Dilly Tante
  • Year Published: Original Edition-1931/This Edition-2001 (The H.W. Wilson Company/Bookspan)
  • Year Purchased: 2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: Since I spend so much time writing about dead writers, this is one of the most-used volumes in my personal reference library. Although I don’t remember where I bought it, I know that it only cost about $5; practically speaking, it is the best investment I have ever made in a book! ‘Living Authors’ features biographies of pretty much every still-breathing writer (400 of them!) of any importance at the time of initial publication (1931), which means that it covers the years that I most frequently focus on in my own writing. Each entry also has a detailed bibliography. For those of you wondering why I don’t just head over to Wikipedia/other informative web-site, I’ll stop you right there. It’s not the same! Dilly Tante filled his book with strange data and odd minutia, often provided by the authors themselves. It’s simply more interesting and fulfilling.
  • Motivation: I’m always excited to find reference materials contemporaneous to the subjects I write about.
  • Times Read: Cover-to-cover-1/As reference-countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page vi: “In themselves these facts are trivial and meaningless. If they concerned the man in the brown hat next door or the discreet lady across the way, they might be dismissed as idle gossip, both inexcusable and dull. But in the world of art, where talent is primarily a consolidation of personality, we have a right to be curious. Our desire to know the artist is matched by his desire to reveal himself, for the art of the modern world is fundamentally autobiographical, and Goethe, described by Spengler as “the man who forgot nothing, the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single great confession,” may well stand as the type of the Western artist.”
  • Happiness Scale: Off the charts!
My copy of 'Living Authors' Edited by Dilly Tante

My copy of 'Living Authors' Edited by Dilly Tante: I'll award 2 bragging points for every writer you can name!

 

A Year in Books/Day 98: The Writer’s Home Companion

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  • Title: The Writer’s Home Companion An Anthology of the World’s Best Writing Advice, from Keats to Kunitz
  • Edited and with an Introduction by: Joan Bolker, E D. D.
  • Year Published: 1997 (An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company)
  • Year Purchased: 2001/2002
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: I revere books, both for what they contain and for what they symbolize. As a result, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many books I have ever highlighted passages in or written notes in the margin of, including textbooks. ‘The Writer’s Home Companion’ is one of the exceptions. Why? It contains so much stellar, spot-on advice for writers by writers. The kind of advice that you will actually heed and apply. The kind of advice that you probably already know, deep-down, but keep pushing away because that is the easy thing to do. The kind of advice that is at once remedial and advanced, that simultaneously disciplines and frees. The kind of advice that we all need to remember as we go about the task and joy that is writing.
  • Motivation: Who could resist practical advice by the likes of John Keats, Bernard Shaw, Ursula Le Guin and Natalie Goldberg all in the same volume? Not this girl.
  • Times Read: Countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page xi: “Writing is a solitary sport, but none of us can do it without good company at crucial moments. Most of the writers I’ve known are pulled and tugged between their wish for the quiet aloneness necessary for their work, and their longings for human connections. We write both to express ourselves and to be heard by others, but first we have to learn how to tolerate ourselves as we work at our writing. The authors of the pieces collected here share honestly, and often humorously, their thoughts and feelings about writing and the writer’s life, and can provide you with the good company you need to get on with your own work.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10

A Year in Books/Day 91: An American Childhood

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  • Title: An American Childhood
  • Author: Annie Dillard
  • Year Published: 1987 (Harper & Row, Publishers)
  • Year Purchased: 1987
  • Source: My Mom.
  • About: Dillard’s impressionistic memoirs of growing up in Pittsburgh between the years 1950-1962.
  • Motivation: This is one of the definitive books of my girlhood. I nicked it from my Mom’s shelf in late autumn or early winter of 1987; I never gave it back. Why I honed in on this particular volume on that long-ago day is somewhat foggy, although I’ll venture to say that it was due to a combination of the title and boredom. I was in the midst of my own, although very different, American Childhood. What remains in my mind, as brilliant and clear as ice, is curling up on the floor next to my bed and reading it straight through in a couple of hours. Already a budding writer, with scores of stories, poems and plays to my name, I desperately wanted to be able to write like that: simply, divinely, forcefully. It’s twenty-five years later and my writing voice, developed long ago yet still tightening, transitioning, is nothing like Dillard’s; it contains no trace of my pubescent infatuation with her wordplay. What remains is a sense of gratefulness to one of my many literary heroines, one that I needed at an age when so many dreams scatter and fade away. Her book is a fine thread in the narrative of my formative years.
  • Times Read: 3 or 4 (all back in 1987/1988)
  • Random Excerpt/Page 51: “By the time I knew him, our grandfather was a vice-president of Pittsburgh’s Fidelity Trust Bank. He looked very like a cartoonist’s version of “vested interests.” In fact, he almost always wore a vest, and a gold watch on a chain; he was short and heavy; he had a small white mustache; he smoked cigars. At home, his thin legs crossed under his belly, he read the financial section of the paper, tolerant of children who might have been driven, in the long course of waiting for dinner, to beating their fingertips on his scalp.”
  • Happiness Scale: In importance and satisfaction to my young self,  is incalculable.

A Year in Books/Day 86: American Bloomsbury

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Frontispiece for Woman in the Nineteenth Centu...

Frontispiece for Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1855), by Sarah Margaret Fuller. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  • Title: American Bloomsbury
  • Author: Susan Cheever
  • Year Published: 2006 (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks)
  • Year Purchased: 2008
  • Source: Daedalus Books & Music
  • About: ‘American Bloomsbury’ weaves together the lives and friendships of five New England authors, loosely following them and their wider circles between the years 1840-1868. Alongside the expected Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne are two women: Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. Susan Cheever devotes just enough space to the latter to whet the appetite for a deeper analysis of their lives and work. Within the constraints of this book, she manages to rescue Alcott from her reputation as the sappy creator of saccharine kiddie lit (a tired trope unfair to both her and ‘Little Women’), setting her firmly into the harsher but more rewarding world of reality; her gutsy complexity is given space to breathe. The mostly forgotten Fuller (one of my favourite women) suffers from no such reputation; in fact, she largely has no reputation from which to suffer or gain. Cheever does her best to correct that.* If you don’t know who she is, start with this book and your awakened curiosity will take care of the rest.
  • Motivation: Like so many teens before me (and since, or so my optimistic heart likes to think), I was pulled under the spell of Thoreau and, from there, to Emerson. Although in all my years I have never been able to warm to Hawthorne, the period when these New Englanders flourished is, for me, the best of 19th century American literature. With Alcott and Fuller added to this mix, I was sold.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 35: “Without this obscure lawsuit in 1836, it’s hard to know what would have happened in Concord, Massachusetts, if anything. It was Ellen Tucker’s share of the Tuckers’ fortune that bought the Emerson House on the Cambridge Turnpike and was sustaining the Alcotts as well as the Hawthornes and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson not only paid the rent; Louisa noticed that after a visit from Mr. Emerson there was often a small pile of bills under a candlestick on the dining room table, or left on top of a pile of books he had brought from his library.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9 1/2

* I just came across the more recent ‘Louisa May Alcott’ by Susan Cheever. Happy dance!

Women Writing for a Change ‘Spring Fling’ Podcast!

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A few weeks ago, I participated in a podcast for Women Writing for a Change here in The Queen City. Although I was puffy and a bit out-of-sorts due to major sinus issues, the entire experience was several sorts of fun. My kilt-clad honey was there for moral support; the organizers even invited him into “the circle” (quite the important thing), where he unleashed his singular brand of brash, intellectual charm on all of my co-writer-readers. There followed nearly two hours of creative rituals, snacks, networking, laughter and, of course, podcast recording.

As host Carol Stewart said in her intro to the ‘Spring Fling’-themed podcast, we are “sending forth words that are bold and necessary”. Twelve writers offering twelve entirely different perspectives, a dozen voices ultimately uniting in a rising and triumphant exultation to the new season; there is stunning individuality but a cohesive flow is maintained. Written in ten minutes on a Sunday afternoon, with the only goal being to stave off boredom whilst maintaining a comfortable laziness, my contribution is brief and humble. It initially appeared here as Intermezzo: The Sky is Flaunting Itself. It’s quick but descriptive; after reading it twenty times I’m still content with it and am glad that I did not embellish it for this recording.

I am the third reader in the first segment. Be sure to check out my friend Angela Muchmore in the second segment, where she reads a lovely original poem. The podcast is available as a free download on iTunes. It can also be found on the WWFC web-site.

A Year in Books/Day 81: Mortification Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame

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  • Title: Mortification Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame
  • Editor: Robin Robertson
  • Year Published: 2003 (Harper Perennial)
  • Year Purchased: 2007/2008
  • Source: This was a gift from my Mom.
  • About: This volume offers up seventy first-hand, real-life stories of writers’ deeply humiliating encounters with the public. Names as luminous as Margaret Atwood, Edna O’Brien and Chuck Palahniuk grace the pages with their always-humorous tales of woe and embarrassment.
  • Motivation: My Momma loves to indulge the writer in me (which, to be real, comprises a good chunk of who I am). She knows how to make her girl happy!
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page xi: “While there are occasional undercurrents of seriousness in these stories-a desire for something between expiation and exorcism, perhaps-their main intention it to make us laugh, while feeling a strong sense of ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’. It is greatly to the credit of all the contributors that they have embraced their mortification so warmly-returning to the scene of the crime and leading us, hot-faced, through their hell.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8