The Write Advice 213: KAY BOYLE

 

How to release reluctant students to speech is the first problem for the teacher of writing.  At times the young find it as difficult to express their inner thoughts in words as do those whose minds have solidified into all but unbreakable moods.  But why, after all, should this inability to speak with the heart as well as with the lips be blamed on 'restrictive teaching'?  Is it not more a case of restrictive thinking (induced by restrictive living) causing this muteness, which perhaps no teacher can cure?  One can suggest reading to such students — great poetry, great novels — to help allay the fear of speaking.  But one cannot be sure that the students will dare to understand the words that other men have said.  It takes courage to say things differently: caution and cowardice dictate the use of the cliché.… Most adults, having somehow lost touch with the great simplicities, have forgotten that to write is to speak of one’s beliefs.  Turning out a typescript with the number of words neatly estimated in the upper right hand corner of the first page has nothing to do with writing.  Neither have questions about the prices paid by Harper’s Magazine or The Atlantic Monthly or The Ladies’ Home Journal or Esquire.  Writing is something else entirely, as the young instinctively know.

 

 

'The Teaching of Writing' [reprinted in Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1985]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of a US-based 

organisation dedicated to celebrating the life and

work of writer, educator and political activist KAY 

BOYLE (1902–1992):

https://kbs.hypotheses.org/

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 193: CAN XUE

 

 

The Write Advice 113: ELIZABETH McKENZIE

 

Poet of the Month 099: PARINAZ FAHIMI

 

PARINAZ FAHIMI

c 2014

 

 

 

 

CINNAMON

 

 

I want to be cinnamon

to be mixed with sugar

when I am braided into dough and sprinkled on its edges

I hide in the lines of Grandmother’s fingers

folded in her prayers

rubbed onto grandchildren’s lips

to sweeten a careful kiss

to nourish the ants on the rug 

and so

I might dissolve into the memory of childhood

and forever bake poems

with the scent of cinnamon

as if I could solve my heartache with spices

and steady it with sugar’s promise.

 

 

 

 

 

From the posthumous collection

Poppies with Alef

 

 

 

Translated from Persian by

ELHUM SHAKERIFAR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the short life of unpublished Iranian poet PARINAZ FAHIMI, who sadly died of a brain tumour in 2016:

 

 

 

https://www.poetrytranslation.org/poem/cinnamon/#poem-notes

 

 

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The Write Advice 212: JAMES JONES

 

I would like to leave books behind me to let people know that I have lived.  I'd like to think that people would read them avidly, as I have read so many and would feel the sadness and frustration and joy and love I tried to put in them, that people would think about that guy James Jones and wish they had known the guy who could write like that.

 

Letter to George W (Jeff) Jones [3 November 1942]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of the JAMES JONES LITERARY SOCIETY:

 

 

http://www.jamesjonesliterarysociety.org/index.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 105: C WRIGHT MILLS

 

The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community's relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.

      Men in masses are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source. Men in public confront issues, and they are aware of their terms. It is the task of the liberal institution, as of the liberally educated man, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual. In the absence of deep and wide political debate, schools for adults and adolescents could perhaps become hospitable frameworks for just such debate. In a community of publics the task of liberal education would be: to keep the public from being overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible individual that cannot be sunk by the burdens of mass life. But educational practice has not made knowledge directly relevant to the human need of the troubled person of the twentieth century or to the social practices of the citizen. The citizen cannot now see the roots of his own biases and frustrations, nor think clearly about himself, nor for that matter about anything else. He does not see the frustration of idea, of intellect, by the present organization of society, and he is not able to meet the tasks now confronting 'the intelligent citizen'.

 

The Power Elite (1956)

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of North American sociologist CHARLES WRIGHT MILLS (1916–1962):

https://www.sociologygroup.com/charles-wright-mills/

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 211: BETSY LERNER

 

Chances are you want to write because you are a haunted individual, or a bothered individual, because the world does not sit right with you, or you in it.  Chances are you have a deep connection to books because at some point you discovered that they were the one truly safe place to discover and explore feelings that are banished from the dinner table, the cocktail party, the golf foursome, the bridge game.  Because the writers who mattered to you have dared to say I am a sick man.  And because within the world of books there is no censure.  In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies.  All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive — as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little… I am not suggesting a writer let it bleed so much as I am suggesting that he understand his motivation.

      The more popular culture and the media fail to present the real pathos of our human struggle, the more opportunity there is for writers who are unafraid to present stories that speak emotional truth, or that make such an intimate connection that briefly we become children again, listening with rapt attention… At a time when people are encouraged to follow their bliss, to pursue whatever makes them feel good, I suggest you stalk your demons.  Embrace them.  If you are a writer, especially one who has been unable to make your work count or stick, you must grab your demons by the neck and face them down.  And whatever you do, don't censor yourself.  There's time and editors for that.

 

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers (Revised edition 2010)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American writer, poet, editor and literary agent BETSY LERNER:

 

https://betsylerner.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 098: RENÉE PETTITT-SCHIPP

 

RENÉE PETTITT-SCHIPP

2018

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT WATER BRINGS

 

 

we are learning archaeologies of loss

rummaging along edge of island

turning each gift left by the tide

 

meanwhile, unseen at the edge of the atoll, fifty-eight

Tamils are escorted in; navy ship grey, fishing boat festive

jubilant in sunlight

 

within the lagoon’s still waters officers

insist on life jackets, clothing refugees

in orange irony

 

from SIEV to zodiac, zodiac to Customs, Customs to shore

shore to bus, they are watched, guided, guarded

a headline brews

 

but here we are oblivious, searching amongst the seaweed

finding thongs, whole bulbs and bottles, a toy soldier

minus his head

 

later, we drive through palms beneath tall towers of cloud,

past the Quarantine Station where the bus has just arrived

and the dust will not settle. 

 

from the 2018 UWA collection

The Sky Runs Right Through Us

 

 

Use the link below to read more about West Australian poet and writer RENÉE PETTITT-SCHIPP:

https://fremantlepress.com.au/contributor/renee-pettitt-schipp/

 

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The Write Advice 210: ANTHONY BURGESS

 

What could I teach these sharp, wary, vigorous Creative Writers?  Only the grammar they should have learned in fourth or fifth grade, only the professional trickery which shocked them with its insincerity.  They were terribly sincere, even when they divined that there was money in this writing racket if only you cut out the artsy-shmartsy crap.  By professional trickery I meant and mean the use of repetitive verbal tropes to fix a character in the reader’s mind, helped along by ocular tics and patches of alopecia (give the character the name Fox, since he has fox-mange); how to describe a seething party with everybody talking at once; how to convey a stormy sea by raiding an arbitrarily chosen page of a dictionary (stairwells of foam, waves rearing in stalagmites, precipitating in stalactites, staminiferous in their stalwart stallion-balled stalling angles). Or I could concentrate on opening techniques, with reference to The Good Soldier or Middlemarch.  What I could not evade was the dogged listening to dull work in progress.  Wow, that’s great, Janice…If these young people learned nothing else, they learned how heartbreaking the writing game was.

 

You've Had Your Time (1990)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, an English-based organisation which 'encourages and supports public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.'  It also operates an archive/performance space in his home town of Manchester.



http://www.anthonyburgess.org/

 

 

 

 

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