The Write Advice 097: URSULA K LE GUIN

Utopia, and Dystopia, are intellectual places.  I write from passion and playfulness.  My stories are neither dire warnings nor blueprints for what we ought to do.  Most of them, I think, are comedies of human manners, reminders of the infinite variety of ways in which we always come back to pretty much the same place, and celebrations of that infinite variety by the invention of still more alternatives and possibilities… To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.  It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.
      Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader’s present, actual world. Young people in general welcome this kind of story because in their vigor and eagerness for experience they welcome alternatives, possibilities, change.  Having come to fear even the imagination of true change, many adults refuse all imaginative literature, priding themselves on seeing nothing beyond what they already know, or think they know.

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)


 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of North American novelist URSULA K LE GUIN (1929–2018):

 

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/

 

 

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Styles of Writing (2014) by GRANT SNIDER

 Re-posted from the blog INCIDENTAL COMICS

© 2014 Grant Snider

People tend to think that inspiration, exploration, and elation are the majority of the creative process, that artists live in this magical land of ideas.  But most of creative work is getting something down, being dissatisfied with it, reworking it, reworking it again, throwing it out, starting over, and continuing until some deadline arrives.  Creative work, aside from those rare moments of pure inspiration, is real work.  Taking time each day to put in the work and be at your drawing table: that’s how it gets done.  If nothing happens, you still have to be there in the chair, otherwise absolutely nothing will get done.  Those moments are hidden from the public eye; no one sees the hours at the drawing table waiting for ideas to come or reworking things. They see the finished product.

GRANT SNIDER

Interviewed in The Los Angeles Review of Books

16 July 2017

 

Use the links below to visit INCIDENTAL COMICS, the wonderful blog of North American cartoonist GRANT SNIDER, and purchase his many fine books from ABRAMS COMIC ARTS and CHRONICLE BOOKS:

 

 

http://www.incidentalcomics.com/


https://www.abramsbooks.com/contributor/grant-snider_15889594/


https://www.chroniclebooks.com/collections/read-aloud-childrens-books/products/what-color-is-night?_pos=1&_sid=48c1770e7&_ss=r

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Poet of the Month 041: EDUARDO WHITE

EDUARDO WHITE
c 2004

 

 

 

 

THE BURDEN OF LIFE

 

The burden of life!
I loved bearing it, just like you,
hearing it grow inside me,
in living flesh.

 

I didn't only want
to open your wound,
I didn't only want
the patient vocation of a labourer:
I wanted the earth's vocation too,
which also is yours.

 

Treat love like a profession,
to be practised with great care.

 

Repeat to perfection
as often as necessary,
until it lasts
and everything inside
is in the right place.

 
Let the sun rise into the night.
Never let love become a leftover, a memory.

 

 

 

1990

Translated by  

 

STEFAN TOBLER

 

 

 

Eduardo Costley White was born in the Mozambique port city of Quelimane on 21 November 1963.

 

After training for three years at the Industrial Institute, he founded the poetry magazine Charrua in 1984 before going on to be named President of the Mozambican Writers Association.
 

 
His first collection of poetry Amar Sobre o Índico [To Love the Indian] was published in 1984.  He published ten other collections, the last being Até Amanhã, Coração [See You Tomorrow, Heart] which appeared in 2005. The poem O peso da vida [The Burden of Life] is from his third collection País de Mim [Country of Me, 1990].  In 2001 he was named Literary Figure of the Year by the Mozambican Press Association.

 

Preoccupied with his mixed Portuguese and English heritage, White's poetry was both a reflection of his personal history and an exploration of Mozambique's war-torn past characterized by the unceasing quest for human dignity.  Whether speaking of his beloved, of the land or of his relationship to his own work, his poems are notable for their tone of tenderness, musicality and occasional eroticism.  Now considered one of his country's finest poets, White died in Mozambique on 24 August 2014.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems posted on the website of the Poetry Translation Centre:

 

 

http://www.poetrytranslation.org/

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 096: JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA

I’m not interested so much in being included as I am in fucking shit up.  Representation, to me, implies subsumption.  I don’t want to belong in this world.  I want to end it and make something new, something better.  That said, the ways in which certain folks are institutionally excluded from the literary world are glaring.  There is work out there that deserves to be heard that is instead being actively silenced while racists, transmisogynists, and other bigots are given platforms for their mediocre and harmful shit.

Interview conducted by ERIN TAYLOR [18 June 2016]


 

Use the link below to read the full 2016 interview with North American poet JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA:

 

http://maudlinhouse.net/joshua-jennifer-espinoza/

 

 

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The Write Advice 095: BARBARA KINGSOLVER

I struggle with confidence, every time.  I’m never completely sure I can write another book.  Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here.  A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.  I falter and fidget and worry it won’t be good enough, and then the day comes when I give myself permission:  just write, I tell myself.  No one has to see it, you can throw everything away if it’s terrible, we’ll keep it a secret unless or until it becomes wonderful.  And then I get to work.

About Writing

 
Use the link below to visit the website of North American historical novelist and founder of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction BARBARA KINGSOLVER:

 

http://www.kingsolver.com/faq/about-writing.html#1

 

 

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Poet of the Month 040: HELENE MULLINS

Twayne Publishers US, 1970

MY MOTHER’S FINAL GESTURE

Before she left, my mother,
trying to make it easier for us,
by slow degrees erased her identity.
Shedding the meretricious ornamentations,
the perpetual hopes, the outworn new beginnings,
she covered with the tenuity of old age
her beauty, grace, the poor remains of a gaiety
hoarded against a need that might arise.
So intent was she
on divesting herself of all familiar lineaments,
she did not heed a word of what we were saying:
that we were glad she soon would be released
from the tremors of our menaced civilization,
the fears and horrors seeping through our walls.
Barely recognizable at the end,
except to us who knew her as she was,
she slipped away
with a reassuring flutter of her hands.
We watched her go toward her unknown destination,
then turned to face our own.

  

 

 

The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems 

(1970)

 

 

The following biographical statement appears on the Yale University Library website.  [It is re-posted here for information purposes only and, like the poem re-posted above, remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.]
 

Helene Mullins (née Gallagher), American poet and novelist, was born in New York City in 1899, and was active from the 1920s (by which time she had already married Ivan Mullins) through the 1960s. She and her sister Marie McCall collaborated on their first novel, Paulus Fy (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company) in 1924. Mullins's breakthrough as an author came when a novel, Convent Girl, and a volume of poetry, Earthbound & Other Poems, were published by Harper and Brothers in 1929.  In 1935 she was involved in a near-fatal car accident, and soon thereafter she and McCall moved to Hollywood, California, for a lengthy convalescence. Except for this period, and time spent in Washington DC during the Second World War, Mullins lived her entire life in New York City. She continued to publish poems (under the name Mullins, though she later married Linné Johnson) in journals and collected volumes until 1970.  Helene Mullins died in Manhattan in 1991.

 

Unfortunately, Mullins remains so obscure that it was impossible to find a single photograph of her to add to this post.  The only image I could find for The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems, her final volume of poetry published twenty-one years before her death, is the one posted above. 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a fascinating post about poet HELENE MULLINS featured on the always informative NEGLECTED BOOKS website:

 

 

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=4345

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 026: GORDON LIVINGSTON

We live in a society that has elevated complaint to a primary form of public discourse.  The airwaves and courts are full of victims of this and that: childhood abuse, mistakes of others, random misfortune.  Voluntary behaviors have been reclassified as illness so that sufferers can be pitied and, where possible, compensated.  Not surprisingly, many of these people appear in psychiatrists' offices expecting a sympathetic ear and medication that will relieve their feelings of distress.  Often they want testimony to support lawsuits or letters to excuse them from work.  They are not there to engage in the difficult process of examining their lives, taking responsibility for their feelings, deciding what they need to do to be happy –– and doing it.

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need To Know Right Now (2004)


 

Use the link below to read the obituary of North American psychiatrist, author and anti-war protester DR GORDON STUART LIVINGSTON (1939–2016):

 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bs-md-ob-gordon-livingston-20160323-story.html 

 

 

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