Alice Munro 1931-

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.


I have recently re-read much of Chekhov and it's a humbling experience. I don't even claim Chekhov as an influence because he influenced all of us. Like Shakespeare his writing shed the most perfect light - there's no striving in it, no personality. Well, of course, wouldn't I love to do that!


I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.


In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.


In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.


Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.


Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.


That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.


The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.


The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.


The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.


When I'm doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it on the computer I can get carried away, and I try to go as far as I can every day, as if I were going to die in the night or something.

William Faulkner, 1897 - 1962

William (Cuthbert) Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi (1897). He grew up listening to stories about his family, including several stories about his great-grandfather, a colonel in the Civil War, who once killed a man with a bowie knife and later killed another man who tried to avenge the first man's death. And then there were stories about Faulkner's father, who was once sitting in a drug store with a girl when the girl's spurned boyfriend walked in and shot Faulkner's father in the back with a shotgun. Somehow, Faulkner's father survived.

Aside from family lore, Faulkner's literary education came not from school but from an older friend named Phil Stone, who had gone to Yale. At that time, Faulkner had been reading Moby-Dick and Shakespeare, but it was Phil Stone who introduced him to modern literature like the works of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.

After dropping out of high school, Faulkner spent several years trying to figure out what to do with himself. He went to the University of Mississippi for a year, where he got a D in his English class. He went to New York City, where he was fired from a job at a bookstore because he told the customers they were reading trash. Then he worked for a while at a post office, until he lost that job because he failed to deliver the mail and often closed down early to go golfing.

He published a book of poems and two relatively conventional novels, and then he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who advised him to write about his hometown. So Faulkner began observing Oxford, Mississippi, more closely, and he began to invent an imaginary version of Oxford he called Jefferson, located in an imaginary county he called Yoknapatawpha.

He later said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top."

One of the first novels he wrote about his new imaginary landscape was The Sound and the Fury, about a wild young woman named Caddy Compson and her three brothers: Benjy, who is mentally handicapped; Quentin, who falls in love with her; and Jason, who feels she has ruined the family's name by getting pregnant out of wedlock.

Faulkner went on writing through the 1930s, but he never really broke through to popular success. By 1944, all but one of his books were out of print. But in 1945, Malcolm Cowley helped publish a Portable Faulkner edition, which brought attention back to his work. Then in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. All his books were brought back into print, and they have stayed in print ever since.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949

William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

*In Midnight In Paris, Gil Pender, the disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter played by Owen Wilson, says, “the past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner.

*A gentleman can live through anything. 

*A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once. 

*A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. 

*Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. 

*An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. 

*Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. 

*Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. 

*Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written. 

*Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other. 

*Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief. 

*Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder. 

*I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. 

*I decline to accept the end of man. 

*I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

Café by: Czeslaw Milosz 1911- 2004

Café

Of those at the table in the café
where on winter noons a garden of frost glittered on windowpanes

I alone survived.

I could go in there if I wanted to

and drumming my fingers in a chilly void

convoke shadows.

With disbelief I touch the cold marble,

with disbelief I touch my own hand.

It—is, and I—am in ever novel becoming,

while they are locked forever and ever

in their last word, their last glance,

and as remote as Emperor Valentinian

or the chiefs of the Massagetes, about whom I know nothing,

though hardly one year has passed, or two or three.

I may still cut trees in the woods of the far north,

I may speak from a platform or shoot a film

using techniques they never heard of.

I may learn the taste of fruits from ocean islands

and be photographed in attire from the second half of the century.

But they are forever like busts in frock coats and jabotsin some monstrous encyclopedia.

Sometimes when the evening aurora paints the roofs in a poor street

and I contemplate the sky, I see in the white clouds

a table wobbling. The waiter whirls with his tray

and they look at me with a burst of laughter

for I still don’t know what it is to die at the hand of man,

they know – they know it well.

Warsaw, 1944


Czeslaw Milosz, who defined poetry as "the passionate pursuit of the Real": was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania (1911), when it was still part of the Russian Empire. In 2002, he wrote Milosz's ABCs, a book of alphabetical entries dealing with people Milosz knew and admired, historical events, abstract ideas, his own characters and poems, and relevant places or happenings in his own life. One of the entries is for "Szetejnie, Ginejty, and Peiksva," the hamlets around where he was born. He wrote: "A traveler journeying across that plateau today will not be able to intuit what once was on it. Smoke from the hamlets has vanished, along with the creaking of well pumps, the crowing of roosters, barking of dogs, people's voices. There is no longer the green of orchards embracing the roofs of the cottages — apple trees, pear trees, plum trees in every farmyard, between house, barn, and granary, so that the village streets were framed in trees. People loved trees there, and they also loved whittling away at wood: carved window shutters, symbols and letters chiseled into beams, stools of a prescribed shape, frequent roadside crosses linked with the radiant symbol of the sun and an inverted crescent moon, or little chapels in which sat a mournful Jesus."

He moved around Russia with his family while his dad served as an engineer in the army during World War I. Then he went to high school in Wilno, which was then part of Poland but is now the capital of Lithuania. He worked for Polish radio at the outbreak of World War II, and chose to stay in Warsaw through the war. Afterward, he worked as a political attaché for Poland, with assignments in New York, Washington, D.C., and Paris. In 1951, while Milosz was working in Paris, he found out that if he went back to Poland he would be arrested for not being Communist enough. So he sought political asylum in France, and from there he published fierce critiques of Stalinism, and more volumes of poetry. Finally, he grew tired of the leftist intellectual culture in France, and all the people who idealized Communism without really understanding what it was like to live under Communist rule. So he left for California, and lived in Berkeley for many years, teaching at the university there.

In 1981, he was finally able to return to Poland. A year earlier, one of Milosz's poems had been inscribed onto a monument in Gdánsk, Poland, for shipworkers who were killed by the government in a protest. At the base of the monument was a line from Psalm 29, translated by Milosz: "The Lord will give strength unto his people." When he went back to Poland the following year, members of the trade union put up a banner that said: "The People Will Give Strength Unto Their Poet."

In 1980, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. He published many collections of poetry, including City Without a Name (1969), Chronicles (1987), and The Second Space (2002), and many books of essays, like The Captive Mind (1953), about the behavior of intellectuals under repressive regimes. He died in 2004 at the age of 93.

Milosz said, "If I were asked to say where my poetry comes from I would say that its roots are in my childhood in Christmas carols, in the liturgy of Marian and vesper offices, and in the Bible.''

And he wrote: "To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life."

Source: The Writer's Almanac

Amy Tan, 1952-

 Amy Tan, was born in 1952, in Oakland, California. Tan is best known for her first novel, The Joy Luck Club. A first-generation daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, Tan spent much of her youth trying to deny her heritage. From third grade on, she was the only Chinese-American girl in her class. Tan once went a week sleeping with a close pin on her nose, trying to make it narrower and more like her classmates' noses. She was embarrassed by her mother's broken English and by her Chinese customs.

When Tan was 15, her father and older brother both died of brain tumors, within six months of each other. Her mother became convinced spirits were cursing the family, and she moved Tan and her younger brother to Switzerland. Tan continued to rebel against her mother, who wanted her to become a part-time concert pianist and a full-time brain surgeon. Instead, Tan became an English and linguistics major, and fell in love with an Italian. She and her mother didn't speak for six months.

Tan worked as a freelance business writer, working 90-hour weeks to keep up with demand. But she eventually realized she was addicted to work she didn't like. She went into counseling and began writing short stories.

When her mother went into the hospital in 1985, Tan promised herself that if her mother survived, she would take her to China and learn her mother's stories. It was a trip that would change Tan's perspective. She said later, "When my feet touched China, I became Chinese."

Tan's short stories became The Joy Luck Club (1989), a novel about four Chinese immigrant mothers and their relationships with their American-born daughters. It was an instant best seller and was made into a film. Tan has written five novels, all best sellers, including The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). Her most recent novel is Saving Fish from Drowning (2005).

Source; The Writer's Almanac

My Papa’s Waltz BY THEODORE ROETHKE

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans   

Slid from the kitchen shelf;   

My mother’s countenance   

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist   

Was battered on one knuckle;   

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head   

With a palm caked hard by dirt,   

Then waltzed me off to bed   

Still clinging to your shirt.

Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1942 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1961)

David Smith, 1950-2013

I think what I will remember more than anything else about David is his distinct laugh and his great sense of humour. He always had a joke to tell. Sometimes we did not get the punchline. In those instances, his way of laughing at his own jokes made us laugh along with him and when afterwards he explained it to us we had the pleasure of laughing a second time.  At  FACO where we worked together, one of the courses David taught was the art of communication. David was a great communicator. His teaching method reminded us of the truth behind those verses in 1 Corinthians: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or tinkling cymbal."  He taught us that learning English is much more than mastering pronunciation techniques and grammatical rules.  He conveyed to his students that learning English is inseparable from acquiring those noble and civilising values embedded in the living texture of the language. 

Just a few weeks ago he was amongst us with his friendly and optimistic presence and then before we knew it he gently glided into that eternal night. In our memories however he will continue to occupy a vivid and bright presence. David will be remembered by his colleagues, friends and students for his professional excellence, his impeccable knowledge of the subjects he taught and above all for his kindness and humanity.