Saturday, January 12, 2013

Thoughts on Writing ~

"Good writers work themselves physically.  Melville and Sandburg did farm chores.  H.L. Menken, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay all gardened.  Malcolm Cowley saws wood.  And Robinson Jeffers did stonework as a daily ritual, adding one room after another to the house he had built himself in Carmel, California, with huge stones he hauled up from the beach below.  I like the image that routine suggests ~ Jeffers struggling to catch flighty words in the morning and lifting heavy stones in the afternoon.  It's as if the one activity gave substance and form to the other."

~ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Introduction, Writers in Residence. The Viking Press, 1981.

Banks of The Grand ~ Mohawk Chapel Brantford ON
Authors:
H. Mellville (Moby Dick)
C. Sanburg (Three Pulitzer Prizes)

H. L. Mencken (Happy Days)
Wm. Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
Malcolm Cowley (WW 1 Correspondent, writer)
Robinson Jeffers (Poet, environmentalist)

"The best place for a writer to work is in his head," remark attributed to Ernest Hemingway.


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