“Everybody is different — even writers. You have to learn how to use your energy and not squander it. In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.”
— British novelist Doris Lessing, born today in 1919
DC police measure up-and-coming neighborhoods (Washington Post): “As residential and retail development pushes more people and businesses into new areas, economic development data can be as important in shaping police staffing decisions as armed-robbery statistics. Discussing “up and coming” hubs, such as the Waterfront and H Street NE, Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier says that “my primary goal, as these areas roll out, is that not only are they safe, but that they feel safe.” As neighborhoods change, “there is also friction between law enforcement and community leaders who say police are not moving quickly enough or deploying officers smartly enough in some areas.” What is your experience?
Poverty and Schools: Finally, Some Lights Go On (Huffington Post): Peter Meyer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute discusses the “seemingly interminable battle between those who believe that you have to cure the poor before you can educate them and those who believe that educating the poor will help cure poverty.” His opinion? “The pendulum might be swinging, ever-so-slightly, toward the believers (in school).” He cites several projects that he hopes “will motivate more school leaders to believe that they can and must face poverty squarely, in the classroom.” Do you agree with the findings, and are they replicable?
Language instruction for immigrants in the DC region (WMAU: Community Minute): Profiled at the beginning of this month, Catalogue nonprofit “Language ETC (LETC) offers English and literacy training to low-income adult immigrants in the greater Washington area using volunteer teachers and tutors [and] educates more immigrants annually than any other non-governmental organization in the area — and no willing student is turned away.” Most recently listed in the 2009/2010 Catalogue, LETC also provides a Multimedia Language Lab, conversation classes, book clubs, and individual job counseling to Washington area students.
[…] I’ve watched thee every hour;
I know my mighty sway:
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away.Few hearts to mortals given,
On earth so wildly pine;
Yet few would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine.Then let my winds caress thee;
Thy comrade let me be:
Since nought beside can bless thee,
Return — and dwell with me.
— English writer Emily Bronte, born today in 1848
Today is a good time to learn more about The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, which nourishes writers of all ages, from youngsters who are just learning to tell their stories, to emerging writers eager to hone their skills.
WILDE: “… But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority […]
I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new.”
— The Invention of Love (1997) by British dramatist Tom Stoppard,
born today in 1937.
“Oh, I’ve never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.”
(The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942)“But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
(The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927)
— American novelist & playwright Thornton Wilder, born today in 1897
“There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.”
— French writer Emile Zola, born today in 1840
“Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.”
— German artist Max Ernst, born today in 1891
Have a creative month, Greater Washington!
In beginning to write The Giver, I created a world that existed only in my imagination — the world of “only us, only now.” I tried to make [protagonist] Jonas’s world seem familiar, comfortable, and safe, and I tried to seduce the reader. I seduced myself along the way. It did feel good, that world. I got rid of all the things I fear and dislike […] One child has pointed out, in a letter, that the people in Jonas’s world didn’t even have to do dishes.
It was very, very tempting to leave it at that.
But […] if I’ve learned anything through that river of memories, it is that we can’t live in a walled world, in an “only us, only now” world where we are all the same and feel safe. We would have to sacrifice too much. The richness of color and diversity would disappear; feelings for other humans would no longer be necessary. Choices would be obsolete.
And besides, I had ridden my bike Elsewhere as a child, and liked it there, but had never been brave enough to tell anyone about it. So it was time.
— author Lois Lowry, born today in 1937
Newbery Medal acceptance speech for The Giver, June 1994
“He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings.”
— The Town and the City“I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”
— Letter, 1950
— novelist Jack Kerouac, born today in 1922
[…] William Faulkner said, “I decline to accept the end of man.” I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
— Nobel Lecture of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born today in 1927