Tag Archives: Pulitzer Prize winner

“You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully.”

The last word of this sentence stunned me. The Annie Dillard I know is one of the boldest writers. Could she experience fear when writing? She does. She says, “In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all … Continue reading

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“Lately I’ve found myself reaching for the books of certain familiar writers, whose own zest and energy offer some kindly remedy to my condition.”

Perhaps you can relate to this: while I enjoy the holidays, I also am running low on the “zest and energy” that Mary Oliver describes in this essay. Her solution to this problem is to reconnect with familiar writers. Her … Continue reading

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“It seemed to me that if I could stir, if I could move to take the next step, I could go out into the poem the way I could go out into that snow.”

Were my reading assignments interesting?  Moving?  Inspiring?  These are the questions I ask myself after teaching literature classes.  I hope my students will experience the sort of engagement that Eudora Welty describes here.  She writes about spending an afternoon in … Continue reading

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“. . . and I doze here, dreaming that something lies under a suburban lawn, waiting to change my life . . .”

Henry Taylor’s poem “The Muse Once More” continues: “…to draw me away from what I chose too long ago to forsake it now on some journey out of legend, to smuggle across the world’s best-guarded borders this token, whatever it … Continue reading

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“Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.”

Ever since I started reading a history of the United States, I’ve been thinking long and hard about how our past has led to our present.  I am reassessing many of my assumptions about our core values. This provocative book … Continue reading

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“It’s one thing to know a lot and to have experienced a lot, but it’s quite another to know how you feel about what you’ve observed and lived.”

We can’t assume that all novelists who create likable characters are likable themselves, but I imagine that Richard Russo is. In this collection of essays, he is warm, funny, and self-deprecating – traits that characterize many of the people in … Continue reading

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“Wasn’t memory, that bully and oppressor, supposed to become soft and spongy?”

What if you found out that many of your memories were either wrong or incomplete? Maybe you would have the same disconcerted feeling that I had when I first saw the cover of this book.  It’s a picture of someone … Continue reading

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“There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need to make.”

Frank Bidart, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, explores this “need to make” in the twenty-part poem “Advice to the Players.” Yes, that’s right: twenty parts. He’s known for psychological complexity and paradoxical observations, and this poem provides … Continue reading

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“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”

Stating the premise of your work simply and clearly in the first sentence requires courage. Readers might say, “Is that all?”  Or, some might feel skeptical about your ability to show how an original story can follow from a classic … Continue reading

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“The waitress seemed to sense that this was not the moment to ask if they had everything they needed.”

Of course, the waitress was right: these people clearly didn’t have everything they needed. This is familiar territory for fans of Anne Tyler. We count on seeing an “eccentric ecosystem of relatives and neighbors” who aren’t getting the assurances, stability … Continue reading

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“All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.”

This is how Laura Ingalls Wilder described her Little House books in a speech in 1937. As it turns out, the “whole truth” was stranger than fiction in many ways. In Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, … Continue reading

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“Is the soul solid, like iron?”

The poet Mary Oliver continues: “Or, is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?” With these questions, Oliver opens the poem “Some Questions You Might Ask,” which has inspired artists, videographers, … Continue reading

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“He didn’t fit in.”

Even though he was wealthy and influential, Charles Dickens didn’t fit into middle-class life in Victorian England for many reasons. Here are three: He made fun of “society” people in his novels. Instead of writing anonymously, as the other novelists … Continue reading

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“It tells the stories of two revolutions.”

Revolutions, indeed. This book is about Revolutionary War era hero Alexander Hamilton, whose picture is on our ten-dollar bill.  It’s also about the revolutionary way his story is told by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who uses hip-hop, harpsichords, and a largely non-Caucasian … Continue reading

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“Felicity rubbed a bit between her fingers. It was gray, just grit.”

This is how the great-granddaughter of Iowa farmers Walter and Rosanna Langdon describes what’s left of the topsoil on the original family farm when she visits it in the closing pages of The Last Hundred Years Trilogy by Jane Smiley.  … Continue reading

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