Annie Dillard - Writer

Today is the birthday of Annie Dillard (books by this author), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). She began writing poetry in high school, and then studied English in college. After writing a master's thesis on Thoreau's Walden, she moved to a cabin in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. There she wrote poetry and also kept a daily journal of her observations of nature and her thoughts about God and religion. She wrote in old notebooks and on four-by-six-inch index cards, and when she was ready to transform the journal into a book, she had 1,100 entries. "By the time I finished the book, I weighed about 98 pounds," Dillard said. "I never went to bed. I would write all night until the sun was almost coming up."

The result, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was published in 1974, and Annie Dillard received her first literary award the following year: the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She was only 29 years old. She has published collections of essays and of poetry, as well as an autobiography. Her most recent work is a novel, The Maytrees (2007). When it comes to writing, she says: "Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."

Harper Lee

It's the birthday of novelist Harper Lee (books by this author), born Nelle Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama (1926). She has written just one novel, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), but it has sold more than 30 million copies. She hates interviews and speeches, and prefers to live quietly in Monroeville, where she is known as Miss Nelle.

She wrote: "I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren't for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We're talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. [...] Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it."

David Hume - Philosopher

It's the birthday of the man who said: "The truth springs from arguments among friends," and "The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster." That's Scottish philosopher David Hume (books by this author), born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1711. While working as a librarian, he wrote the six-volume History of England (1762), which became a bestseller and gave him the financial independence to write and revise his philosophical treatises. He wrote A Treatise of Human Nature (1740), Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). He was a strict skeptic, and questioned all knowledge derived from the senses.

David Hume said, "Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty."

He also said, "Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme happiness."

And, "He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances."

Rare and pure and perfect...

Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.   Patrick RothfussAmerican Author and College Le

Writers on Living

It's the birthday of writer and naturalist John Muir (books by this author), born in Dunbar, Scotland (1838). When he was 11 years old, his family moved to America and started a farm in Wisconsin. He was working as a sawyer in Indianapolis when he had a terrible accident in the shop: An awl pierced his right eye, and he went completely blind, temporarily. When his eyesight returned, he quit his job and went out to Yosemite in California. He spent the rest of his life traveling and advocating for the preservation of wilderness. His books include Studies in the Sierra (1874), Our National Parks (1901), The Yosemite (1912), and Travels in Alaska (1915).

He said, "One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books."

Writers on Writing

It's the birthday of writer Nell Freudenberger (books by this author), born in New York City (1975).
After graduating from Harvard, she turned down a job offer from Random House and instead spent a year teaching English to teenagers in Thailand. She said, "I didn't really have anything to say about being an American until I went and lived in that high school." After Thailand, she traveled in India, then came home and got a job at The New Yorker. She wrote every morning before work, and one day she started a story about an American woman in Delhi coping with the death of her married Indian lover. She said, "I liked working on that story because it wasn't work; it was simply an hour and fifteen minutes of nostalgia every morning, before I got on the train to go to my real job." A year later, that story, "Lucky Girls," was published in The New Yorker, and it sparked a bidding war for a book. Lucky Girls, a collection of five stories, was published in 2003, followed by a novel, The Dissident (2006).

She said: "I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private — a comforting thought. If you can make that distinction in your head, you can write just the way you always did, even after you start publishing books."

Friendship

A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely.
  Pam BrownAustralian Poet