Notes For December 31st, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 31st, 1972, the famous writer and journalist Pete Hamill quit drinking, winning a 20+ year battle with alcoholism, which he would chronicle in his bestselling 1995 memoir, A Drinking Life.

Pete Hamill was the oldest of seven children, the son of Irish immigrants from Belfast. His mother was gentle and fair-minded. His father was a one-legged alcoholic. In A Drinking Life, Hamill tells of his childhood and adolescence in 1940s Brooklyn. His family lived in an Irish neighborhood where, as he would soon learn, the local tavern was the nucleus of social life.

As a young teenager, Hamill began drinking at the tavern regularly as his father had done before him. Soon, Hamill and his friends were downing pails of beer every night. Alcohol, he observed, was not a kick, but a way of life and part of his Irish culture. To be a man, you have to drink, but you must be able to hold your liquor and not become a drunk. Unfortunately, most men became drunks.

Hamill continued to drink, and alcohol became a way of life for him. It helped him overcome his sexual shyness and be confident around the neighborhood girls whom he described as "noble defenders of the holy hymen." As a teenager, Hamill dropped out of school and lived on his own, working at a Brooklyn shipyard, where he would drink with his co-workers.

Yearning for a better life, Hamill joined the Navy, then traveled to Mexico. Alcohol remained a part of his life, and the results were wild nights of drinking and fighting, most of which he can't remember to this day. Hamill switched gears and decided to pursue his artistic interests, studying at the School of Visual Arts, where he would meet and fall in love with Laura, an exotic nude model.

By 1960, Hamill had begun a career in journalism, becoming a reporter for the New York Post. He was still drinking, and his alcoholism worsened an already turbulent first marriage. Finally, on New Year's Eve, 1972, at the age of 37, Pete Hamill had his last drink - a vodka. As he looked around the bar and saw all the old drunks passed out, he realized that he was looking at a vision of himself in the future. Terrified at the prospect of becoming a pathetic old drunk, Hamill quit drinking for good and never fell off the wagon. He was able to quit cold turkey without having to join an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous to help him stay sober.

Some readers found it strange that in A Drinking Life, Hamill does not explore the more horrific aspects of alcoholism in detail or sermonize in favor of temperance and prohibition. Rather, he exposes and dissects a culture that has embraced alcohol as part of its identity, which indirectly encourages its people to become alcoholics.

Pete Hamill became one of New York City's best known reporters, writing columns for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Newsday. As a foreign correspondent, he covered the wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. He served as editor-in-chief for the New York Post and the New York Daily News. His work as a journalist landed him on former President Richard M. Nixon's infamous list of political opponents.

In addition to his memoir A Drinking Life, Hamill also wrote a collection of non-fiction books, (including one about legendary singer-actor Frank Sinatra's contributions to American popular music) and several novels. His latest novel, North River, set in Depression-era New York City, was published in 2008.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful." - Pete Hamill

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Pete Hamill on University of California Television, giving a lecture on the history of Lower Manhattan and the origins of New York City. Enjoy!

Notes For December 30th, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 29th, 1816, the legendary British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley married his second wife, writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would become famous for her legendary horror novel, Frankenstein.

Five years earlier, after he was expelled from college for refusing to recant the atheist views in a pamphlet he'd written, Percy Bysshe Shelley, then nineteen years old, went to Scotland to marry his 16-year-old girlfriend, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a pub owner. They were married on August 28th, 1811, and Shelley's father disinherited him as a result.

Three years later, Shelley's marriage to Harriet had become unhappy. He often left her alone with their daughter, Ianthe. When he went to visit writer / journalist / philosopher William Godwin at his home and bookshop in London, Shelley also met his daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

On July 28th, 1814, Percy Bysshe Shelley left his wife and ran off with Mary, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, along for company. They sailed to Europe, wandered through France, and settled in Switzerland, living mostly on a small inheritance Percy had received from his grandfather. Six weeks later, broke and homesick, they returned to England.

In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary made another trip to Switzerland, at the behest of Claire Clairmont, who wanted them to meet Lord Byron - her ex-lover, whose interest she hoped to recapture. The Shelleys and Byron rented neighboring houses on Lake Geneva. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron became good friends, and their conversations got Shelley's creative juices flowing again; he began writing prolifically.

In December of 1816, not long after the Shelleys returned to England, Percy's estranged wife Harriet committed suicide, drowning herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. A few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Percy and Mary Shelley were properly married, partly so Percy could regain custody of his children. Unfortunately, the court refused to grant him custody of his children because he was an atheist. They were placed with foster parents.

Six years later, on July 8th, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a storm while sailing from Livorno to Lirici on his schooner, the Don Juan. The boat, which was custom made for Shelley in Genoa, sank after being pounded by the sudden storm. Shelley claimed to have had a premonition of his death. Mary Shelley would later claim that her husband's boat wasn't seaworthy. Most believe that the boat was seaworthy and sank as the result of both the storm and the poor seamanship of Percy Shelley and his two mates.

Some have claimed that Percy Shelley may have been depressed and committed suicide at sea, while others believe that Shelley's boat was attacked by pirates who mistook it for Lord Byron's ship. There is also evidence, albeit scattered and contradictory, that Shelley was murdered for political reasons by an agent of the British government, which he had antagonized with his anti-monarchist, pro-Irish views, writings, and activities.

When Shelley's body washed ashore, he was cremated on the beach as per the requirements of the quarantine laws of the time. His heart was rescued from the pyre by his friend, writer / adventurer Edward Trelawny, and given to Mary Shelley, who kept it with her until the day she died, after which, it was interred next to her grave.

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Quote Of The Day

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"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading from Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay, A Defense Of Poetry. Enjoy!

Notes For December 29th, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 29th, 1916, James Joyce's classic first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published in the United States. It was the first publication of the novel in book form, as it had previously been published in a serialized format in Ezra Pound's literary magazine, The Egoist, from 1914-15.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a complete rewrite of Stephen Hero, an earlier novel Joyce had been working on from 1904-05. Frustrated, Joyce abandoned it, but an incomplete first draft of Stephen Hero would be published posthumously in 1944.

Told in Joyce's dazzling, trademark stream-of-consciousness narrative style, (with his trademark use of dashes in place of quotation marks) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an autobiographical novel that told the story of the physical, intellectual, philosophical, political, and spiritual coming-of-age of its main character, Stephen Dedalus.

Named after the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, who also had conflicts with the established religion of his homeland, as he grows up, Stephen Dedalus (Dedalus was the architect of ancient Greek myth who became trapped in a labyrinth of his own design) begins to question the Catholic doctrine he was brought up to believe in. He eventually rebels against the Church and renounces his religion.

In Dedalus' native Ireland, the Church exerts a tremendous amount of influence on and power over all aspects of secular life, including the government. Whether one is on the political left or right, or in the middle, one cannot escape the power and influence of the Catholic Church. Realizing this, Stephen Dedalus refuses to commit himself to any political beliefs or party. He also realizes that there is no future for him in Ireland, so he leaves the country and moves abroad to pursue his artistic calling.

In a 1907 lecture, Joyce discussed the issues that Dedalus faces in the novel:

The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt. The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove.

A seminal early novel that establishes the literary style and personal philosophy of one of the world's greatest writers, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a must read for anyone interested in James Joyce or great novels. Its main character, Stephen Dedalus, would reappear as one of the main characters in Joyce's controversial epic masterpiece, Ulysses.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end." - James Joyce

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare recording of James Joyce himself reading from his classic novel, Finnegan's Wake. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Internet Writing Workshop members continue to find publishing success in all venues.

Congratulations to this week's crew, and we wish all our members the greatest success in 2010!

Jody

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Virginia Winters

My story, "Clarice," has been accepted at the Gumshoe Review for January 1. Many thanks to Gayle for the opportunity.

Pat St. Pierre

I have three photos published in the Winter issue of Ken*Again.

Wayne Scheer

I have good holiday news to report.

Pushing Out the Boat, a print publication out of Scotland, has accepted my story, "Doing Penance." Thanks to the folks at Fiction for their critiques.

Also, my flash, "One Happy Family," is up at Camroc Press Review. Thanks to Barry Basden, as well as the Practice group, for this one.

"The Story of My Life" is up at Ken*Again. Thanks to both Practice and Fiction for their help with this one.

Another holiday present for me...

Weird Year has accepted my story, "Without Tears," for their January 25 issue. This represents a personal triumph because they rejected my last submission, saying it wasn't weird enough. I consider myself weird enough.

Tom Mahony

My micro piece, "Marriage," is up at Blink Ink.

Barry Basden

"His Kind of Woman," slightly altered, has been reprinted by amphibi.us.

The original version appeared and disappeared a short while ago at 13 Myna Birds.

This Week's Practice Exercise

It's A Crime!

Created by: Alice Folkart
Posted on: 27 Dec 2009
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Exercise: In 400 words or less write a scene with at least two characters and a crime in progress. Give a clear idea of the place and time, what kind of crime it is, who is committing it and what happens. This exercise is all about suspense and action.

You can write about any kind of crime:

- a bank robbery
- a convenience store stick up
- white collar crime - the accountant juggling the books
- political crime - payoffs and manipulation
- corporate crime destroying lives with toxic waste or dangerous products
- even petty crime like lifting a candy bar from the display at the news stand.

Is the perpetrator sympathetic, perhaps committing the crime for what he thinks is a good reason? Or, is he or she an out and out scoundrel? Does he get away with it, or does someone sound the alarm, is he discovered in the act, does he run, is he caught? You needn't write a novel, but these general ideas that might spark your imagination.
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Exercise: In 400 words or less write a scene with at least two characters and a crime in progress. Give a clear idea of the place and time, what kind of crime it is, who is committing it and what happens. This exercise is all about suspense and action.
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In your critique, consider whether the scene grabs you, whether the action moves the scene along, whether the suspense is killing you, what you think of the perpetrator and victims. Would you want to read more?

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop.

Notes For December 24th, 2009

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Happy Holidays!

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We at the Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of our members and blog readers a safe and happy holiday season. There will be no post tomorrow, but be sure to check the blog this weekend for the latest Practice exercise and list of Yahoos - our members' publication successes!

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 24th, 1881, the legendary Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez was born. He was born in Moguer, Andalusia, Spain. Although he studied law at the University of Seville, Jiménez never practiced it, choosing to become a writer instead.

Jiménez' first two poetry books were published in 1900; he was eighteen at the time. That same year, his father died. Jiménez was devastated and fell into a severe depression. He was sent to France for psychiatric treatment, where he had an affair with his doctor's wife. Jiménez would spend the next two years at a sanitarium in Madrid.

The sanitarium was run by the nuns who lived at the nearby convent of the Sisters of the Holy Rosary order. Jiménez stayed at the sanitarium from 1901 to 1903. While there, he supposedly had passionate affairs with three young nuns who cared for him - Sister Pilar, Sister Amalia, and Sister Filomena. While there is no concrete evidence to prove this, Jiménez was expelled from the sanitarium by the Mother Superior, as were the three young nuns, who were sent to stay at other convents belonging to their order.

Beginning in 1911, Jiménez would write poems about his affairs with the nuns. One of the best known of these poems is Three Verses:

Sister! We stripped off our ardent bodies
In endless and senseless profusion….
It was autumn and the sun – don’t you remember?
Added sweet sadness to the white splendor of our abode
Sister Pilar, are your eyes still so black?
And your mouth so fresh and red?
And your breasts…? How are they?
Oh, do you recall how you would come into my room late at night,
calling to me like a mother, telling me off like a child?
When she fled, in a flight of deranged wimples,
from the impetuous will of my desire
she would seek shelter in a corner, like a cat…
but her nails were sweeter than my kisses.

In 1913, he met and fell in love with Zenobia Camprubi, a writer and translator known for her Spanish translation of the works of Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. Shortly after meeting Zenobia, Juan Ramón Jiménez published a book of mildly erotic, lyrical poems. He planned to follow it with a book of more explicitly erotic poetry, but changed his mind after Zenobia reacted with disgust to his previous collection.

Jiménez continued writing and publishing collections of poems at a prolific rate. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Jiménez refused to side with General Franco's fascists. He and Zenobia eventually left Spain on a self-imposed exile, settling first in Cuba, then in the United States, and finally in 1946, Puerto Rico. For eight months, he would be hospitalized again for severe depression.

Jiménez would later become a professor of Spanish language and literature at the University of Maryland, which would name a building on its campus and a writing program after him. In 1956, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three days later, his wife died of cancer. Devastated, his health began to deteriorate. He died in 1958, at the age of 76.

Among the most popular works of Juan Ramón Jiménez were poetry collections such as Spiritual Sonnets 1914-1916 (1916), Stones and Sky (1919), Poetry in Prose and Verse (1932), Voices of My Song (1945), and Animal At Bottom (1947). He also wrote a popular book-length prose poem, Platero and I (1917), a whimsical tale of a writer and his donkey, which is still read and studied by Spanish schoolchildren.

In 2007, a Spanish publisher released Books of Love, a compilation of Jiménez' erotic poetry. It contained his original book, plus a collection of previously unpublished poems - the more explicitly erotic poetry that Jiménez had wanted to publish earlier, but didn't. The poems about the author's affairs with the three young nuns were included in the new volume, resulting in a furious letter of protest from the nuns' order, the Sisters of the Holy Rosary.

Juan Ramón Jiménez remains one of the greatest Spanish poets of all time.

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Quote Of The Day

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"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." - Juan Ramón Jiménez

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of I Am Not I, a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Enjoy!

Notes For December 23rd, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 23rd, 1926, the famous poet, philosopher, and activist Robert Bly was born. He was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota. After graduating high school in 1944, Bly joined the Navy and served for two years. He then enrolled at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where he stayed for a year before transferring to Harvard University.

At Harvard, Bly's fellow undergraduate students included a group of poets and writers who would later become famous, such as George Plimpton, John Hawkes, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and Frank O'Hara. Robert Bly graduated Harvard in 1950 and moved to New York, where he spent the next few years.

In 1952, Bly received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. Being of Norwegian descent himself, Bly also took time to meet his Norwegian relatives. While working on his poetry translations, Bly encountered the works of other internationally renowned poets who were barely known in the United States, including Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson.

Bly was determined to create an American forum for English translations of the works of those and other foreign poets. So, he founded a succession of literary magazines that introduced them to the writers (and readers) of his generation. He also published essays on American poets. In 1954, he entered the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. While there, he met a girl named Carol on a blind date and later married her. She bore him four children and became a successful writer and teacher of the craft. They divorced in 1979. A year later, Bly married his second wife, Ruth.

Robert Bly's first poetry collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962. It would prove to be a major influence on American poetical voice for the next two decades. In 1963, Bly published an essay, A Wrong Turning in American Poetry, where he made a case against the influence of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore on American poetical voice, believing that American poets should look toward the likes of Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado, and Rainer Maria Rilke for inspiration.

In 1966, Bly became a political activist, co-founding American Writers Against The Vietnam War. The group organized public readings, meetings, teach-ins, and antiwar rallies and demonstrations. Bly would become a leader in the writing community's opposition to the Vietnam War.

Bly would publish more collections of poetry, including The Light Around the Body (1967), which won him the National Book Award. In 2000, he received the McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award. In 2002, he won the Maurice English Poetry Award and was named the University of Minnesota Library's Distinguished Writer. Six years later, in 2008, Bly was named the state of Minnesota's first poet laureate.

In addition to his poetry collections, Robert Bly wrote non-fiction books on a variety of subjects, including poetry and philosophy. His most famous non-fiction book combined both poetry and philosophy. Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) uses an obscure Brothers Grimm fairy tale to deliver a philosophical treatise on the masculinity of the modern man. Bly argues that the male psyche has been damaged by both the chauvinistic, aggressive "macho man" model of the 1950s (which was rejuvenated and embraced by the Reagan conservatives of the 1980s) and the "sensitive man" model of the 1970s created in part by the feminist movement.

Instead of these destructive models, Bly proposes an alternative model of manhood - a man of strength, bravery, intelligence, and conviction who is also a nurturer and not afraid to show (and share) his emotions. Bly also proposes a return to the rituals of guiding boys into manhood. Iron John: A Book About Men has been credited with starting the Mythopoetic men's movement of the early 1990s.

In 2006, the University of Minnesota purchased Bly's archive of over 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts, a journal covering nearly 50 years of his life, notebooks filled with poems, early drafts of translations, his correspondence with many other writers, and hundreds of audio and video tapes. The collection is housed at the Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University's campus.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness." - Robert Bly

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Robert Bly reading his poem Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey at his 80th birthday party at the Guthrie Theatre. Enjoy!

Notes For December 22nd, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 22nd, 1849, the legendary Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was forced to suffer the psychological torture of a mock execution at the hands of Czar Nicholas I. Dostoevsky was made to stand in front of a firing squad and prepared for execution. Just as he thought the soldiers were about to fire, he was given a reprieve, taken away, and sentenced to four years of hard labor at a prison camp in Omsk, Siberia.

Dostoevsky had been arrested for being a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, a liberal intellectual group founded by Mikhail Petrashevsky, a follower of French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. The Petrashevsky Circle opposed the czarist autocracy and Russian serfdom. Their members included writers, teachers, students, government officials, military officers, and others. Czar Nicholas I, fearful that the revolutions being waged in other countries would spread to Russia, mistakenly believed that the Petrashevsky Circle was a subversive revolutionary organization and ordered the arrest of its members.

While serving his time at the squalid, freezing, and filthy prison camp, Dostoevsky became disillusioned with Western ideas and converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity, planting the seeds of the next phase of his literary career.

He would later become famous for his legendary novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov, (1881) cementing his legacy as one of the greatest novelists of all time.

Fyodor Dostoevsky died of a lung hemorrhage from emphysema and an epileptic seizure on February 9th, 1881, at the age of 59.

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Quote Of The Day

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"It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them - the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a two-part reading from Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel, Crime and Punishment. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Internet Writing Workshop members continue to find publishing success in all venues.

Congratulations to this week's crew!

Jody

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Stacey Dye

My poem, "Masterpiece" is now out in BellaOnline's 'Mused.' Thanks to all who helped to edit it.

Mused is a wonderful literary journal that puts out an impeccable coffee table print book as well. I'm so pleased to be lucky enough to be there again.

If you check the "Feedback" section, I even got a nice comment from the poem I submitted in the Fall edition. What a nice surprise!

Thanks again for all the support!

Rebecca Gaffron

My creative nonfiction story, "A Sort of Homecoming," has been accepted by and is posted at Camroc Press Review. As always, thanks goes out to Barry for this quality journal. It's an honor to be a contributor there.

Alan Girling

My short memoir, "Mr. Forrest: Neighbour" is now appearing in the current issue of Canadian Stories, a magazine that describes itself as 'a literary folk magazine written by or about Canadians.'

To me it's definitely more folk than literary, but you can find out more by visiting their website.

Ann Hite

My story, "Blackberry Winter," joins Stacy's poem at Mused online. Take a look at the whole issue. It is awesome.

Pat St. Pierre

I had photos accepted by Southern Women's Review and Touch, and will let you know when the issues are ready.

Also I just had a chapbook "Theater of Life" accepted by Finishing Line Press. It will be published in 2010. I will let you know about prepublication dates.

I'm just thrilled.

Randy Radic

My review of Under Armour's latest product is up at Basil and Spice. Thanks to Cassie for the garment and Kelly for the opportunity.

My article about Byron de la Beckwith, the KKK and Medgar Evers is up at True Crime Magazine.

My article about Peter Rollack aka Pistol Pete is up at Crime Magazine.

My blog/article about my great-grandfather is up at Basil and Spice. Thanks to Kelly for the opportunity.

My review of God loves rich kids is up at Basil and Spice.

Thanks to Jc for the book and Kelly for the opportunity.

Sarah Savage

My first yahoo! My story "Interesting Things" is up at Camroc Press Review.

Thanks to Barry Basden for posting it. He made my week. He really is as easy to work with as everyone has said, and there aren't any long, nail-biting waits between submission and acceptance/rejection.

Amit Sharma

My short fiction "After the dark night" will be published by Muse India, an eJournal, in its forthcoming Jan-Feb 2010 issue.

Thanks to the list for keeping me motivated and informed.

Joanna M. Weston

Cheers for the solstice: I've four poems about my mother up at Mused.

A couple of other IWW members are up there too, so we're having a party!

This Week's Practice Exercise

I'm Sorry!

Prepared by: Ruth Douillette
Reposted on: Sunday, December 20, 2009

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Exercise: In fewer than 400 words write a scene in which one character makes an apology to another.

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To err is human, and a good apology can go a long way toward soothing ruffled feathers. Apologies can be forced, insincere, and reeking of false repentance, or they can be honest, heartfelt requests for forgiveness.

For this exercise you need two characters, one of whom has been wronged by the other, or feels wronged. Begin your story at the point where the apology is about to begin. Show us what the argument is about, but let the reader learn about both characters, their relationship; and the nature of the problem through effective use of dialogue and body language.

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Exercise: In fewer than 400 words write a scene in which one character makes an apology to another.

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Critique by commenting on what you learned about the relationship between the characters and the cause of the argument. As always, consider all aspects of the writing.


These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop.

Notes For December 18th, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 18th, 1870, the famous British writer Saki, the pseudonym of H.H. Munro, was born in Akyab, Burma, which is now known as Sittwe, Myanmar. He was born Hector Hugh Munro, the son of an inspector-general for the Burmese police. At the time of his birth, Burma was still part of the British Empire.

In 1872, Munro's pregnant mother had gone home to England for a visit. While there, she was charged by a cow, and the shock of it caused her to miscarry. She never recovered from the miscarriage and died shortly afterward. So, Munro's father sent him and his sister Ethel to England, where they were raised by their aunts and grandmother in a strict Victorian household.

H.H. Munro received his primary education at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and Bedford Grammar School. When his father left the Burmese police and retired to England, Munro and his sister traveled with him around Europe, visiting various fashionable spas and tourist resorts.

In 1893, Munro followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Indian Imperial Police. He was posted to Burma. Two years later, he had to resign due to poor health. Munro returned to England, where he began a career as a journalist, writing for newspapers such as The Westminster Gazette, The Daily Express, The Bystander, The Morning Post, and The Outlook.

Munro's first book was published in 1900. It was a non-fiction historical study called The Rise Of The Russian Empire. For six years, from 1902-08, Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia, and Paris. In Russia, he witnessed the infamous Bloody Sunday incident of January 22nd, 1905, where striking workers marched to St. Petersburg, hoping to deliver a petition to the Tsar. Instead, they were met by gunfire from the Tsar's soldiers and massacred. The organizer of the march, a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Gapon, later revealed himself to be a traitor working for the Tsarist secret police.

By 1908, H.H. Munro gave up his position as a foreign correspondent and settled in London, where he continued his writing career. He took the pseudonym Saki, which was thought by scholars to be a reference to the cupbearer in the famous ancient Persian poetry collection, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Although he had co-written a play, Saki's specialty was the short story, and he became a master of the form. He often satirized life in Edwardian England, but he was best known for his darkly humorous and macabre tales, such as The Storyteller, The Toys Of Peace, and Tobermory. His most famous story was The Open Window, a masterpiece of dark comedy.

The Open Window told the story of Framton Nuttel, a nervous nebbish who has come to visit Mrs. Sappleton, a friend of his sister's. He finds himself left alone with the woman's young niece, Vera, who tells him a horrifying story: three years ago, her aunt's husband and younger brothers had gone out hunting and drowned in a bog. Their bodies were never found, so Mrs. Sappleton has always left the walk-in window open in case they return.

That night, the men do return, covered in mud. A terrified Nuttel grabs his hat and cane and runs out of the house. The imaginative Vera explains that Nuttel was most likely frightened by the hunters' dog, as he was once chased into a cemetery by a pack of wild dogs and had to spend the night in a freshly dug grave!

In addition to his short story collections, Saki also wrote two novels, The Unbearable Bassington (1912), and When William Came (1913). When William Came, published before the outbreak of World War 1, was a work of "what if" fiction - a chronicle of life in London under German occupation after the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm II (the William of the title) invade Britain and conquer it.

When World War 1 broke out, Saki was 43 years old - too old to join the military, but he did anyway. He joined the Royal Fusiliers regiment of the British Army as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. In November of 1916, Saki was in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, when he was shot and killed by a German sniper. His last words were "Put that bloody cigarette out!"

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Quote Of The Day

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"We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples, they sometimes live apart." - Saki (H.H. Munro)

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading from Saki's classic short story, The Open Window. Enjoy!

Notes For December 17th, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 17th, 1843, A Christmas Carol, the legendary novella by Charles Dickens, was published in London, England. (Sometimes the publication date is mistakenly listed as December 19th.) Dickens began writing the book in October of 1843 and completed it in six weeks, with the final pages written during the first week of December.

After feuding with his publisher over the small amount of money he'd earned for his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens declined a lump-sum payment for A Christmas Carol and chose to take royalties instead. The novella's first edition run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve, but because of high production costs, Dickens only earned £230 and not the £1,000 he expected - and needed badly, as his wife had become pregnant again.

Although it didn't earn him as much as he'd hoped, A Christmas Carol proved to be a huge critical success, something Dickens also needed badly, after the failure of Martin Chuzzlewit. The holiday classic continued to sell well, and soon, the author saw more of a profit. In January of 1844, less than a month after its first edition release, A Christmas Carol appeared in a pirated edition, published by Parley's Illuminated Library. Dickens sued them and won, but the company just declared bankruptcy, leaving him without compensation and owing £700 in legal expenses.

To fight future piracy, Dickens periodically tweaked his manuscript for A Christmas Carol and republished it in revised editions, something many writers did back during the times of inadequate or nonexistent protection from copyright law. The piracy of A Christmas Carol was still a big disappointment for Dickens, as he felt a special affection for the novella's lessons in love and generosity that he wanted to teach the world.

Dickens based A Christmas Carol on both his own experiences and American writer Washington Irving's tales of the traditional old English Christmas and its customs. In 1824, when Dickens was twelve years old, his prosperous, middle class father's mismanagement of his money led to financial ruin. Unable to pay his creditors, he was arrested for debt. The Dickens family was sent to debtor's prison - except for the precocious, intellectual Charles, who was forced to leave school, pawn his collection of books, and go to work in a factory to pay off his father's debts.

In early 1843, Dickens toured the Cornish tin mines and saw children working in appalling conditions. He also visited one of several London schools that had been set up to educate the city's large population of half-starved, illiterate street children. Remembering his own horrific experiences as a child laborer, Dickens researched the effect of the Industrial Revolution on poor children. He gave a speech at the Manchester Athenaeum urging employers and workers to work together to fight illiteracy.

Dickens wrote and planned to publish a low-cost political pamphlet, An Appeal to the People of England, on Behalf of the Poor Man's Child, but changed his mind and put off the publication. Instead, he tried to inspire compassion for the poor through his beloved novella, A Christmas Carol. Its main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, had been partly based on Dickens' own attitude as a child before his family's financial ruin. As a young boy, he'd had a strong sense of intellectual and class superiority. When he was forced to work alongside other poor children (and adults), his initial humiliation was transformed into a deep, lifelong compassion for the poor.

A Christmas Carol opens on Christmas Eve, seven years after the death of Ebenezer Scrooge's business partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge is a greedy and heartless moneylender and landlord who overworks and grossly underpays his loyal, hardworking clerk, Bob Cratchit. Scrooge hates Christmas, dismissing the holiday as humbug. After grudgingly allowing Cratchit to take Christmas Day off, Scrooge leaves for home. The ghost of Jacob Marley appears and haunts him. Tormented and wrapped in heavy chains built link by link by his sins, Marley warns Scrooge that he will suffer the same fate if he doesn't change his ways. He tells Scrooge that three more spirits will haunt him.

The Ghost of Christmas Past brings Scrooge back to his past, a time when he cared about people and loved Christmas - before tragedy and greed warped him. The Ghost of Christmas Present exposes Scrooge to the plight of the poor - especially that of Bob Cratchit and his family, who are struggling to survive on the slave wages that Scrooge pays him. He also shows Scrooge how his nephew Fred - the son of his beloved sister who died in childbirth - still loves him despite the fact that Scrooge disowned him.

The Ghost of Christmas Future proves to be the scariest spirit, tormenting Scrooge with a vision of the death of Tiny Tim - Bob Cratchit's crippled and sick little son - which could have been prevented. He also shows Scrooge a vision of his own death, where nobody mourns him. Scrooge repents and awakens on Christmas morning with joy in his heart, vowing to be kind and to keep the spirit of the holiday with him always.

Needless to say, A Christmas Carol became hugely popular, a classic reread every year at Christmastime. Dickens' readers begged him to write another holiday story, so from 1844-48, Dickens published some Christmas-themed short stories. They sold well, but the critics trashed them. By 1849, Dickens decided that he was done writing Christmas stories, but he wanted to reach out to people with his "Carol philosophy." So, he began performing public readings of A Christmas Carol during the holiday season.

Dickens' first public reading of A Christmas Carol took place in 1853. It was an unabridged reading; for later performances, Dickens prepared an abridged text to read. He would perform 127 public readings of his holiday novella. His last performance was in 1870 - the year of his death. In 1867, Dickens performed a reading in Boston on Christmas Eve. One of the spectators, a factory owner named Fairbanks, was so moved that he experienced a Scrooge-like transformation and sent every one of his employees a turkey.

A Christmas Carol would be adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, radio, and television. The first stage play adaptation opened on February 5th, 1844 - less than two months after the novella was published - and became a hit. Of the many film adaptations, the best known and best loved version is the 1951 British production starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge. Disney recently released a 3D animated adaptation starring the voice of Jim Carrey. The very name Scrooge would enter the English lexicon as a synonym for the word miser.

A Christmas Carol remains one of the all-time greatest works of English literature and a treasured holiday classic.

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Quote Of The Day

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"It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection and disease in sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour." - Charles Dickens

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading from Charles Dickens' classic novella, A Christmas Carol. Enjoy!

Notes For December 16th, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 16th, 1775, the legendary British writer Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. Born into a large upper class family, Jane had six brothers and one sister, Cassandra.

With five sons to educate, (Jane's brother George was mentally handicapped and sent to live elsewhere) the Austens couldn't afford to send Jane and her sister to school, too. (When Jane was eight, the girls did go to Oxford for a year to begin their formal education, but then they fell ill with typhus and the family finances became strained.) However, the girls were well educated by their father and older brothers. Jane's father, William Austen, a clergyman, provided his daughters access to his large and eclectic library of books. He also provided them with writing and drawing materials.

Though part of the British upper class, the Austens were a liberal, intellectual family. Beginning around the time Jane was seven years old, the family staged plays privately for the amusement of themselves and their relatives and friends. Most of the plays were comedies and no doubt cultivated Jane's talents for comedy and satire. She began writing her own plays, poems, and stories at the age of twelve. These works were originally written for her and her family's amusement, but she made clean copies of the manuscripts and organized them into three bound volumes known as the Juvenilia.

Among the works in the Juvenilia were Love And Friendship, a satirical epistolary novella, and The History Of England, a scathing parody of Oliver Goldsmith's historical work of the same name, featuring watercolor illustrations by Jane's sister, Cassandra. Scholar Richard Jenkyns has compared Austen's Juvenilia to the works of 18th century British novelist Laurence Sterne and the 20th century British comedy troupe, Monty Python's Flying Circus.

As she grew into womanhood, Jane Austen became involved in activities typical for young women of her age and social class. She practiced the piano, helped her mother and sister supervise the servants, attended church regularly, and socialized with her friends and neighbors. Socializing at the time usually involved dancing, and as her brother Henry later observed, "Jane was fond of dancing and excelled at it."

Although she had become an accomplished seamstress, at around the age of fourteen, she decided that she wanted to be a professional writer. In 1793, at the age of eighteen, Jane began work on a novella, Lady Susan, which she completed two years later. In this epistolary novella, Lady Susan is an intelligent, attractive, and self-centered middle aged widow who uses her beauty and charm to manipulate and seduce both married and single men alike in her quest to snare another rich husband. She also tries to marry off her daughter Frederica, whom she considers stupid and stubborn, to a rich man. Frederica, however, is a sweet and sensible girl, and will have none of that.

Lady Susan was considered risque and shocking for its time, but Jane's liberal parents supported her writing endeavors. Around the time she completed the manuscript, the twenty-year-old Jane Austen met Tom Lefroy, the nephew of her neighbors. Having just graduated from university, the young Irishman had come to London to train as a barrister. He and Jane met at a social gathering, and it was love at first sight. They spent a lot of time together, but then Tom's family intervened and sent him away. They had decided that Tom and Jane were too young and too poor to marry, despite their social class. Jane never saw him again.

Jane began work on her first full-length novel, Elinor and Marianne, which would later be revised considerably and published as the classic Sense and Sensibility. While working on her second novel, First Impressions, (which would be revised and later published as Pride and Prejudice) Jane's father tried to get Elinor and Marianne published. It was rejected. Jane probably never knew about it, as she kept writing.

In 1800, William Austen surprised his family by announcing his retirement and his plan to move the family to Bath. Jane was shocked at having to move out of the only home she ever knew. In Bath, she fell into a depression and her writing productivity slowed down to almost a standstill. Two years after the move, Jane and her sister visited their old friends, Althea and Catherine Bigg. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg, was back home, having returned following his graduation from Oxford.

Jane had known Harris since they were both young. Harris was a large, unattractive man who rarely spoke. When he did speak, he stuttered, engaged in aggressive conversation, and was completely tactless. He was, however, an heir to his family's considerable fortune, so when he proposed to Jane, she accepted. Marriage to Harris would be practical - he could take care of her, provide a comfortable life for her parents in their old age, and a home for her unmarried sister. The next morning, though, Jane realized she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance.

In 1804, Jane began work on a new novel, The Watsons, but it would remain unfinished. Several months after she started writing it, her father died suddenly. This left Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their mother penniless. Jane's brothers Edward, James, Henry, and Francis contributed to the support of their sisters and mother. The women lived in rented rooms in Bath and Southampton for the next four years. Then, Edward's fortunes improved and he moved them into a cottage on his estate in Chawton.

Feeling secure again, Jane returned to her writing, and her level of productivity soared. In 1811, her first full-length novel, Sense and Sensibility, was finally published. The book was published anonymously, under the name "A Lady." The reviews were great and the first edition sold out. The royalties provided Jane with both financial and psychological independence. She continued to publish classic novels, including Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814), the first editions of which also sold out.

After her novel Emma was published in 1815, Jane learned that the Prince Regent admired her writing and kept a set of her novels at every one of his residences. His librarian sent her an invitation to meet with the Prince at his home in London. Jane disliked the Prince, but she couldn't refuse the invitation. She would later base her satirical piece, Plan Of A Novel, (1815) on the many suggestions made to her by the Prince's annoying librarian.

In July of 1816, Jane completed the first draft of her next novel, The Elliots, which would later be published as Persuasion. Earlier in the year, she had fallen ill, but ignored her illness and kept writing at her usual pace. As a result, her health began a long and slow deterioration. As the illness progressed, she lost all of her energy and experienced increasing difficulty in walking. Jane Austen died the following year at the age of 41. Her last two novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, would be published posthumously in 1817.

Most of Jane's biographers relied on Dr. Vincent Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis of Addison's disease. Some claimed that Jane suffered from Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of cancer. In a recent work, Katherine White of Britain's Addison's Disease Self Help Group suggested that Jane Austen most likely died of bovine tuberculosis, a common disease during her time that was contracted by drinking unpasteurized milk.

To this day, Jane Austen is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest English novelists of all time. Her works are still studied and admired by readers around the world.

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Quote Of The Day

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"There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart." - Jane Austen

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading from Jane Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, performed by the acclaimed British actress, Helena Bonham Carter. Enjoy!

Notes For December 15th, 2009

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This Day In History

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On December 15th, 1936, the legendary British writer George Orwell (the pseudonym of Eric Blair) delivered the completed manuscript for his famous non-fiction book, The Road To Wigan Pier (1937), before leaving for Spain to help fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

The Road To Wigan Pier was Orwell's account of life in Wigan, a poor coal mining town in Northern England. To research his book, Orwell lived like one of the locals, in a dirty rented room above a tripe shop. He met many Wiganers, took extensive notes on the living conditions and wages, explored the mine, and spent days in the library, researching public health records, working conditions in mines, and other data.

The resulting book is divided into two parts; the first part is a straightforward documentary on life in Wigan. The second part is a philosophical treatise that asks and attempts to answer a question: if socialism can improve the appalling conditions in Wigan and towns like it around the world, then why aren't we all socialists?

George Orwell was a lifelong socialist, and he believed that socialism could indeed improve the condition of towns like Wigan. Why then was socialism not universally accepted? Orwell believed that the ferocious prejudice of the middle class against people whom they associate with socialism, such as the lower class poor, people of certain races, intellectuals, atheists and agnostics, libertines, hippies (or sandal-wearers, as Orwell called them) pacifists, feminists, and other such undesirables, was the reason. He summed it up in his famous quote, "The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight."

Orwell would later become famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both of which were brilliant allegorical satires of Stalinism. Animal Farm was a modern cautionary fable, while Nineteen Eighty-Four was a work of dystopic science fiction. In the years since their publication, the radical right in the United States and Europe embraced these novels as the bibles of anti-communism. George Orwell became their hero, and this gave way to a misconception that Orwell had been a staunch conservative - perhaps even a fascist - although he was actually a socialist.

Why then did Orwell write his famous novels? During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell fought alongside the POUM, (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista - the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) which was allied with Britain's Labour Party, of which he was a member. The POUM was one of several leftist factions which had formed a loose coalition to fight General Franco's fascists. Another member of this coalition was the Spanish Communist Party, which was controlled by the Soviet Union.

At the Soviets' insistence, the Spanish Communist Party denounced the POUM as a Trotskyist organization and falsely claimed that they were in cahoots with the fascists. Near the end of the war, the POUM was outlawed, and the Spanish Communist Party began attacking its members. Tragically, this infighting would break apart the coalition, giving the fascists the opportunity to win the war. Orwell was wounded in action, shot in the throat by a sniper. While he recovered in a POUM hospital, he had a lot of time to think, and he came to hate Soviet communism.

The lesson Orwell teaches us in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four is that even an ideal as noble as socialism can become corrupted and twisted into something far worse than the ills it seeks to cure. And yet, he remained a lifelong socialist and always hoped for a better world than the one of poverty, despair, and apathy that he experienced while researching and writing The Road To Wigan Pier.

George Orwell died of tuberculosis in January of 1950, at the age of 46.

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Quote Of The Day

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"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading from George Orwell's classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, performed by Christina Woo during this year's Banned Books Week ceremonies. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Here is the latest list of publishing successes by Internet Writing Workshop members. Once again, our writers have found success in a number of venues, and a hearty congratulations goes out to this week's crew!

Jody

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Alan R. Braun

My story, "Freaks" (as A. R. Braun), just came out in the new issue of Downstate Story, a magazine published in Peoria. I'm so thrilled to be featured in such an austere magazine!

My story, "Coven," just came out in the Heavy Metal Horror anthology. WOOT!

My story, "The Interloper," comes out tomorrow in Bonded by Blood 2 through SNM Horror.

Barry Basden

Wearing my floppy editor's hat, I answer questions at Six Questions For... as part of an ongoing project to find out what those folks really want.

Beth Camp

I'm very pleased Camroc Press Review accepted my poem, "The Oracle" which went up December 7.

Barry Basden is an encouraging editor who makes the submission process stress-free and IWW does a wonderful job by providing a community of writers. Thank you all!

Celestine Stoltenberg

I have a piece, "The Great Do-Over," up at 50-to-1.

Short but sweet. My first publication in six years.

Ellen Lindquist

Ellen Lindquist's short, surrealistic flash fictions "Properly Pedigreed Snails" and "Eskimo Pie Psychosis" are in the October, 2009 issue of Clockwise Cat. Her mother isn't going to understand these two...

Ginny Wagner

One of my practice pieces, "Afternoon Delight," will be running in Apollo's Lyre December issue beginning on approximately December 20, 2009. Thanks to all on practice who critiqued it.

Jan Bridgeford-Smith

My article, "All That Glittered: The Rise and Fall of Sarah Coventry," is now available on-line at Life in the Finger Lakes. It was originally published in the magazine's 2009 Summer edition.

As always, I credit the feedback and support from IWW members for any worthwhile (or paid) writing I produce. Thanks folks.

My six-word memoir will be published in Smith Magazine's forthcoming anthology, It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

My reaction to this honor? Six words. One thought. Pulitzer Prize.

My story, "Details," was accepted for publication on Weirdyear. It will appear on the front page January 8, 2010.

A special thanks to all my colleagues on the Practice List for the helpful feedback on a variation of this piece. As ever, their suggestions and support are invaluable.

Jeannette Angell

I have a piece in the 50-to-1 blog also ... "Love Can be Murder."

50 words exactly! Whew!

Joanna M. Weston

Two poems, "Single" and "Street Square," are up at Pemmican Press.

Judith Quaempts

Just learned one of my first lines has been accepted by 50-to-1 and is already up. What's really great is that I'm sharing space with two other IWW members, Alice and Amanda.

Kathy Highcove

My story "A Higher Calling," is up on The ShadowCast Audio Anthology, an ezine with a difference. Editor Jason Warden provides a reading of one's story, or gives the writer the option of sending in a recording IF the story is accepted. I let Jason do the honors with my flash and he was a credible Creole woman with attitude. Drowned daid.

Mark Budman

My Six-Word Memoir will be published in the new book, It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, published by Smith Magazine. I was published in the original one, too.

Michael Wright

My poem, "Why I Am Not A Musician," is up at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k).

Paul Stenquist

A mini yahoo for a mini New York Times blog: "Chevrolet Volt or Jelly Doughnut? An Old Michigan City Will Make Both."

Randy Radic

My review of Brigitte Zarie's new CD is up at Basil and Spice.

Thanks to Brigitte and Neil for the CD, and thanks to Kelly for the opportunity.

My review of a TIMEX product is up at Basil and Spice.

Thanks to Tristan at TIMEX and Kelly at Basil and Spice.

Sue Ellis

My story, "King Me," is up at Weirdyear.

This is a neat little site for odd stories, which I tend to write if I stay up past 10 PM. The stories headline for a day, and then can be accessed by clicking on 'previous.' The editor responds quickly, too.

Tom Mahony

My flash, "Idiot" is being reprinted in The Foghorn.

Wayne Scheer

I have a warm and fuzzy Christmas story up at Foliate Oak, "Home for the Holidays." It started as a Practice exercise, so thanks for those critiques.

An old comic story of mine critiqued in Fiction, "Doing Battle," has been accepted for the March issue of The Shine Journal.

This Week's Practice Exercise

Gut Feeling

Prepared by: Loretta Russell and Ruth Douillette
Reposted on: Sunday, December 13, 2009
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In less than 400 words, write a scene in which a character has a flash of intuition. Show the character's response to the feeling, and what the outcome is.

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The dictionary definition of intuition is "quick and ready insight, the act or process of coming to direct knowledge without reasoning or inferring." It is derived from the Latin word "intueri" which means "to see within." Intuition is a way of knowing or sensing the truth without benefit of logical explanation.

Most likely you've experienced the sense that something will happen, or you may have had a prickle of warning about a person, although there is no logical reason for you to feel this way. Call it a gut feeling or a hunch--you may have paid it no mind, or completely changed your plans based on the feeling.

Here are some examples to prime your pen:

You passed on a blind date, and later discovered the guy was a killer.

You pulled into a rest stop, but something didn't feel right, so you drove off just as Highway Patrol vehicles pulled in.

Notes For December 11th, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 11th, 1918, the legendary Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born. He was born in Kislovodsk, Stavropol Krai, in the North Caucasian region of Russia. Shortly after his mother Taisia discovered that she was pregnant with him, his father Isaakiy, an Army officer and World War 1 veteran, was killed in a hunting accident.

With the death of his father, Alexander was raised by his mother and aunt. Poor but educated, his mother encouraged his interests in literature and science and brought him up in her Russian Orthodox faith. He began writing in 1936, at the age of eighteen. He also studied mathematics at Rostov State University and took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History.

In April of 1940, while at university, Solzhenitsyn married his classmate, Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya, a chemistry major. They would divorce in 1952, remarry in 1957, then divorce again in 1972. The following year, he married his second wife, mathematician Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, who was 21 years younger. She would bear him three sons.

During World War 2, Solzhenitsyn served in the Red Army as commander of a sound-ranging battery, saw major action at the front, and was decorated twice. His early, unfinished novel Love The Revolution! chronicled his wartime experiences and his growing disillusionment with the Soviet regime. Around this time, in Februrary of 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for making derogatory comments about the regime in general and Josef Stalin in particular, in letters to his friend Nikolai Vitkevich. (At the time, it was a common practice for Soviet authorities to read citizens' private mail in search of subversive statements.)

Accused of distributing anti-Soviet propaganda, Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On July 7th, 1945, he was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, which was the normal sentence for the crime Solzhenitsyn was charged with. He served his time at several different work camps, including one in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan, where his experiences would form the basis for his first published book, a novella that would bring him international fame.

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (1962) told the story of the title character, an innocent Russian soldier and prisoner of war who, after returning home, finds himself arrested by Soviet authorities and charged with being a spy. He is sent to a work camp in the Soviet gulag system. The brutally cold, filthy, and degrading labor camp is designed to dehumanize the prisoners, but Ivan Denisovich's spirit can't be broken. He makes friends with his fellow inmates and they all try to survive the inhumane conditions as best they can. When Denisovich falls ill, he is forced to continue working.

While serving his time in Ekibastuz, Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself fell ill and had a tumor removed, although the doctors failed to diagnose his cancer. In 1953, after he finished serving his sentence, he was exiled for life in Kazakhstan, a common fate for political prisoners. His cancer spread. Close to death, he was allowed to be treated at a hospital in Tashkent. The treatments worked and his cancer went into remission. He would base his 1967 novel, Cancer Ward, on his experiences fighting the disease.

After Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous Secret Speech in 1956, where he denounced the crimes of the Stalin regime in an attempt to bring the Soviet Union out of the dark ages and closer to Lenin's original vision, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was exonerated and freed from exile. He returned to Russia, where he taught school during the day and wrote at night. He kept his writings a secret, but somehow, while he was working on the manuscript for his famous non-fiction expose, The Gulag Archipelago, which wouldn't be published until 1973, (and not officially in the Soviet Union until 1989) the KGB found out that he was a writer.

Nevertheless, in 1962, Solzhenitsyn approached Alexander Tvardovsky, poet and editor-in-chief of the Noviy Mir magazine, with his final draft of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. Amazingly, the novella was published in an edited form with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who publically defended it at a Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication. He said: "There is a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."

Solzhenitsyn's novella became a huge hit throughout Russia. It was studied in Soviet schools. It also became a hit around the world, bringing the Soviet gulag system to the attention of the West. Unfortunately, two years later, in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power, and books exposing the horrors of Stalinism began to disappear. In 1965, the KGB confiscated most of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's papers and manuscripts. The manuscript for his non-fiction book The Gulag Archipelago was spared, hidden from the KGB by Solzhenitsyn's friends in Estonia. They helped him finish typing it up.

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He couldn't go to Stockholm to receive it, for fear of not being allowed back in the Soviet Union. A compromise was proposed where Solzhenitsyn would receive his prize at a ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow, but the Swedish government rejected the proposal, fearing that the ensuing media coverage would damage its relations with the Soviet Union.

The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in 1973. Not long afterward, the KGB found a copy of the first part of the manuscript. On Februrary 12th, 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was arrested. The following day, he was deported to Frankfurt, West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. A few days later, the celebrated Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko suffered reprisals for his support of Solzhenitsyn. U.S. military attache William Odom managed to smuggle most of Solzhenitsyn's archive out of Russia.

Solzhenitsyn lived in Cologne and Zurich, Switzerland, before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States. He lived in the Hoover Tower, then settled in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. In 1978, Harvard University awarded him an honorary literary degree, and he delivered the commencment address - where he condemned materialism in modern Western culture. He began work on The Red Wheel, a cycle of novels on the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In the 1980s, Solzhenitsyn found himself becoming a media star, the darling of the radical right and the Reagan administration, which had whipped up anti-communist hysteria and paranoia to levels not seen since the 1950s. Liberals and secularists criticized Solzhenitsyn for his strong support of the Vietnam War, his reactionary patriotism, and his devout espousal of Russian Orthodox Christianity, which had an anti-Semitic flavor. He had written a 2-volume essay on Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together, which was denounced as anti-Semitic. He had also fought against allowing foreign Catholic and Protestant clergy into Russia in order to protect the country's Russian Orthodox Christian identity.

In 1990, Solzhenitsyn's Russian citizenship was restored. Four years later, having tired of the West, he and his wife moved to Troitse-Lykovo, West Moscow, where he lived until his death in 2008 at the age of 89. On the first anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's death, in an interview on Radio Liberty, Russian dissident writer Vladimir Voynovich claimed that Solzhenitsyn had been a lifelong anti-Semite - a fact he deliberately kept secret because he knew that it would prevent him from receiving the Nobel Prize. His notorious essay, Two Hundred Years Together, would not be published until 2001.

Despite the controversy over some of his beliefs, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remains one of Russia's greatest writers.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time of threatening moral and social dangers - such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its public works are used as wastepaper instead of being read." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a news segment from Russia Today on the legacy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Enjoy!

Notes For December 10th, 2009

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 10th, 1830, the legendary poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prosperous middle class family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was treasurer of Amherst College, (his father, Samuel Dickinson, co-founded the school) as well as a state legislator who served numerous terms of office over a 40-year period. Emily described him as warm and loving, while her mother was cold and distant. Emily had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia.

As a child, Emily Dickinson was well-behaved and displayed a gift for music, showing a particular talent for playing the piano. However, from the age of nine, she studied botany and tended the family garden with her sister. Emily collected pressed plants, and throughout her lifetime, assembled them in a 66-page leather bound herbarium, which would contain almost 425 specimens.

At the age of ten, Emily, along with her sister, enrolled at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that began accepting female students two years earlier. Edward Dickinson bought a new home and moved the family in. Whenever their parents were absent, Emily and her brother Austin would pretend to be Lord and Lady Dickinson, the owners and rulers of the home. Since she was so distant from her mother, Emily turned to her brother for comfort whenever something befell her. "He was an awful mother," she wrote, "but I liked him better than none."

From a young age, Emily was troubled by the "deepening menace" of death, especially when she lost people close to her. When she was 14, the death of her second cousin and close friend Sophia Holland from typhus traumatized her. A year later, a religious revival took place in Amherst, with many people becoming born again Christians. Emily too became one of the faithful, but it didn't last. She ended her church-going a few years later, after which, she wrote a poem opining that "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church - / I keep it, staying at Home."

After graduating from Amherst Academy in 1847, Emily Dickinson enrolled at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which would later become Mount Holyoke College. She remained at the Seminary for only ten months. Some say that she had become ill and was homesick, others have suggested that she disliked the teachers and rebelled against the school's evangelical fervor. Whatever the reason, her brother Austin brought her home, where she took over the household, keeping house and cooking for the family. She enjoyed attending activities and events in town.

At this time, a young attorney named Benjamin Franklin Newton became a Dickinson family friend and a mentor to the 18-year-old Emily. He introduced her to the works of William Wordsworth and gifted her with a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first poetry collection. Newton held Emily in high regard and recognized her talent as a poet, but their relationship was most likely platonic. Sadly, he contracted tuberculosis, and as he lay dying of the disease, he wrote to Emily and told her that he would like to live long enough to see her become a literary success. He didn't. Emily would say of Newton, "When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality - but venturing too near himself, he never returned."

A few years later, in 1850, Emily was devastated again by the death of a close friend. Leonard Humphrey, her former prinicpal at Amherst Academy, died suddenly of "brain congestion" at a young age. Emily had other friends, including Susan Gilbert, her best girlfriend, who had been a classmate of hers at Amherst. Emily would write her over three hundred letters, more than she had written to anyone else. Their friendship was tempestuous, as Susan was often aloof and disagreeable, but she also played the role of Emily's muse and literary advisor. She would later marry Emily's brother Austin, but the marriage was not a happy one.

From the mid-1850s, Emily's mother became bedridden, suffering from various chronic illnesses. She demanded that one of her daughters remain with her, so Emily assumed the responsibility. The strain of having to care for her cold and emotionally distant mother, as well as keeping up with the household chores, took a toll on Emily's mind. She began to withdraw more and more from the outside world, and became a recluse.

When she wasn't caring for her mother or keeping house, Emily wrote poetry and organized her large collection of manuscripts, rewriting, editing, and making clean copies of her poems. Over a seven-year period, from 1858 to 1865, she assembled 40 volumes containing nearly 800 poems. When Samuel Bowles, owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican newspaper, became a friend of the Dickinson family, Emily sent him over three dozen letters and nearly fifty poems. Their friendship brought out some of her most intense writing.

Around 1872, Otis Phillips Lord, a judge on the Massachusetts state Supreme Court, became an acquaintance of Emily's, and then, her friend. In Lord, she found a soul mate and kindred spirit who possessed similar literary interests and admired her poetry. After his wife died in 1877, scholars believe that Lord's relationship with Emily became a late-life romance, but this can't be proven because their letters were destroyed.

More deaths of loved ones traumatized Emily. In 1874, her father died of a stroke. Nearly a year to the day in 1875, her mother suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. The increased demands her care required took a tremendous toll on Emily's mental and physical health. She continued to write, but stopped organizing her manuscripts. Her mother would live for seven more years. She died in 1882. The following year, Emily lost her favorite nephew, Gilbert, her brother's youngest child, when the boy died of typhus. Judge Lord fell ill and died in March of 1884.

Devastated and drained both mentally and physically, her health began to deteriorate. Emily Dickinson died on May 15th, 1886, at the age of 55. Her doctor listed the cause of death as Bright's disease, now known as chronic nephritis or inflammation of the kidneys. After Emily's death, her sister Lavinia kept the promise she made and destroyed all of Emily's letters. However, Emily did not request that her poems be destroyed. Although less than a dozen of them had been published during Emily's lifetime, Lavinia was shocked to find that her sister had written nearly 1,800 poems.

When Emily's poems were published anonymously by Samuel Bowles in the Springfield Republican, he had edited them considerably, and she complained that the edits changed the meanings of her poems. Emily wrote poetry in an experimental style, with unconventional capitalization and punctuation, extensive use of dashes, slant rhyme schemes, and idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery. Evidently, Bowles thought her style was too unconventional for Victorian readers. Her work would not be published in its original, unaltered format until 1955, when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems Of Emily Dickinson.

Today, Emily Dickinson is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest American poets of all time, and she remains a major influence on American poetical voice.

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Quote Of The Day

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"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry." - Emily Dickinson

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Emily Dickinson's classic poem, I Cannot Live With You, in a virtual movie that uses special effects to make the poet seem to read her own work. An amazing, but somewhat creepy video. Enjoy!