Notes For December 31st, 2010

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Happy New Year!

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The Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of its members and blog readers a happy, healthy, prosperous, and productive new year.

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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. 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 enemies.

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, 2010

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 30th, 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 the writer, journalist, and philosopher William Godwin at his home and bookshop in London, Shelley also met his daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom he fell in love.

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 about 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 the great poet Lord Byron - her ex-lover, whose affections 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 violent 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, 2010

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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, (and 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, and Dedalus, the architect of ancient Greek myth who became trapped in a labyrinth of his own design, Stephen Dedalus 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 party or beliefs. 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!

Notes For December 28th, 2010

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 28th, 1917, A Neglected Anniversary, the famous satirical essay by legendary American essayist, satirist, and journalist H.L. Mencken, was published in the New York Evening Mail. The essay appeared to be a legitimate article on the American invention of the bathtub, but it was really a hoax - a practical joke on the American press and one of many classic Mencken jabs at the American bourgeoisie, which he liked to call the booboisie.

In a narrative parodying the style of an editorial, Mencken chided the public for failing to recognize such an important American cultural event as the anniversary of the invention of the bathtub: "Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day." To forget such an important anniversary was downright unpatriotic!

The nation had simply forgotten that the very first bathtubs appeared in Cincinnati. Why? Mencken believed it was because the bathtub had been denounced by the watchdogs of society as "an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic," and by the American medical establishment, which believed that bathing in a tub caused "phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases."

In a (seemingly) thoroughly researched account of the Great Bathtub Debate, Mencken observed:

The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was reflected in legislation. Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.

Mencken was surprised and delighted when newspapers across the country fell for his phony article on the history of the American bathtub and republished it. Not only that, the "facts" in the article were added to reference books and touted by the health and hygiene industry. The makers of calendars for the White House observed Mencken's anniversary of the bathtub and his claim that Millard Fillmore had been the first U.S. President to install one at the White House.

Eight years after he wrote the bathtub article, Mencken decided it was time to end the joke and expose the hoax. He published a confession, but some people believed that was the real hoax, and his phony bathtub anniversary continued to be commemorated.

Mencken had written A Neglected Anniversary as a satirical slap at both the gullibility of the American booboisie and the American press, which had been acting as part of the government's propaganda machine. In 1917, when the article was published, the United States had entered World War 1. Unlike World War 2, the U.S. had not been attacked. Many Americans were apprehensive about entering World War 1 to fight Germany and her allies. So, for propaganda purposes, the press smeared everything German. American citizens of German descent were denounced as "dirty Huns" and their patriotism was questioned. Even prominent German-American writers like H.L. Mencken and his close friend Theodore Dreiser were denounced.

The propaganda machine went to such absurd lengths that sauerkraut, the popular German side dish, had been renamed by the U.S. government as "liberty cabbage." (Sound familiar? Remember "freedom fries?") When the press smeared him for daring to admit that he wasn't ashamed of his German heritage and that he admired German culture, Mencken had enough. A Neglected Anniversary was his revenge on the press for being part of the propaganda machine instead of the objective journalists they were supposed to be.

What did Mencken think of Germany during the second World War? When Hitler first came to power, Mencken dismissed him as a buffoon. When the Nazis began persecuting Jews, Mencken compared Hitler's Third Reich to the American Ku Klux Klan. And when President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to admit Jewish refugees into the United States, Mencken blasted him publicly. He was one of the first American journalists to speak out against the persecution of Jews in Germany at a time when even the New York Times remained silent on the issue.

H.L. Mencken died in 1956 at the age of 75. One can only imagine what he'd think of the times we live in now, and media outlets like the Fox News Channel that serve the propaganda machine, presenting lies as truths.

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Quote Of The Day

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"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier." - H.L. Mencken

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a clip of a rare interview with H.L. Mencken - the only recording of his voice known to exist. Enjoy!

Our Members' Writing Success~

Amanda Borenstadt:

My fantasy novel, Syzygy, was featured in the Indie Spotlight. As a little freebie Christmas present for my readers, I published two spin-off stories with characters from the novel.  "Rainy Day with Sam and Bea"  and "Deacon Sam"

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Deborah Lincoln:

Finally! I get to do a Yahoo!  My novel, JABEZ, which some of you long-timers might remember, won first prize in the historical category in the Great American Novel Contest--Tag Publishers. I have NO idea if this is a big deal, or how many entries there were, but it comes with a $75 check. The Pacific Northwest Writers Association advertised the contest, so I'm thinking it may be a good one.

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Tom Mahony:

My story, "Time" is up at EarthSpeak Magazine.

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M. Elaine Moore:

My short form poem, “Displaced,” was accepted at “Four and Twenty Magazine."

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Anita Saran:

My first novel, Circe, arrived in the mail couple of days ago--three author copies. And a poster "proof' which is good enough to frame. (Thanks Clive for the poster idea). My first copy has gone to my son Siddhartha to whom the book is dedicated. When I was pregnant with him, my Creative Director warned that I would lose my creativity and I set out to prove her wrong. Siddhartha is old enough (18) to read a spoof on the Quest for Mr. Right and sex and a smattering of four letter words. He loves the book, which is good as he's a highly critical reader and wants to write a book himself. He's written a plot for a novel, which is many pages long. Yaaay! This is my third book in paperback edition and it's the best looking.

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Wayne Scheer:

Anatomy, a new online publication, has accepted my story, "Getting  Serious," for their inaugural issue slated for March 2011. This story was critiqued in Fiction. An old story, also critiqued in Fiction, "Buddies," is up at ken*again.

Editors don't seem to have the holiday spirit.  I received a number of   rejections the past few days, but I did get one acceptance.  Rusty Typer  accepted a recent flash I wrote with the Practice group, "Is It My Fault?" 

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Notes For December 24th, 2010

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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 happy and safe holiday season. For your holiday reading, I recommend A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, and Old Christmas by Washington Irving.

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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 the nuns' order insists that there is no concrete evidence proving that the affairs took place, 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, 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, 2010

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 23rd, 1926, the famous American 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 equally 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, 2010

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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 prepared for execution and made to stand in front of a firing squad. 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 reading from Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Enjoy!

Notes For December 21st, 2010

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 21st, 1879, A Doll's House, the famous play by legendary Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, opened in Copenhagen. Ibsen, born into an affluent family in Skien, Norway, took up writing while studying as an apprentice pharmacist. At this time, his parents, who were both descended from some of Norway's oldest and most respected families, experienced sudden financial ruin.

Ibsen's father plunged into severe depression. His mother sought solace in religion. They would both serve to inspire the characters in their son's plays, which often dealt with financial adversity, moral conflicts, and the hypocrisy and dark secrets that often lurk beneath cloaks of respectability. Henrik Ibsen would become one of the greatest playwrights of all time - and one of the most controversial. A Doll's House would become his most famous play.

A Doll's House opens with Nora Helmer, a middle class housewife and mother, returning home after doing her Christmas shopping. Her husband, Torvald, has a new job as a bank manager, and both he and Nora believe that their finances will improve. Torvald is terrified of debt; Nora behaves childishly, but her husband enjoys treating her like a child. He instructs her like a parent and indulges her whims.

Nora's old girlfriend Christine Linde arrives for a visit. Christine is a childless widow whose husband left her no money, so she has supported herself by doing various jobs. She's looking for more work, preferably work that's not too physically demanding. Nora tells Christine the secret she's been keeping from her husband. When Torvald fell seriously ill, Nora borrowed money from disgraced lawyer Nils Krogstad to save his life. To protect her husband's pride, Nora made him and everyone else believe that the money came from her father, who had died at the time.

Nora has been repaying her debt by skimming money from her housekeeping budget and secretly working, making handwritten copies of papers. Being able to earn her own money "as if she were a man" makes Nora proud. Now that her husband has a new job, the extra money he'll give her, combined with her secret earnings, will finally enable Nora to pay off her debt completely.

Nora asks Torvald to give Christine a secretarial job at his bank. He agrees. Later, Nora is approached by Nils Krogstad, who also works at Torvald's bank. He fears that he will be laid off to make room for Christine's position and demands that Nora help him keep his job. When she refuses, he threatens to reveal that she forged her husband's name on the loan bond. Krogstad warns her that her reputation would be ruined like his. He doesn't go into detail about his own indiscretion, but says that he did it for the same reason as Nora - to provide for a seriously ill spouse.

Krogstad leaves, but Torvald, who had seen him, asks Nora if Krogstad tried to get her to help save his job. Nora asks about Krogstad's indiscretion, and Torvald tells her that he committed forgery, then escaped prosecution by playing a "cunning trick." Torvald would have trusted Krogstad had he admitted his guilt, but by continuing to feign innocence, Krogstad "has lost all moral character." Torvald believes that a parent who "lives a lie" poisons his children and causes them to become criminals as well. This distresses Nora greatly.

When Krogstad does lose his job, he arrives to tell Nora that while he no longer cares about the loan he made her, he intends to use the forged bond to blackmail Torvald into not only retaining his position but giving him a promotion as well. When Nora tells Christine of this, Christine reveals that she and Krogstad were in love once, and she'll talk to him. When she does, Christine tells him that she always loved him and was forced to marry her husband out of financial desperation. She blames herself for Krogstad's disgrace. Moved, Krogstad abandons his blackmail plan, but Christine believes that Torvald should know the truth, for the sake of his and Nora's marriage.

When Torvald learns the truth about Krogstad's loan to Nora, he explodes. He berates Nora, denouncing her as a dishonest and immoral woman and an unfit mother. He declares that their marriage is over, and will only be preserved for the sake of appearance. When Krogstad tells him that he has no intention of blackmailing him, Torvald burns the incriminating evidence and takes back his harsh words to Nora. But instead of recognizing the agonizing choice Nora made for the sake of his health, he attributes her actions to her foolishness, which is one of her most endearing feminine traits.

Nora finally realizes that the strong and gallant man she thought she'd married is a weak-willed, hypocritical, self-absorbed narcissist whose love for her was really love for himself for being a wonderful husband. The play ends with Nora declaring that her sham of a marriage is over. She's leaving Torvald and her children and will live alone while she tries to find out who she is and decide what to do with her life. All her life, she's been treated like a doll - a plaything - first by her father, then by her husband, and she's not going to take it anymore.

Torvald insists that Nora do her duties as wife and mother, but Nora says that her first duty is to herself. She reveals that she had planned to kill herself to save Torvald's reputation because she thought that he would sacrifice his reputation to save hers. Now she knows that would have been a pointless act. Torvald only cares about himself. Before the curtain falls, Nora lets herself out of the house, leaving behind her wedding ring and keys. Her narcissistic husband is left behind as well, in a state of confusion.

A Doll's House was received with a mixture of high praise and loud cries of outrage. Ibsen's fellow playwright, George Bernard Shaw, found the play exhilarating. Most of Ibsen's fellow Scandinavians loved it; at the time the play premiered in Copenhagen, sales of printed copies were record breaking. But some critics saw in the play a direct assault on the sanctity of marriage.

For the play's debut in Germany, Ibsen was forced to write an alternate ending. The lead actress refused to play Nora as she was written, and producers demanded that the ending be changed as well, to make the play more palatable to conservative German audiences. So, in that production, instead of leaving her husband, Nora decides to stay with Torvald for the sake of their children. Ibsen later condemned the alternate ending as a disgrace to the original play, calling it a "barbaric outrage."

A Doll's House would later be adapted for the radio, screen, and television. It is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest plays ever written.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority." - Henrik Ibsen

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a clip from a rare 1959 live TV production of A Doll's House, featuring Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer as Nora and Torvald. Enjoy!

IWW Member's Publishing Success~

Barry Basden:

My 100-word drabble, "Waiting," is live and in good IWW company at Boston Literary Magazine.  Thanks to all who helped with it under a different title. ---

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Mark Budman:

Sonora Review did an interview with me.

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Florence Cardinal:

Health Central: Enjoying the Holidays  

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Jeannette Angell Cezanne:

 If you're interested in historical fiction and want an inexpensive   holiday gift, click here for my new  ebook, The Crown and the Kingdom. It takes place in France and England in the decades leading up to the Hundred Years' War and is, I hope, a satisfying read. Reviews always welcomed.  In other news, a piece I wrote on the history of Provincetown (nonfiction this time) appears in this month's issue of the Cape Cod Geneaological Bulletin.

My play, Flygirls, about Amelia Earhart and Harriet Quimby, is included in Estrogenius 2009: A Celebration of Female Voices, a lovely anthology. I figure that this one is about history, too, even though it takes place in the afterlife.

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Norman Thomas Cooper:

I'm proud to share that The Dead School of Southern Literature has published another one of my little stories. That's good enough for one yahoo, but they also have a link to my piece of flash on the front page of the website. Thanks to all on the Practice list, where the story was born, and the good writers on both the Prose-P and Fiction-W list for helping me shape this story. You're comments and suggestions are a treasure. Link to website: Link to story:  (I'm not sure why they used the picture on the page with the story, it's not me or anyone I know. It's not even in the same time period of my story.)

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Sue Ellis:

Cynic Online Magazine went live today with the 2010 Christmas story contest winners. My story, "The Apology," made honorable mention. I don't think I had this critiqued at IWW, but thanks to all the great feedback I've had for the past few years, I'm better able to edit stories myself.   Also, Skyline Magazine has selected "The Disappearance of PFC Ned Lansing" for their 2010 print edition of Skyline Review. That one was critiqued in fiction. Thanks so much for everyone who read the story and offered feedback.  

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Tom Mahony:  

My flash, "Angry Loner,"is up at SFWP.      

My flash, "The Sedan," is up at Johnny America.    

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Sarah Morgan:

 My review of Ingrid Betancourt's new memoir, EVEN SILENCE HAS AN END, is up on the Internet Review of Books. Betancourt said shortly after her rescue that there were things that happened in the jungle that should stay in the jungle, but her memoir tells a lot of what went on those six years she was held captive by the FARC. It was a captivating read. And, a big thank you to the nonfiction list who helped polish and find focus for the review. IWW rocks! All the best,

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Wayne Scheer:                

Apollo's Lyre accepted my flash, "Being a Man," for their March  issue. I wrote this story for a recent Practice exercise, so thanks to the  group.    

Trying to keep pace with Barry Basden, my flash, "Mother and Daughter," is also in Boston Literary Magazine. This one began in Practice and was   recently critiqued in Fiction, so thanks to all.  for  the blog  

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Roger Poppen:

It's not Dickens but it is a Christmas story. 'Christmas at Aunt Betty's' is up at Hennen's Observer.  

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Ben Winship:

My story "Circle Bread," which was critiqued in the fiction group is up and  Lowestoft Chronicle which is a relatively new zine with a really cool aesthetic.      

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Michael Wright:

My haiku was selected a winner in the 2010 Punctuation Haiku Contest. The prize? a T-shirt. You can read all the winners here. Scroll down and click on "click here to read the winning haikus.

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Notes For December 17th, 2010

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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, and famously dismisses 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 Yet to Come 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, he 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, while on his first and only public reading tour of America, 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 as Scrooge, whose name 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, 2010

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 16th, 1775, the legendary British novelist 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's finances became strained.) However, the girls were well educated by their father and older brothers. Jane's clergyman father, William Austen, 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 had ever known. In Bath, she fell into a deep 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. He 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 terrible 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 had 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 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, 2010

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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 subjects.

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 improve the condition of towns like Wigan. Why then was socialism not universally accepted? Orwell believed that reason was 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 others. He concluded, "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, right wingers 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 popular misconception that Orwell had been a staunch conservative - perhaps even a fascist - although he was really 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 and give 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 last year's Banned Books Week ceremonies. Enjoy!

Notes For December 14th, 2010

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This Day In Writing History

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On December 14th, 1916, the famous American writer Shirley Jackson was born. She was born in San Francisco, California, to an upper-middle class family. When she was a young girl, the family moved across the country to Rochester, New York, where she later graduated from Brighton High School.

After high school, Shirley Jackson attended first the University of Rochester, then Syracuse University. While a student at Syracuse, her first published short story, Janice (1938), appeared, and through her work with the university's literary magazine, she met Stanley Edgar Hyman, who would become both a famous literary critic and her husband.

Shirley and Stanley settled down in rural Vermont and had four children - two sons and two daughters - who would become somewhat famous themselves when their mother included fictionalized versions of them in her humorous memoirs, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). Although Shirley's literary career - and sadly, her life - would be short lived, she wrote six novels, several children's books, and numerous short stories. She would famously quip, "Fifty percent of my life was spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes, and mending."

Shirley Jackson's first novel, The Road Through the Wall was published in 1948. Inspired by the upper-middle class California suburb that she had spent her early childhood in, the novel tells the dark stories of the people who live in a seemingly ideal community that is tearing itself apart on the inside. Meanwhile, a new road being built threatens to expose the isolated community to the outside world.

Jackson's first novel introduced her trademark prose style and fascination with the dark side of human nature. In her later novels, such as The Bird's Nest (1954) and The Sundial (1958), Jackson ventured into all out horror - stories that combined supernatural and psychological horror. This was nothing new to her. Jackson's most famous short story, The Lottery, dealt with similar themes.

The Lottery, first published in The New Yorker in 1948, told the story of a small, rural American town with a horrific secret. The story begins with the town's 300 residents acting strange and nervous, as June 27th approaches. That's when they will partake in their annual ritual, called "the lottery." In preparation for the ritual, children collect stones while the adults assemble for the event.

The reader soon learns that "the lottery" is an ancient ritual held to choose a human sacrifice to ensure a good harvest. In the first round, the head of each family chooses a slip of paper. Bill Hutchinson receives the paper with the black dot on it, so the sacrifice will come from his family. In the second round, each Hutchinson family member chooses a slip of paper. Bill's wife Tessie receives the paper with the black dot. The townspeople stone her to death while she denounces the lottery to her dying breath.

The Lottery was quite a shocker for readers in 1948, and hundreds of letters poured in to the New Yorker. Shirley described the reactions as "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse." Some charged her with a calculated, subversive attack on American values and religious faith. The story would be republished in book form as the title story of the collection, The Lottery and Other Stories (1949). It would be adapted as an acclaimed short film in 1969, a made-for-TV feature film in 1996, and as a short film again in 2007.

Shirley Jackson's most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, was published in 1959. The brilliant supernatural horror story told the tale of Dr. John Montague, a parapsychologist who rents the famous and supposedly haunted Hill House for a summer. He intends to prove that the house is in fact possessed by supernatural forces. Accompanying him are two people who have already experienced supernatural phenomena. They are Theodora, a psychic, and Eleanor, a shy, troubled recluse who as a girl witnessed poltergeist activity in and around her family's home.

The haunting soon begins, and as the novel progresses, it becomes obvious that the evil forces in Hill House are intent on possessing the vulnerable Eleanor, as frightening incidents begin to erode her sanity. Dr. Montague's bossy, arrogant, and tactless wife later arrives to help her husband with his investigation, along with boys' school headmaster Arthur Parker, who is also interested in the supernatural. Will any of these people survive Hill House?

The Haunting of Hill House was adapted first as an acclaimed feature film called The Haunting in 1963, starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom and Richard Johnson, and again in a mediocre 1999 remake starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In his 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, an analysis of horror in literature, radio, film, and comics, legendary horror novelist Stephen King proclaimed The Haunting of Hill House to be one of the greatest horror novels of the late 20th century. The novel's masterful prose and power to scare can be seen in the famous opening paragraph:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

As Shirley Jackson's reputation grew as a horror novelist, her husband Stanley started a myth that she practiced witchcraft. This was done as a publicity stunt to sell books, but many people took it seriously. Shirley found it funny. Later, the myth gave her the idea to write The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956), a children's book based on the Salem witch trials.

Throughout her life, Shirley suffered from mental and psychosomatic illnesses. These illnesses, and the effects of the various prescription drugs she took to treat them caused her health to decline early in life. She was also overweight and a heavy smoker. She died in her sleep of heart failure in August of 1965 at the age of 48. In 1996, a crate of Shirley Jackson's unpublished short stories was found in the barn behind her home. The best of these stories were published later that year as the short story collection, Just An Ordinary Day.

In 2007, the Shirley Jackson Award was established, with permission from her estate, to honor her literary legacy and recognize outstanding achievement in psychological suspense, horror, and dark fantasy literature.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there." - Shirley Jackson

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features the acclaimed 1969 short film adaptation of Shirley Jackson's classic short story, The Lottery. Enjoy!

Our Members' Writing Success~

Barry Basden: 

Three short poems are up today at Media Virus. Thanks to 

those who helped with any of them in whatever form.

In late January, Willows Wept Review will publish my 

surrealistic poem about hunting,"The Rabbit Ran for a 

Quarter Mile."

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Florence Cardinal: 

My two-part article is up at Health Central:  

Perchance to Dream - Prophetic Dreams - Sleep Disorders 

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Jeannette Cezanne:  

I'm very pleased to announce that my medieval novel, The 

Crown and The Kingdom, is nowpublished as an ebook and 

available here.

I started this book when I was fifteen, and it's gone 

through one translation (originally written in French), 

myriad rewrites and edits, a full structural change 

(and back), and a lot of angst. So I'm very happy to have 

it out in the world.
 

Please note that the Kindle ebook can be read on nearly 

any portable device, not just the Kindle, and indeed on 

your laptop or home computer as well.
 

Please take a moment to check it out. It's affordable and 

might be just the right holiday gift for that person who's 

difficult to shop for!
 

Thanks, and thanks for your support!

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Jacki Massoud:

Hello -

My flash piece, "Subway Sounds", has been published at 

Weird Year and is now online on their site: 

This originally started out in Practice, so thank you to 

everyone who gave me critiques on this one.

Cheers!

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Tom Mahony: 

There's a new review of my novel IMPERFECT SOLITUDE in 

The Waterman's Library, and an interview with me in  

Boston Literary Magazine:
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Bob Sanchez: 

I won some prizes today at the El Paso Writers' League's 

annual writing contest, including a first place in one of 

the fiction categories.

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Wayne Scheer:

My flash, "A Secret," is up at Long Story Short.

My 100-worder, "She's Still There," won Honorable Mention 

at this  month's Necon Books Flash Fiction Contest. 

They're going crazy with themselves and expanded next 

month's word limit to 500. Check the  site for theme 

details.
 

Foliate Oak's website is working again. The current issue 

includes my  flash, "A Clear Picture.""The Bride Didn't 

Even Wear White," a bit of creative nonfiction  that 

started in Practice a long time ago, will be published in  

Clever Magazine's January issue.
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Pat St. Pierre:

Just received two acceptances from Touch, The Journal of 

Healing for two of my photos. 
 
A "Winter Afternoon" photo will be in the January 2011 

issue and can be purchased at Amazon.
 
The "Evening" photo will be in the May 2011 issue.

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Ignatius Valentine Aloysius:

I'm up at Suite101 with the article "How to Buy Firewood 

From Your Local Scout Troop,"seen here.
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Joanna M. Weston:
A short poem, "Glazing," is up at Ink, Sweat, and Tears.


Cheers!

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