The INTERNET WRITING WORKSHOP: 6/1/22

Thursday, June 30, 2022

Notes For June 30th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 30th, 1936, Gone With The Wind, the classic novel by the famous American writer Margaret Mitchell, was published. It all began when Mitchell was bedridden with a broken ankle.

To pass the time, her husband, John Marsh, brought her numerous history books from the public library. After she'd read them all, he said, "Peggy, if you want another book, why don't you write your own?" So, she took him up on it.

John brought Margaret an old Remington typewriter, and she started writing a novel, using her vast knowledge of the Civil War and some dramatic moments from her own life as inspiration.

At first, she wrote just for her own amusement and kept her writing a closely guarded secret from her friends, hiding pages in her closet, under her bed, and even disguising them as a divan.

In her early drafts, she called her heroine Pansy O'Hara and Tara had been called Fontenoy Hall. Early titles for the book included Tote The Weary Load and Tomorrow Is Another Day.

Mitchell's husband acted as her proofreader and continuity editor for the manuscript. By 1929, her ankle had healed and she lost interest in writing. She soon took it up again, and most of the manuscript was written by 1930, at an apartment she called "The Dump."

She gave no thought to publishing her novel, but then in 1935, she met Harold Latham, an editor from the Macmillan publishing house, who had been scouring the South in search of promising writers. She escorted him around Atlanta at the request of a mutual friend.

Latham became enchanted with Margaret Mitchell and asked her if she'd ever written a book. She told him no, and he said, "Well, if you ever do write a book, please show it to me first!" A friend of Mitchell's overheard the conversation and made a derogatory comment about "someone as silly as Peggy writing a book."

Insulted, Mitchell went home, fished out her unfinished manuscript and gave it to Latham at his hotel room, just as he was about to leave Atlanta. After he got home and read it, he encouraged Mitchell to complete the book, believing that it would be a blockbuster.

Margaret Mitchell completed her manuscript in March of 1936, and two months later, Gone With The Wind was published. Latham's prediction proved to be uncannily accurate. The novel became an overnight success.

The first edition hardcover sold for $3 - a virtually unprecedented price for a hardcover book in 1936 and the equivalent of $63 in today's money. Yet, within its first six months of publication, the novel sold about a million copies.

Legendary Hollywood producer David O. Selznick bought the film rights, and three years later, the movie version of Gone With The Wind premiered in Atlanta.

The nearly four hour epic film, which starred Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, is rightfully considered one of the greatest motion pictures ever made.

Selznick had to fight the censors to use the famous line "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!" and other elements from the novel deemed objectionable and unacceptable for movies during the Production Code era.

He employed a clever trick to outwit the censors, deliberately peppering the script with content he knew the censors would never pass. That way, he could offer to cut some things in exchange for other material he wanted to keep in the picture.

The film made headlines in 2020 when the streaming service HBO Max pulled it, citing complaints about its romanticized depiction of slavery, pro-Confederate point of view, and racial stereotyping.

Despite these negative aspects of the film, (a product of its time) it also resulted in Hattie McDaniel becoming the first African American to win an Academy Award - a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Mammy.

After an outcry over the pulling of Gone With The Wind, HBO Max returned the film to its service, with an introduction by Jacqueline Stewart (professor of cinema studies and director of the nonprofit arts organization, Black Cinema House) putting its controversial elements in the proper historical context.

Sadly, Margaret Mitchell died suddenly in 1949 at the age of 49. She was struck by a drunken off-duty taxi driver, Hugh Gravitt, as she crossed Peachtree Street on her way to see a movie. At the time, Gravitt was out on $5450 bail (about $67,000 in today's money) and awaiting trial for a previous drunk driving arrest.

Mitchell never regained consciousness. She died in the hospital five days after being struck. Despite his prior record, Gravitt, the drunk driver who killed her, served only eleven months in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

For many years, it was assumed that Margaret Mitchell had only written one complete novel - Gone With The Wind. Then, in the 1990s, an earlier manuscript of hers was discovered. The manuscript was a novel called Lost Laysen - a romance set in the South Pacific. Mitchell had written it in two notebooks in 1916 - when she was just sixteen years old.

In the early 1920s, Mitchell had given the novel and a collection of letters to an old boyfriend, Henry Love Angel. Angel's son had discovered the manuscript and sent it to the Road to Tara Museum, which authenticated it.

Lost Laysen was published in 1996 in a volume that included an account of Mitchell and Angel's romance and a collection of her letters to him.

Quote Of The Day

"The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business." - Margaret Mitchell

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Margaret Mitchell's classic novel, Gone With The Wind. Enjoy!

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Notes For June 29th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 29th, 1900, the famous French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry was born in Lyon, France.

He was born into an old aristocratic family, but his father, the Viscount Jean de Saint-Exupéry, was an insurance broker who died when Antoine was four.

The young Saint Exupéry was a below average student and failed his prep school final exams. Nonetheless, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture.

In 1921, he joined the military and was assigned to the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs (calvary) before being sent to Strasbourg to train as a pilot. He received his pilot's license the following year, along with an offer of transfer to the Air Force.

Due to the strenuous objections of his fiancée, Saint Exupéry declined the transfer and moved to Paris, where he took an office job. Over the next few years, the couple broke off their engagement and Saint Exupéry worked at a series of menial jobs.

In 1926, he became a pilot again - and not just any pilot. He flew planes for the Aéropostale as one of the first international mail flight pilots in the world - a dangerous job considering how primitive aircraft were in the 1920s.

That same year, Saint Exupéry published his first work - a short story called The Aviator - in Le Navire d'Argent magazine.

In 1929, he published his first book, Southern Mail. His career as an aviator took off (no pun intended) as well. He became the Latécoère French airline stopover manager at Cape Juby airfield in the Spanish zone of Southern Morocco. He later moved to Argentina and became director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company.

In 1931, Saint Exupéry published his second book, Night Flight, a novel based on his adventures flying for the Aéropostale, which won him the Prix Femina prize and made his name as a writer.

He also married Consuelo Suncin, a Salvadoran writer. It would be a stormy marriage, as Saint Exupéry was always away flying and a notorious womanizer.

After his death, his mistress, Hélène de Vogüé, became his literary executrix and wrote a biography of him under the pseudonym Pierre Chevrier.

On December 30th, 1935, Saint Exupéry and his navigator, André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert while en route to Saigon.

They had been attempting to win a 150,000 franc prize by flying from Paris to Saigon faster than any previous aviators. Both men survived the crash, but they didn't know where they were, and had only enough food and drink to sustain them for one day.

They wandered the desert, experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations. By the third day, the men became so dehydrated that they stopped sweating. The next day, they were found by a Bedouin camel rider who saved their lives.

Saint Exupéry wrote a memoir of their experience, Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939), and his most famous book, a children's novella called The Little Prince (1943) opens with a pilot being marooned in the desert.

The Little Prince is a delightful, clever, surreal, and poetic fairytale about a little boy who is the Prince of B612, a small asteroid out in space.

The Prince works hard caring for his asteroid, which will die if he neglects it. He falls in love with the only rose that grows on the asteroid.

One day, the Prince leaves home to see what the rest of the universe is like. He visits other asteroids, each one the home of an eccentric character.

The King tells his subjects that he can control the stars - but only by telling them to do what they already do anyway. He believes that a citizen's duty is to obey the King - but only if the King's demands are reasonable.

The Conceited Man lives alone, but longs to be admired by everyone. He is literally deaf to anything that isn't a compliment. The Drunkard drinks to forget that he's ashamed of being a drunkard.

The Businessman wants to own the stars, but the Prince tells him that because one cannot care for the stars or be useful to them in some way, he cannot own them. The Prince owns the rose because he cares for it.

The Lamplighter lives on an asteroid that rotates once a minute. Before its rotation sped up, he had time to rest. Now, he has no time to rest, but he refuses to turn his back on his work. The Prince feels sorry for the Lamplighter because he's the only person he's met who cares for something other than himself.

The Geographer spends all of his time making maps, but he never leaves his desk. He won't trust anything that he can't see with his own two eyes, but he refuses to leave his desk to explore the world around him.

The Prince comes to Earth as an ambassador at the King's request, and meets a marooned pilot in the desert, telling him about his home asteroid and the aforementioned characters he's met.

As he travels the desert, he tames a desert fox and meets a railway switchman and a merchant who both comment on the absurdity of human nature. He also meets a sly and deadly snake. The story ends on a sad, surreal, and ambiguous note.

The Little Prince has become - and still is - an all time classic work of children's literature that's beloved by readers of all ages.

In the 1940s and 50s, Disney considered making an animated feature film adaptation, but the plans fell through. In 1974, there was a live action, musical feature film adaptation released by Paramount - the last movie musical written and composed by the team of Lerner and Lowe.

The film starred Steven Warner as the Prince, Richard Kiley as the pilot, Gene Wilder as the Fox, and Bob Fosse (who choreographed his own dance routine) as the Snake.

At the time of its release, the movie was roundly panned by critics and a bomb at the box office, but it has since become a cult classic highly sought after by film lovers. It's now available on DVD.

In August of 2016, a big budget animated feature film adaptation of The Little Prince was released, with a stellar voice cast that included Jeff Bridges, Rachel McAdams, Benicio Del Toro, Ricky Gervais, Albert Brooks, Paul Rudd, James Franco, and Paul Giamatti.

Although the film featured dazzling animation and received critical acclaim, scoring a 93% fresh rating on the Tomatometer, it flopped at the box office, grossing about $30 million on a budget of $81 million.

In 1943, after living in America for just over two years, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, then 43 years old, returned to Europe and enlisted to fly in the Free French Forces and fight with the Allies in the Mediterranean.

A year later, after publishing his next book, Letter To A Hostage, Saint Exupéry took off from an airbase in Corsica and was never seen again. His plane was thought to have crashed.

In 1998, a French fisherman found a silver identity bracelet bearing the names of Saint Exupéry, his wife Consuelo, and his publishers, Reynal Hitchcock. The bracelet was fastened to a piece of cloth, most likely from Saint Exupéry's uniform.

Two years later, a diver found the remains of a P-38 Lightning war plane off the coast of Marseille. In 2003, some of the remains were recovered, and investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the aircraft was Saint Exupéry's missing plane.

Quote Of The Day

"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiring for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Antoine de Saint Exupéry's classic novella, The Little Prince. Enjoy!

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Notes For June 28th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 28th, 1888, the legendary Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson left San Francisco and set sail for the South Seas.

He was searching for a new home with a healthier climate, as he was suffering from tuberculosis. He and his family would settle on a Samoan island, where Stevenson would spend the last six years of his life.

No stranger to such voyages, Stevenson was an avid traveler and adventurer. He began his literary career writing travelogues. His first, An Inland Voyage (1878), was an account of his 1876 canoeing trip through France and Belgium.

He followed it with Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), a memoir of his twelve-day, 120-mile solo hike through the Cévennes Mountains in France.

Though he would write several more travelogues, Stevenson made his name as a writer of fiction, first with his short story collections, then with his adventure novels.

His most famous adventure novel was the classic Treasure Island (1883). Set in mid-18th century England, it told the story of Jim Hawkins, a young boy from a seaside village who works at his parents' inn.

One of the lodgers at the inn is Billy Bones, a rum guzzling ex-pirate whom Jim comes to like. Bones is hiding out from his former crew mates, but one of them, a sailor called Black Dog, tracks him down.

They come to blows and Black Dog flees. Another man, a blind fellow named Pew, arrives with a message for Bones - a pirate's summons that causes the rum-soaked Bones to have a stroke and die.

Jim and his mother then open Bones' sea chest, hoping to find enough money to cover the rent that Bones owed them. Later, they discover something unexpected in the chest - a map.

It's a detailed map of an island where Bones' former commander Captain Flint buried his treasure. Soon, Jim finds himself on a ship bound for the island, where he runs afoul of other pirates, including the legendary Long John Silver.

Robert Louis Stevenson later wrote another seafaring adventure, Kidnapped (1886), set amidst the intrigues of the Jacobite movement in 18th century Scotland. David Balfour, an orphaned young man, arrives to stay with his Uncle Ebenezer.

David's stingy, money hungry uncle, scheming to steal his inheritance, sells the boy to Captain Hoseason of the brig Covenant, who forces him to work as cabin boy. Hoseason plans to resell David to another slavemaster.

Other classic Stevenson novels include The Black Arrow (1883), an adventure novel set during the Wars of the Roses - the English civil wars that took place in the 15th century - and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

In this celebrated horror tale, Dr. Henry Jekyll, a respected, compassionate doctor and scientist, troubled by Man's capacity for evil, invents a miracle drug to eliminate the dark side of the human psyche.

Unfortunately, instead of eliminating Jekyll's dark side, the drug causes it to emerge as a separate personality - that of Edward Hyde, a depraved, murderous psychopath who terrorizes London.

After Robert Louis Stevenson and his family arrived in Samoa, they settled on the island of Upolu, where they lived on a 400-acre parcel of land in the village of Vailima. Stevenson took the native name Tusitala, which meant teller of tales in Samoan.

The Samoans came to love him and often turned to him for advice. He became active in local politics, and, believing that the European rulers of the Samoan Islands were incompetent, blasted them publicly in a nonfiction book called A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892).

The book caused such an uproar that Stevenson feared he might be deported. He wasn't. The scandal blew over and he remained in Samoa until he died from his tuberculosis in 1894 at the age of 44.

Of the European leaders whom he had blasted for their mismanagement of Samoa, Stevenson would famously quip, "I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how he shines beside the politician!"

Quote Of The Day

"Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life." - Robert Louis Stevenson

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure novel, Treasure Island (1883). Enjoy!

Monday, June 27, 2022

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 6/26/22

Preeth Ganapathy

I'm happy to announce that two of my poems are up at The Sunlight Press.

Friday, June 24, 2022

Notes For June 24th, 2002

This Day In Literary History

On June 24th, 1842, the legendary American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio. He was the tenth of thirteen children, all bearing first names that began with the letter A.

He grew up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, where his poor but intellectual parents instilled in him a deep love for reading. When he was fifteen, Bierce left home to become a printer's devil (apprentice) at a small Ohio newspaper.

In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, Bierce enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. The following year, he was made a First Lieutenant and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, mapping areas that would likely become battlefields.

He fought in the Battle of Shiloh, which at the time was the bloodiest battle in U.S. history. Bierce used the terrifying experience as the source for several short stories and a memoir, What I Saw of Shiloh.

He continued fighting in the war and received recognition for his daring rescue of a seriously wounded comrade under fire in the Battle of Rich Mountain, West Virginia. In June of 1864, Bierce himself was seriously wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.

He spent the summer on furlough and returned to active duty in September. He was discharged in January 1865, but resumed his military career in the summer of 1866, when he rejoined General Hazen on an expedition to inspect military outposts in the Great Plains.

In San Francisco, after receiving the rank of Brevet Major, Bierce resigned from the Army. He remained in San Francisco, where he became famous as both a contributor and an editor for many local newspapers and periodicals. On Christmas Day, 1871, he married his girlfriend, Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day.

She bore him two sons and a daughter, but the couple would separate in 1888 when Bierce discovered letters from a lover that constituted proof of Mollie's infidelity. They finally divorced in 1904.

Mollie died a year later. Bierce's sons died before him; his son Day was shot in a dispute over a woman, and his other son Leigh died of pneumonia - a complication of his alcoholism.

Ambrose Bierce lived in England from 1872-75, where he wrote and contributed to magazines. He returned to San Francisco, then left again to manage a mining company in the Dakota Territory.

After the company folded, he went back to San Francisco and resumed his career as a journalist. In 1887, he published a column called Prattle, becoming one of the first columnists and editorial writers for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, The San Francisco Examiner.

In January of 1896, Hearst sent Bierce to Washington, D.C. to foil the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies' plan to have a Congressional ally sneak in a bill that excused the companies from having to repay massive government loans to build the First Transcontinental Railroad.

Bierce's coverage of the story - and his scathing satirical diatribes - resulted in such public outrage that the bill was defeated. His sardonic nature and scathing satire earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce." Despite his reputation, he was known to encourage young writers to pursue and perfect their craft.

As a writer himself, Ambrose Bierce was known for both his horror stories, which were on a par with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and his satircal works. His best known horror story was An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge.

Published in 1891. It told the tale of a Confederate saboteur, Peyton Farquhar, who is caught and sentenced to be hung from Owl Creek Bridge. At the hanging, the rope breaks and Farquhar falls into the creek.

He escapes and makes it to dry land. From there, as he tries to get home to his family, Farquhar finds that his senses have been heightened to superhuman proportions. He also experiences visual and auditory hallucinations.

When he finally arrives home, he runs to his wife. Just as he reaches out to her, Farquhar feels a searing pain in his neck and all goes black. It is revealed that he never escaped at all. He dreamed the whole thing just as he was hung, before the rope broke his neck.

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge was adapted numerous times, the most famous adaptation being a French short film made in 1963 called La Rivière du Hibou, directed by Robert Enrico.

It won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject and was later aired on American television as an episode of the brilliant and acclaimed 1959-64 TV series, The Twilight Zone.

Ambrose Bierce was most famous for his satirical masterpiece, The Devil's Dictionary. Published in 1911, The Devil's Dictionary was a scathing, book-length parody of Webster's Dictionary, filled with humorous definitions of various words, such as:

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.

The end of Ambrose Bierce's life turned out to be so strange that, had he lived, he might have written a short story about it. In October of 1913, at the age of 71, Bierce embarked on a tour of his old Civil War battlefields.

In December, after visiting locations in Louisiana and Texas, Bierce crossed the border into Mexico, where he became involved with the Mexican Revolution. He joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, and later witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca.

Bierce followed Villa's army as far as Chihuahua. He wrote a letter to his close friend Blanche Partington, which was dated December 26, 1913. Then he mysteriously disappeared, vanishing without a trace - one of the most famous disappearances in literary history.

Some writers have speculated that Bierce headed North to the Grand Canyon, where he committed suicide in a remote location. No evidence exists to prove this theory or the countless other theories about what happened to Bierce.

All investigations into his fate have thus far proved fruitless.

Quote Of The Day

"Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first." - Ambrose Bierce

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Ambrose Bierce's classic horror story, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. Enjoy!

Thursday, June 23, 2022

Notes For June 23rd, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 23rd, 1398 (c), the legendary German inventor Johannes Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany. As a young boy, he learned to read. This was a rare skill in the 15th century, as books were a luxury for the rich.

At that time, books had to be written by hand, (usually by monks, scholars, or scribes) a slow and expensive process. Fortunately for Gutenberg, he was born into a patrician (aristocratic) merchant family.

After he learned to read, he became an avid reader and spent hours in the library. The few libraries that existed then did not loan out their books. The books had to be read in the library and were chained to the wall to prevent theft.

Whenever Gutenberg's father ordered a book, it would take from several months to a year for the handwritten manuscript to be completed. Gutenberg hated to wait and dreamed of a more efficient means of producing books than writing them out by hand.

In 1411, there was an uprising against the patricians in Mainz, so the Gutenberg family moved to Eltville am Rhein, where Johannes took up the goldsmithing trade, as his father was a goldsmith who worked with the ecclesiastic mint.

Gutenberg became a skilled metalworker, and his skills would help him create his greatest invention - the mechanical printing press. By 1440, he began experimenting with the elements that would form his mechanical printing process.

Using his skills as a metalworker, Gutenberg designed a movable typeface, with separate metal type for each letter to be printed. He also developed oil-based inks of various colors that would hold up better on the page than the traditional water-based inks.

Last, but certainly not least, he built printing presses based on the designs of the olive, wine, and cheese presses of the time. By 1450, Gutenberg's print shop was in business. One of the first items to be printed there was a German poem.

The successful operation of the press and the quality of the printed material attracted attention, and Gutenberg was able to convince Johann Fust, a wealthy and powerful moneylender, to give him an 800-guilder loan to expand and maintain the business.

He took on Fust's son-in-law, Peter Schoffer, as an apprentice. In 1452, Gutenberg borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust. His print shop was a success and he printed thousands of indulgences for the Church.

Indulgences were certificates absolving the bearers of their sins and guaranteeing them a way out of Hell after their deaths. Indulgences were sold to rich parishioners - the only ones who could afford them.

This made the Church a tremendous amount of money. The printing of indulgences earned Gutenberg a tidy profit as well, which he put back into the business and used to repay his loans. He then embarked on his greatest printing project.

Gutenberg determined to print the most important book of the time - the Bible. He designed and tested beautiful layouts that combined color and black inks. Expenses for the Bible project started piling up, and he borrowed more money from Johann Fust.

Soon he was in debt for over 2,000 guilders. The Bible project took about three years to complete, and around 200 copies of the Bible were printed. During this time, a dispute arose between Gutenberg and Fust.

Fust accused Gutenberg of misusing the money he lent him and demanded all of it back. He filed suit at the archbishop's court. The court ruled in Fust's favor, giving him ownership of Gutenberg's print shop and half the bibles that had been printed.

Unfortunately, Fust also gained control of the Gutenberg name. Though effectively bankrupt, Gutenberg did run a small print shop in Bamberg and participated in another Bible printing project in 1459.

None of the materials he printed bore the Gutenberg name because Fust owned it. So it's uncertain exactly what Gutenberg printed in his little Bamberg shop. It's been speculated that he may have printed 300 copies of the 744-page Catholicon Dictionary there.

Johannes Gutenberg died in 1468 at approximately 70 years of age. By 1500, there were more than a thousand print shops in Europe. Gutenberg's dream of distributing information to the masses had come true.

In 1971, Project Gutenberg was launched by University of Illinois student Michael Hart, taking the inventor's dream into the digital age. The idea of Project Gutenberg was to digitize public domain texts into searchable ASCII text files.

The files could then be stored on the university's Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer - one of fifteen nodes on a network that served as the precursor to the Internet. The first text to be digitized was the Declaration of Independence.

Project Gutenberg has since digitized over 50,000 public domain texts (novels, poetry, plays, nonfiction, etc.) in various languages. With the advent of telecommunication, Project Gutenberg e-texts were distributed on bulletin boards and the Internet.

E-books continue to evolve, and electronic reading devices like the Amazon Kindle have made them more popular than ever, but it was Johannes Gutenberg who gave the world its first means of mass-producing books.

Quote Of The Day

"The most important human being whoever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around." - Tom Clancy

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a documentary on Johannes Gutenberg, hosted and narrated by Stephen Fry. Enjoy!

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Notes For June 22nd, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 22nd, 1964, the famous American writer Dan Brown was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. Brown's father was a teacher, and he grew up on the campus of Philips Exeter Academy, where his father taught.

Brown was an avid reader, but didn't care for most modern fiction, preferring to read the classics or nonfiction. After graduating college, Brown went to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make it as a singer and songwriter.

In Los Angeles, Brown joined the National Academy of Songwriters and met Blythe Newlon, the Academy's Director of Artist Development. They fell in love. Later, when they moved back to New Hampshire, they married.

Brown worked as a teacher while he pursued his singing career. He released his first album, Dan Brown, in 1993. It was followed by Angels & Demons in 1994. He would later use that title as the title for his second novel.

His musical career floundering, Dan decided to try his hand at becoming a novelist after reading Sidney Sheldon's suspense thriller The Doomsday Conspiracy while on vacation in Tahiti. He thought he could write a better novel.

He began work on his first novel and co-wrote a humor book with his wife - 187 Men To Avoid: A Guide For The Romantically Frustrated Woman - under the female pseudonym Danielle Brown.

Dan Brown's first novel, a techno thriller called Digital Fortress, was published in 1998. With Digital Fortress, Brown began exploring his fascination with cryptography.

In the novel, NSA (National Security Agency) cryptographer Susan Fletcher is called upon to stop Digital Fortress - encryption software that the NSA's code-breaking supercomputer TRANSLTR is incapable of cracking.

If Digital Fortress spreads through the Internet, it could cripple the NSA. The novel addresses civil rights issues in the Internet age, such as government agencies hacking into citizens' private data (i.e. messages in e-mail accounts) and reading it.

In Dan Brown's second novel, Angels & Demons (2000), he introduced his most popular character, Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon, who is called upon to help investigate a bizarre murder.

A respected nuclear physicist has been found murdered, with one eye removed and an ambigram of the word Illuminati branded on his chest. Langdon is an expert on the Illuminati - a secret brotherhood of scientists founded during the Renaissance to advance science and challenge the authority of the Church.

At the time of the murder, the Pope has died and a papal enclave has convened at the Vatican to elect the new pontiff. The Preferiti - the cardinals who are candidates to become the new Pope - turn up missing. They are being murdered, one by one, in the same way as the nuclear physicist.

Langdon discovers that the fabled Illuminati still exists and is planning to blow up Vatican City with an antimatter bomb in retribution for the massacre of their predecessors, which was carried out by the Church centuries ago.

Angels & Demons was a bestseller - a huge critical and commercial success for Dan Brown. He followed it with the sci-fi suspense thriller Deception Point (2001).

It told the story of Rachel Sexton, an NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) intelligence analyst and part of a team of experts whose mission is to authenticate findings made by NASA deep within the Arctic's Milne Ice Shelf.

The findings are fossils of insects contained within a meteor, which NASA claims may constitute proof of extraterrestrial life. What the team doesn't know is that their activities are being secretly monitored by a Delta Force unit.

Rachel suspects that the meteor may be a fraud. But who would want to discredit NASA? Could it be her own father, ruthless conservative Senator Sedgewick Sexton, a presidential candidate running on a platform of reducing government spending?

He wants to scrap NASA and turn space exploration over to the private sector. His opponent, the incumbent President, is a huge supporter of NASA. Is the Delta Force unit in on the hoax or have they been ordered to assassinate the team of experts to hide the truth?

In 2003, Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code - a prequel to Angels & Demons - that proved to be a runaway bestseller, selling over sixty million copies and causing a huge controversy.

In The Da Vinci Code, Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon is called upon to assist in the investigation of another bizarre and brutal murder - one that took place in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Jacques Sauniere, the museum's curator, was found murdered, with a strange cipher near his body. Teaming up with Sauniere's granddaughter Sophie, Langdon follows a bizarre trail of anagrams, ciphers, number puzzles, and other brainteasers as he tries to solve the murder.

The trail eventually leads the pair to mysterious clues hidden within the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci, a cryptex invented by Da Vinci, and the Holy Grail - proof that the foundation of Christianity was a fairy tale conceived by the Church.

Jesus Christ actually escaped crucifixion and fled to France with his pregnant wife Mary Magadelene, where she bore the child - a daughter whose descendants became royalty.

Mary Magdalene was the real rock upon which Jesus built his church, not Peter, which infuriated the fiercely misogynistic disciple. Years later, the Church tried to exterminate all of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's descendants to hide the truth.

But some of them survived, and a secret brotherhood (whose membership included Leonardo Da Vinci) was formed that pledged to protect them and the proof of the "con of Man."

Blending thrilling, intriguing suspense fiction with historical facts and theories, The Da Vinci Code proved to be hugely popular and hugely controversial.

The Vatican denounced the novel as anti-Catholic. The Christian Right called it blasphemous, and both factions published numerous nonfiction books dedicated to debunking the historical facts and theories Brown based his novel on.

After a movie adaptation was released in 2006 (directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon) and became hugely successful itself, some disgruntled writers filed suit to get a piece of the pie.

First, Lewis Purdue sued Dan Brown, claiming that Brown plagiarized his novels The Da Vinci Legacy (1983) and Daughter Of God (2000).

Then, writers Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh filed suit, claiming that Brown based The Da Vinci Code on theories put forth in their famous 1982 nonfiction book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Dan Brown won both lawsuits, as the plagiarism claims were ruled to be baseless.

A feature film version of Angels & Demons was released in May of 2009. A few months later, The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's third novel in his Robert Langdon series, was released.

In it, Langdon agrees to give a lecture in Washington, DC, at the request of his mentor, Peter Solomon. When he arrives in Washington, Langdon finds Solomon's severed hand mounted on a wooden base, the fingers pointing up at a fresco on the ceiling that depicts George Washington dressed in celestial robes and ascending to heaven.

As he investigates his friend's murder, Langdon uncovers clues that lead him toward a fabled source of wisdom known as the Ancient Mysteries - and toward Mal'akh, a tattooed, musclebound madman who believes that the secrets of the Ancient Mysteries will enable him to rule the world...

The fourth Robert Langdon novel, Inferno, was published in 2013. It opens with Langdon waking up in a hospital emergency room in Florence, Italy, with no memory of how he got there or what happened in the past few days.

Sienna Brooks, the doctor caring for him, tells him that he stumbled into the hospital after a bullet grazed his head. The female assassin who tried to kill him then invades the hospital to finish the job. Robert and Sienna are forced to flee.

When Robert finds a curious object - a medieval bone cylinder containing a hi-tech projector that displays a modified version of Botticelli's Map of Hell and the words "The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death" - he plunges into yet another deadly mystery.

As he and Sienna are hunted by everyone from assassins to soldiers, Robert Langdon follows a trail of clues that lead him to a brilliant and demented billionaire and Dante fanatic who's come up with a solution to the world's overpopulation problem - sterilizing one-third of humanity with a virus...

Dan Brown's most recent novel, Origin, the fifth in the Robert Langdon series, was published in October of 2017. In it, Langdon is drawn into the investigation of the murder of Edmond Kirsch, a billionaire computer scientist and futurist.

Kirsch, also known for his ferocious contempt for organized religion, meets with three members of the Parliament of the World's Religions to inform them of a revolutionary scientific discovery he made, which he'll reveal publicly in a month.

During his public presentation at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Kirsch claims that his discovery will end religion forever and usher in a new age of science and enlightenment, but before he can reveal it, he's shot and killed by a member of the controversial Palmarian Catholic Church.

More people are assassinated, and Robert Langdon, (Edmond Kirsch's former professor) along with museum curator Ambra Vidal, investigates the murders. Following a series of clever clues left behind by Kirsch, they learn what he discovered - proof of the real origin of mankind...

Quote Of The Day

"Writing an informative yet compact thriller is a lot like making maple sugar candy. You have to tap hundreds of trees, boil vats and vats of raw sap, evaporate the water, and keep boiling until you've distilled a tiny nugget that encapsulates the essence. " - Dan Brown

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Dan Brown discussing his most recent novel, Origin. Enjoy!

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Notes For June 21st, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 21st, 1956, the legendary American playwright Arthur Miller defied the United States Congress, refusing to inform on his friends and colleagues whom a Congressional committee had suspected of being communists.

At the time of his Congressional hearing, Miller, born in Harlem, New York, in 1915, had established himself as one of America's greatest playwrights. An outspoken liberal who openly supported leftist causes, he was long suspected of being a communist.

No evidence exists to prove that he belonged to the American Communist Party; some biographers have speculated that he may have joined under a pseudonym, but that's pure conjecture.

A Red Scare had swept through the American landscape of the 1950s - the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union - infesting the country with fear and paranoia.

The House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), founded by Congress in 1938, was tasked with weeding out suspected communists and communist sympathizers. The committee became notorious for its dubious methods.

To extract confessions from suspected communists, the HUAC, under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, the notorious Republican senator from Wisconsin, would resort to coercion, deception, and false testimony by so-called witnesses.

Another tool in the committee's arsenal was guilt by association - if a defendant's relatives and / or friends were communists, then the defendant must be as well, or he wouldn't associate with them.

Worst of all, when no evidence existed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the HUAC's mostly false and slanderous accusations of communism, the committee manufactured it, creating doctored photographs, film footage, tape recordings, and documents.

In those days, being convicted of communism meant not only jail time, but also the blacklisting of the defendant from his trade, the loss of his civil rights, and public ostracism.

During the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, actors, directors, writers, and producers convicted of being communists or communist sympathizers could not find work after their release from jail.

The Hollywood studios refused to hire convicted or even suspected communists or communist sympathizers, for fear of governmental interference in the movie business.

Blacklisted actors and directors would have to work in small independent productions or make movies in foreign countries. Blacklisted writers would have to use fronts - impostors pretending to be the authors of their scripts - in order to sell their work in Hollywood.

Three years before he found himself brought before the HUAC, Arthur Miller had written a play inspired by what happened to his close friend, legendary filmmaker Elia Kazan.

Brought before the HUAC and accused of being a communist, Kazan, wishing to avoid the Hollywood Blacklist, gladly informed on several of his friends, including legendary playwright Lillian Hellman and actor John Garfield.

Kazan avoided the Blacklist, but his reputation would take a huge hit. He was rightfully considered a loathsome rat willing to ruin the lives of others for the sake of his own self interest. Miller didn't speak to him for ten years.

In his classic play The Crucible (1953), Arthur Miller presented a scathing satirical indictment of the HUAC, likening its hearings to the infamous 17th century Salem witch hunts.

In those trials, innocent lives were also destroyed by false accusations, (of witchcraft) national hysteria, and pompous, self-righteous judges more interested in obtaining confessions than in uncovering the truth and delivering justice.

The Crucible became a huge hit on the Broadway stage and would go on to become Miller's most frequently produced play. It infuriated the HUAC to no end.

So, in 1956, when Miller applied for a renewal of his passport, the HUAC took advantage of the routine request to haul him in for questioning, as it was against the law to issue passports to known or suspected communists.

Having nothing to hide, Miller told the committee that he would gladly provide testimony about his own political beliefs and activities, so long as he was not asked to inform on others.

The chairman agreed and promised that he would not have to inform on others. Miller kept his end of the deal and gave the HUAC a detailed account of his own political activities.

The committee then reneged on the chairman's promise and ordered Miller to give them the names of all of his friends and colleagues who shared in his political beliefs and activities.

He refused to comply, so he was charged with contempt of Congress. His case later came to trial, and in May of 1957, a judge found him guilty.

Miller was fined $500, (the equivalent of about $5000 in today's money) sentenced to thirty days in jail, blacklisted, and of course, denied a renewal of his passport. But his conviction was overturned on appeal.

The Court of Appeals found that he had been deliberately deceived by the HUAC chairman and tricked into incriminating himself, which was a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights.

Arthur Miller's experience with the House Unamerican Activities Committee would haunt him for the rest of his life. Which is why, in the 1970s, he took a personal interest in the famous Barbara Gibbons murder case.

The victim's son, Peter Reilly, was convicted of her murder based on what most people believed was a coerced confession. There was little, if any, actual evidence to prove his guilt.

Miller, believing that Reilly was innocent and had been railroaded by the Connecticut State Police and the state Attorney General who had prosecuted the case, used his celebrity to draw attention to Reilly's plight.

The case reminded Miller of his own railroading by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, which would become the House Committee on Internal Security in 1969 and finally be abolished in 1975.

In December of 1954, by a vote of 67-22, Senator Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his unethical and illegal conduct. He would continue to perform his general duties as a Senator for the next two and a half years, but his political career was over.

Shunned by almost all his fellow Senators, whenever McCarthy gave a speech on the Senate floor, the other Senators would immediately leave the floor rather than listen to him speak.

A broken man haunted by his fate, stripped of power and humiliated, McCarthy became a pale shadow of his domineering former self. He drank himself to death, dying in May of 1957 at the age of 48.

Quote Of The Day

"I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act." - Arthur Miller

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a three-part interview with Arthur Miller, where he discusses his classic play The Crucible and his ordeal at the hands of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Enjoy!

Monday, June 20, 2022

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 6/19/22

Wayne Scheer

I have a micro flash, "Please Hold," as well as a poem, "East and West," up at Fairfield Scribes. They accept flashes and poems under 100 words.

"Please Hold" was critiqued here in IWW, so I have a lot of people to thank. If you scroll down beneath the Interview, my story is about third, and if you still have the heart for it, keep scrolling down until you come to the section marked Poems and you'll see mine.

Dave Gregory

My flash fiction story, "We're All in This Sandbox Together," was recently published in Orange Blossom Review. It was critiqued by the Fiction group, last December, under the title "Shoes in a Sandbox."

Thanks to Frank Zielony, Bill LaFond, Judith Quaempts, Jacki, Deepa, Jean Brown, Victor Kane, Jon Minton, Wayne Scheer, Dale Anson, and Eric Petersen for providing the critical feedback that elevated this story to a more publishable form.

Paul S. Fein

Recently, I was happy to learn The Fein Points of Tennis: Technique and Tactics to Unleash Your Talent was named a Silver Winner in the Adventure, Sports, and Recreation category in the Foreword Reviews 2021 INDIES Book of the Year competition.

I would like to thank the many IWW members whose thoughtful critiques greatly improved my tennis instruction book -- most notably, Irma Navarro, G. K. Adams, Bill Bartlett, Cathy Moser, Sheri McGregor, Ellen Dreyer, Mona Vanek, Jan Bridgeford-Smith, Kristen Howe, and Gary Presley

Friday, June 17, 2022

Notes For June 17th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 17th, 1972, five men were caught burglarizing the Watergate building, a complex of offices, hotel rooms, and apartments in Washington, D.C.

The burglars had been caught breaking into the part of the Watergate that housed the offices of the Democratic National Committee - the national headquarters of the Democratic Party.

Ben Bradlee, Editor-In-Chief of the prominent Washington Post newspaper, assigned two young investigative reporters to cover the seemingly innocuous story of the Watergate burglary. Their names were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Woodward and Bernstein soon realized that there was nothing innocuous about the burglary at Watergate. In fact, the same offices had been burglarized before. Using their investigative skills, confidential sources, and a secret informant known only as Deep Throat, they broke the Watergate burglary story wide open.

The five burglars were really White House operatives whose mission was to spy on President Richard M. Nixon's opposition in the upcoming election. After breaking into the DNC offices, they stole information and bugged the telephones.

Nixon denied involvement and won re-election in November, but Woodward and Bernstein continued their investigation and were able to prove that Nixon not only knew about the Watergate burglary, but was also attempting to block the investigation of it.

In 1974, in order to avoid impeachment and removal from office, Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace. He would later be pardoned by acting President Gerald Ford, a highly controversial move that cost Ford the presidency in the next election.

Woodward and Bernstein's work in exposing the Watergate conspiracy earned the Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. They later wrote a famous book about it called All The President's Men.

Published in 1974, the book became a bestseller. Woodward and Bernstein had been toying with idea of writing a book, but didn't commit to it until actor-filmmaker Robert Redford contacted them with an offer to buy the movie rights.

The acclaimed feature film adaptation of All The President's Men, which starred Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, was released in 1976. That same year, Woodward and Bernstein published The Final Days.

A sequel to All The President's Men, it chronicled the last months of the Nixon presidency. In 1989, it was adapted as an acclaimed TV movie starring Lane Smith as Richard Nixon. It was nominated for five Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were real heroes, the kind of journalists that, sadly, no longer exist and are sorely needed.

In 2005, their famous and mysterious informant Deep Throat revealed his true identity. He was Mark Felt, a former associate director of the FBI and White House insider.

Quote Of The Day

"The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture." - Carl Bernstein

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on an episode of The Kalb Report marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate. Enjoy!

Thursday, June 16, 2022

Notes For June 16th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 16th, 1938, the famous American writer Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She was very close to her paternal grandmother, Blanche Oates, who lived with the family and planted the seeds of her future writing career.

When Joyce was a little girl, her grandmother gave her a copy of Lewis Carroll's classic Alice in Wonderland, which she credited as "the great treasure of my childhood and the most profound literary influence in my life." When Joyce turned 14, her grandmother gave her a typewriter, and she began writing.

Joyce Carol Oates described her family as average, happy, and close-knit. Many years later, after her grandmother died, Joyce learned some surprising secrets about her life.

Blanche Oates' father had committed suicide, after which, Blanche decided to conceal the fact that she was Jewish. Joyce used these and other details of her grandmother's life as the basis for her 2007 novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter.

As a young teenager, Joyce Carol Oates became an avid reader, devouring the works of William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemingway, and the Bronte sisters, whom she claimed were a strong influence on her writing.

After attending the same one-room school that her mother had gone to, Joyce transferred to bigger suburban schools. At Williamsville South High School, where she graduated in 1956, Joyce worked for the student newspaper. She was the first member of her family to graduate high school.

Joyce Carol Oates won a scholarship to Syracuse University, where she joined the Phi Mu sorority, a decision she came to regret. In college, Joyce read the works of D.H. Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka, all of which she claimed were still strong and pervasive influences on her own writing.

When she was nineteen years old, she won a college short story contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. She graduated Syracuse as valedictorian in 1960 and received an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison a year later.

During her college years, Joyce taught herself to be a writer by "writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them." In 1964, when she was 26 years old, she published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall.

Two years later, she published a short story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, loosely based on the life of serial killer Charles Schmid, the "Pied Piper of Tucson." The story was frequently republished in anthologies and was adapted in 1985 as a feature film called Smooth Talk.

Joyce Carol Oates would later use real life crimes and criminals as the basis of her novels, changing names, dates, places, and details, and adding fictionalized elements. Her 1995 novel Zombie, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, was based on the life of cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

The novel takes the form of the diary of Quentin P., a psychotic sex offender on parole who becomes a serial killer as he searches for the perfect "zombie" - a mindless, obedient, handsome young man to be his companion and lover.

The brilliant, cunning, and strangely child-like Quentin lures young men into his clutches and lobotomizes them with various weapons as he conducts experiments in creating a zombie. In addition to Quentin's diary entries, the book contains his bizarre sketches of objects such as weapons and staring eyes.

In her 2008 novel My Sister, My Love, Joyce Carol Oates presents a dark and scathing satire of the infamous JonBenet Ramsey murder case. It's told in the form of a memoir written by 19-year-old Skyler Rampike. When he was ten, his beloved six-year-old sister Bliss - a child ice-skating star - was found raped and murdered.

In his memoir, Skyler paints a grotesque picture of his family before and after the tragedy. His father, Bix, is a ruthlessly ambitious, money-hungry philanderer; his pathetic, neurotic mother Betsey is determined (to the point of obsession) to impress the snooty neighbors in their affluent community.

She's also obsessed with living out her childhood dream by turning her daughter into a figure-skating star, dressing her in provocative costumes and forcing her to practice and perform.

After Bliss's murder, the already dysfunctional Rampike family is plunged into tabloid hell, as suspicion falls on both Bix and Betsey - and even 10-year-old Skyler. Joyce Carol Oates' powerful writing - and her fascination with violence and the dark side of the human condition - earned her the respect of male peers such as Norman Mailer.

Her 1996 novel, We Were The Mulvaneys, was selected by Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001. The Mulvaneys are a happy, close-knit, affluent model family living in upstate New York.

Then, on Valentine's Day, 1976, after attending her high school prom, teenage daughter Marianne Mulvaney goes to a party, gets drunk, and is raped by a fellow student whose father is a respected businessman and close friend of Marianne's father.

Her refusal to press charges against her attacker leads to the slow and painful disintegration of the once perfect Mulvaney family. Years later, at a family reunion, the Mulvaneys finally come to terms with the past and receive the closure that had eluded them.

An extremely prolific writer, Oates has written nearly five dozen novels, (plus 11 more under pseudonyms) with more coming. She has also written over 35 short story collections.

Her other writings include seven books for young adults and children, ten books of poetry, eight plays, and numerous nonfiction works. She will no doubt be remembered as one of the most gifted writers of her generation.

Joyce Carol Oates' most recent novel, Breathe, was published in August of 2021. Part love story and part horror story, it's about a married New England couple, Michaela and Gerard, who move to New Mexico to take residence at a pretigious academic insititute.

Then Gerard is stricken with a mysterious, life threatening illness that is misdiagosed. As she cares for him, Michaela is plunged into a nightmare and must face the prospect of widowhood at 37, knowing that her fierce and selfless love for her husband is not enough to save him. Is a love that refuses to surrender itself to death a blessing or a curse?

Quote Of The Day

"If you are a writer, you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework, you can still be writing, because you have that space." - Joyce Carol Oates

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a recent interview with Joyce Carol Oates, where she discusses her most recent novel, Breathe. Enjoy!

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Notes For June 15th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 15th, 1763, the legendary Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa was born. He was born Nobuyuki Yataro in Kashiwabara, Japan.

When Issa was three years old, his mother died, and he was cared for by his doting grandmother. He began studying haiku with Shinpo, a local poet.

Five years later, Issa's father remarried. His stepmother turned out to be a hard and cruel woman, and after she gave birth to a son of her own, she mistreated Issa terribly. He complained to his father that she beat him a hundred times a day.

When he was fourteen, Issa's beloved grandmother died. Lonely, moody, withdrawn, and estranged from his family, Issa preferred to stay away from them, wandering the fields and forests and communing with nature, which further infuriated his cruel stepmother.

Sensing Issa's unhappiness, his father sent him to Edo, (now known as Tokyo) where he lived in poverty, did odd jobs, and continued his haiku studies, this time at the Kastushika Haiku School with poets Mizoguchi Sogan and Norokuan Chikua.

After Chikua's death, Issa was elected to succeed him as a teacher at the school. He later resigned and took to wandering again, until his father's death in 1801.

In his father's will, Issa was named as sole beneficiary, but his stepmother and half-brother conspired to steal his inheritance from him. After thirteen years of legal wrangling, Issa finally received his rightful inheritance.

In the meantime, he had traveled around Japan, visiting and living in many places, including Kyoto, Osaka, Nagasaki, Matsuyama, and other cities. He worked hard to support himself and made a name for himself as a haiku poet.

Taking the pseudonym Kobayashi Issa, he wrote prolifically, both poetry and prose. At the age of 51, after finally receiving his inheritance, Issa returned to his hometown, Kashiwabari, and married a young village woman named Kiku.

Sadly, the four children Issa's wife bore him died in infancy, and his wife died in childbirth. Later, his house burned down. A devout Buddhist for many years, Issa's spirit could not be crushed by tragedy.

He married again, and his second wife bore him his only surviving child, a baby girl. She was born in 1827 - shortly after Issa's death at the age of 65.

Throughout his prolific literary career, Issa wrote over 20,000 haiku poems and over 250 prose works, including memoirs, his most famous being The Year Of My Life, published in 1820.

As a haiku poet, Issa wrote the simple, unadorned poetry of the common man, using local dialects and the words of daily conversation.

And yet, in their simplicity, Issa's poems were extremely profound. Sometimes they were humorous, sometimes sarcastic, and sometimes quiet and thoughtful.

Issa's haiku are best known for their remarkably poignant and compassionate insight. And of course, they are steeped deep in Buddhism - but without the slightest hint of religious dogmatism.

After the death of one of his children, Issa wrote the following poem. It's a perfect example of his simplicity, his profoundness, and his compassion:

This world of dew
is a world of dew -
and yet, and yet...

Here are some other memorable Issa haiku:

Flitting butterfly -
thus is Buddha's law
in this world

A light snow
over fields, over woods...
pilgrims

The beggar child prays
with trembling voice...
for a doll

Old frog
dewdrops are tumbling
Look! There!

Issa's haiku inspired me to become a poet when I was eight years old. I came across Issa: Haiku Poet - a short biography and a selection of his poems - in my school reading textbook.

Moved and impressed by how much he packed into his little three-line, seventeen-syllable poems, I immediately started writing my own haiku. Issa is rightfully considered one of Japan's greatest haiku masters.

Quote Of The Day

"Where there are humans, you'll find flies and Buddhas." - Kobayashi Issa

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a 90-minute lecture on haiku. Enjoy!

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Notes For June 14th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 14th, 1811, the legendary American writer and activist Harriet Beecher Stowe was born. She was born Harriet Elisabeth Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut. Her mother died when she was five years old.

Harriet and her nine siblings were left to be raised by their father, Hyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister known for his evangelical fervor. He co-founded the American Temperance Society and preached about the evils of drink.

Beecher was an abolitionist - and a hypocrite. He preached against slavery from the pulpit, but he was also a virulent racist. He was opposed to the forced emancipation of slaves by the federal government, believing that the institution of slavery would eventually die out.

When that time came, he believed that blacks should be repatriated to their African homeland rather than be allowed to live freely in America and integrate with whites. As president of the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, he refused to admit black students. Fifty white students left the seminary in protest.

Reverend Beecher's virulent intolerance was not limited to blacks. In 1834, he delivered a fiery anti-Catholic sermon in Boston that was believed to have inspired the burning of a nearby convent.

He also authored a notoriously racist Nativist tract, A Plea for the West, where he urged the federal government to strictly limit immigration or restrict it entirely to protect white Christian (Protestant) Americans from racial and religious undesirables. Sound familiar?

Harriet Beecher determined to become a writer at the age of seven, when she won a school essay contest. After completing her primary education, she enrolled in a progressive school for girls run by her older sister Catharine.

As an educator, Catharine was known for her feminist educational philosophy and her early advocacy for adopting the German kindergarten class for little children into the American public education system.

When she was 21, Harriet moved to Cincinnati to attend her father's seminary. There, she became a member of a writer's group called the Semi-Colon Club, whose membership also included her two sisters.

Another member was one of the seminary's professors, Calvin Stowe, with whom she fell in love. They were married, and she bore him seven children, including twin daughters. Unlike Harriet's father, Calvin was a ferocious abolitionist who called for immediate emancipation - freedom for all slaves.

She shared her husband's convictions, and their home soon became part of the Underground Railroad - the famous secret network of safe houses for fugitive slaves. The escaped slaves would move from house to house as they traveled en route to free states, where slavery was illegal.

In 1850, Congress, bowing to pressure from the South, tried to tighten the screws on the Underground Railroad by passing the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it illegal for people - even those living in free states - to assist fugitive slaves.

The law also compelled local law enforcement to arrest fugitive slaves and provide assistance to the vicious bounty hunters privately hired to track runaway slaves. The free states reacted with outrage to the Fugitive Slave Act, which resulted in gross abuses.

Many free states openly defied it. Several of them passed laws granting personal liberties, including the right to a fair trial, to fugitive slaves. Wisconsin's state Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional.

The law failed to disrupt the Underground Railroad; by the time it was passed, the network had become far more efficient. After the Act was passed, the Underground Railroad grew as the unjust law inspired scores of moderate abolitionists to become passionate activists.

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to do more than just dedicate her home to the Underground Railroad. She wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the abolitionist magazine The National Era, to tell him that she planned to write a story that would expose average white Americans to the true horrors of slavery.

A year later, the first installment of her novel was published in a serialized format in The National Era. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) told the unforgettable story of a kind and noble slave whose faith cannot be broken by the evils of slavery.

The novel opens on a Kentucky farm owned by Arthur and Emily Shelby, who like to think that they're kind to their slaves. But, when he needs money, Arthur has no problem selling two of his slaves down the river without regard to where they might end up.

The slaves in question are Uncle Tom, a wise and compassionate middle-aged man, and Harry, the son of Emily's maid, Eliza. The Shelbys' son George, who looked upon Uncle Tom as a friend and mentor, hates to see him go.

Uncle Tom and Harry are sold to a slave trader and shipped by riverboat down the Mississippi. While on the boat, Uncle Tom strikes up a friendship with Eva, a little white girl. When she falls into the river, he saves her life.

Eva's grateful father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Uncle Tom from the slave trader and takes him to his home in New Orleans. There, the friendship between Uncle Tom and Eva deepens. Sadly, Eva becomes severely ill and dies - but not before sharing her vision of heaven.

Moved by how much Uncle Tom meant to Eva, her father vows to help him become a free man. His racist cousin Ophelia is moved to reject her prejudice against blacks. Unfortunately, Augustine is killed at a tavern, and his wife reneges on his promise to help Uncle Tom. She sells him at auction to Simon Legree, who owns a plantation in Louisiana.

Simon Legree is an evil, perverse, sadistic racist who tortures his male slaves and sexually abuses the women. When Uncle Tom refuses to follow Legree's order to whip another slave, Legree beats him savagely.

The beating fails to break Uncle Tom's spirit or his faith in God. The sight of Uncle Tom reading his bible and comforting other slaves makes Legree's blood boil. Legree determines to break Uncle Tom and nearly succeeds, as the daily horrors of life on the plantation erode the slave's faith and hope.

Just when it appears that Uncle Tom will succumb to hopelessness, he has two visions - one of little Eva and one of Jesus himself. Moved by these visions, Uncle Tom vows to remain a faithful Christian until the day he dies.

He encourages two fellow slaves, Cassy and Emmeline, to run away. Later, when Simon Legree demands that Uncle Tom reveal their whereabouts, he refuses. A furious Legree orders his overseers to beat Uncle Tom to death.

As he lay dying, Uncle Tom forgives the overseers, which inspires them to repent. George Shelby arrives with money to buy Uncle Tom's freedom. Sadly, he is too late. Uncle Tom dies before he can become a free man.

George returns to his parents' farm in Kentucky and frees their slaves, telling them to always remember Uncle Tom's sacrifice and unshakable faith.

That's actually just a threadbare outline of this classic epic novel. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a national uproar. In the North, it was regarded as the bible of abolitionism.

The novel inspired many closet abolitionists to come out and join in the fight against slavery. In the South, the book was regarded as an outrage. It was called utterly false and slanderous - a criminal defamation of the South.

Many Southern writers who supported slavery took to writing literature dedicated to debunking Harriet Beecher Stowe's expose of the horrors of slavery. Their writings were called "Anti-Tom" literature.

This pro-Southern propaganda depicted white Southerners as benevolent supervisors of blacks, who were depicted as a helpless, child-like people unable to live without the direct supervision of their white masters.

To defend herself against the South's accusations of slander and defamation, Stowe wrote and published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a nonfiction book documenting the horrors of slavery that she both witnessed herself and researched.

The book included surprisingly graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of female slaves, who, in addition to being molested or raped by their white masters and overseers, were also prostituted and forced to "mate" with male slaves to produce offspring that would fetch a good price on the auction block.

When Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared in book form in 1852, it was published in an initial press run of 5,000 copies. That year, it sold 300,000 copies. Its London edition sold 200,000 copies throughout the United Kingdom. It became a hit throughout Europe as well.

Ironically, by the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the book was out of print in the United States, as Stowe's original publisher had gone out of business. She found another publisher, and when the book was republished in 1862, the demand for copies became huge.

That same year, Harriet Beecher Stowe was invited to Washington D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln, who supposedly said to her, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

The novel would be adapted many times for the stage, screen, radio, and television.

In the 20th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin courted a new controversy that continues to this day. African-American activists have accused the abolitionist novel of being racist itself, with its racial stereotypes and epithets.

This, like the accusations of racism leveled against Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) comes from a failure to place the novel in its proper historical perspective and consider its overall message.

Although Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote many books, both fiction and nonfiction, none of her other works came close to eclipsing the power and fame of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

During the last 23 years of her life, she lived in Hartford, Connecticut - next door to her friend and fellow writer, Mark Twain. She died in 1896 at the age of 85.

There are two historical landmarks dedicated to her; the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine, where she wrote her classic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Quote Of The Day

"The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon." - Harriet Beecher Stowe

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a 2-part lecture on the history and legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Professor Cyrus Patell of New York University. Enjoy!

Monday, June 13, 2022

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 6/12/22

Pamelyn Casto

My interview with poet Brian Clements has been published by OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, who named Brian their "Featured Writer: All Forms and Styles of Prose Poetry."

Friday, June 10, 2022

Notes For June 10th, 2022

This Day In Literary History

On June 10th, 1928, the legendary American children's book writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak was born in Brooklyn, New York. The youngest of three children, his parents were Polish Jewish immigrants.

Sendak lost most of his extended family to the Holocaust; his parents were often in a state of grieving. His mother constantly hovered over him to make sure that he was all right. A sickly child, he rarely went outside his apartment. Most of his knowledge of the world came from books.

In 1940, Maurice Sendak, then twelve years old, saw Walt Disney's classic animated feature film Fantasia and decided to become an illustrator. In 1947, when he was just 19, Sendak's first published drawings appeared in a textbook.

The textbook was called Atomics for the Millions, written by Dr. Maxwell Leigh Eidenhoff. From there, Sendak worked as a illustrator for children's books, spending most of the 1950s drawing pictures for the works of other writers. Then he began writing his own stories.

In 1956, Sendak's first book, Kenny's Window, was published. His first sucessful book, The Sign On Rosie's Door, was published in 1960. It would be followed in 1962 by The Nutshell Library, a four-volume set of books.

This classic set included Chicken Soup With Rice (A Book Of Months), Alligators All Around (An Alphabet), One Was Johnny (A Counting Book), and Pierre (A Cautionary Tale). But it was Sendak's next book, Where The Wild Things Are (1963) that became his most famous. It was also controversial.

In Where The Wild Things Are, Max, a young boy wearing a wolf costume, makes mischief around the house and gets sent to bed without supper. In his room, he imagines a mysterious forest growing and goes on an adventure, traveling to the land of the Wild Things - grotesque and fearsome looking monsters.

Max stares them down and becomes the King of all Wild Things, but soon, lonely and homesick, he returns to his room, where he finds his supper waiting for him. Parents complained about the frightening monsters and denounced the book as too scary for children. But it went on to become an all-time children's classic.

In 1973, Where The Wild Things Are was adapted as an animated short film. It would later be adapted as a children's opera and a ballet. In 1983, Disney announced an upcoming animated feature film adaptation, but it didn't get past the planning stage.

The book was adapted as a musical play in 2004. Two years later, the Post Office issued a commemorative stamp. In 2009, Where The Wild Things Are would be adapted as a live-action feature film.

Directed by Spike Jonze, it featured the voices of James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker, and Paul Dano as the Wild Things, and in an incredible performance, newcomer Max Records as Max.

The film, which combined first-rate CGI special effects and animatronic puppetry, turned Sendak's 48-page picture book into a brilliant, intriguing, surreal 100-minute psychological study of a disturbed young boy trying to come to terms with his emotional problems.

As in the book, the Wild Things become externalized metaphors for the components of Max's psyche. Sendak loved the movie, as did most critics who praised its "art house" qualities, but many parents derided the film as too dark and too sad for children.

Maurice Sendak's follow-up book, In The Night Kitchen, was published in 1970. It proved to be more controversial than Where The Wild Things Are, but for a different reason. The book told the story of Mickey, a young boy awoken in the night by strange noises.

He finds himself floating in the air and drifts into a strange and surreal world called the Night Kitchen, where he falls into a giant mixing pot full of cake batter. Three lookalike bakers mix the batter, either unaware or unconcerned that a boy is trapped inside their pot.

As the bakers are about to put their cake into a "Mickey oven," the boy escapes and protests that he is not the milk for the batter. Covered in batter, Mickey builds a makeshift airplane out of bread dough.

He flies to the top of a giant milk bottle, and, after washing himself off, pours the milk into the cake batter. The bakers happily finish making their cake. Mickey slides down the bottle and returns to his bed.

In The Night Kitchen was - and still is - controversial for both its bizarre storyline and for the fact that for the most of the story, Mickey runs around naked and is drawn anatomically correct. As a result, the book faced bans and challenges.

It was challenged in several states, including New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota, and Texas, with reports of school librarians defacing copies of the book by drawing pants on Mickey with markers or using whiteout to cover his genitals, making him appear to be wearing a diaper.

Sendak said that he never intended to be controversial. He had Mickey lose his pajamas to avoid messing them up when he fell into the cake batter. In The Night Kitchen still appears on the American Library Association's (ALA) list of frequently banned or challenged books.

In 1974, Maurice Sendak reworked his books The Sign On Rosie's Door and The Nutshell Library into a rock musical called Really Rosie, with music composed by legendary rock singer-songwriter Carole King.

The character of Rosie was based on a real little girl from Sendak's childhood in Brooklyn who would sing and dance on the stoop of her apartment building. Really Rosie was adapted as a classic animated TV special in 1975. Carole King sang all the songs and provided Rosie's voice.

In a 2008 interview in the New York Times, Sendak claimed that there were deliberate references to the Holocaust in In The Night Kitchen. The lookalike bakers had Hitler-like mustaches, and they attempted to bake Mickey in their oven.

He also came out as gay, saying that although he had lived with his partner (Dr. Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst) for fifty years, (Glynn died in 2007) his parents never knew that he was gay. "All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy," Sendak said. "They never, never, never knew."

Maurice Sendak died in May of 2012 at the age of 83. His last book, My Brother's Book, was published posthumously in 2013.

Quote Of The Day

"You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them." - Maurice Sendak

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Maurice Sendak being interviewed on an episode of University of Washington TV's Upon Reflection in 1991. Enjoy!