Nobel prize winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was born on this day, July 21st, 1899. Controversial, brilliant, and always quotable, his words on fiction and truth, taken from a 1954 letter to Bernard Berenson, beautifully captures the tenacity and passion of Hemingway as a writer. You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade … [Read more…]
We stumbled upon this excerpt from a talk by Ira Glass, brought to life with beautifully rendered typography, on storytelling, good taste and the absolute necessity of perseverance in creative work. https://vimeo.com/24715531 (via brainpickings.org)
The great modern American Zen master and photographer John Daido Loori once said, “Shut up and sit!” Of course, the late Daido was referring to Zazen, the Zen practice of seated meditation. I was reminded of Daido’s words as I read a recent post in The New Republic, “Screw Your Standing Desk! A Sitter’s Manifesto.” … [Read more…]
“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” -Mother Teresa We live in a world of sci-fi robot airplanes ripping human beings to shreds; deforestation; climate change; amoral banking hives that deprive the majority while living in gaudy excess; global militant violence … [Read more…]
You’ve read Bukowski’s “So You Want to be a Writer?” and in spite of it all, though your stillness is in fact a kind of madness, it nonetheless “doesn’t come bursting out of you.” Not the way it comes bursting out of Bukowski. “How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?” by … [Read more…]