Friday Links
August 11, 2023
St Francis Mourned by St Clare, Giotto
Writing Historical Fiction, with Natalie Morrill
Cynthia Haven: Are We Ready to Listen to René Girard?
John Wilson for Prufrock: A Scrappy Defense of the Novel?
Maura Harrison in Ekstasis: Let God Become the Quiet in All Things
Writing Historical Fiction, with Natalie Morrill
The Resilient Writers Radio Show chats with our very own Natalie Morrill about writing historical fiction, particularly her wonderful novel, The Ghost Keeper. Take a listen to two very nice Canadians discuss writing and the writing life.
Cynthia Haven: Are We Ready to Listen to René Girard?
At the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, the sheriff Ed Tom Bell talks about a dream he had after his father died. Both men are “back in older times. . . on horseback goin through the mountains of a night.” It’s cold and snowy and as Bell’s father rides on ahead of him, Bell “seen he was carryin fire in a horn. . . ” And in the way of dreams, Bell knew his father was “fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold. . .” His father would wait there, up ahead, with the fire, until Bell arrived. Cynthia Haven is a bit like Bell’s father, she’s been ahead of most of us, writing about Girard, nourishing that fire, waiting for us to catch up. It seems that now, a hundred years after Girard’s birth, the world has finally caught up. Thankfully, Cynthia’s already there.
John Wilson for Prufrock: A Scrappy Defense of the Novel?
John Wilson’s review of Joseph Epstein’s new book, The Novel, Who Needs It?, prompts a question readers love to ponder: What’s the first book (novel, poem, story) you remember reading?
This is one of the things I love about John’s reviews—they meander a little down lanes and paths before returning to the main road. Do you remember the first books or stories or poems you read? Or the ones that really moved you and made you a lifelong reader? Do you remember the covers of books you read when you were young? Your favorite bookstore? Trips to the library? I remember reading Nancy Drew mysteries all summer long and staying up late to see if Nellie Oleson got what was coming to her. And the lives of the saints—St. Lucy with her plate of eyes, arrow-pierced St. Sebastian, patient Monica, and wild Francis. There was a big dictionary with words I could learn and, presumably, use for book reports and conversations with adults. And these magical lines from Yeats’ Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven:
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
How about you? What do you remember?
Maura Harrison in Ekstasis: Let God Become the Quiet in All Things
This poem in the always-gorgeous Ekstasis is a good one for the end of summer, a reminder that even as autumn waits at the starting block, we need to give God “room to soothe with silent sound/Balm for the lonely wound that “Progress” brings. . .”
