Sunday
Jun. 27, 1999
Managing the Common Herd: Two Approaches for Senior Management
Poem: "Managing the Common Herd: Two Approaches for Senior Management," by Julie O'Callaghan, from What's What (Bloodaxe Books).
It's the birthday in Brooklyn, 1953, of novelist ALICE MCDERMOTT, author of That Night (1987), At Weddings and Wakes (1992) and Charming Billy, which won last year's National Book Award. Her parents discouraged her from becoming a writer because they thought she'd starve. But she entered the writing program at the University of New Hampshire, then came out with her first novel, The Bigamist's Daughter. She says, "There has to be an obsession with the act of writing.... It's too hard, too unpleasant too often, without that. When I'm not writingand I have considered many times trying something elseI can't make sense out of anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that."
It's novelist CHARLIE SMITH's birthday, in Moultrie, Georgia, 1947, author of Canaan, Shine Hawk, and The Lives of the Dead. His most recent, Cheap Ticket to Heaven, is about Jack and Clare, a husband and wife criminal team who try to get to heaven through a series of bank robberies and murders.
It's novelist RUSSELL HILL's birthday, in Spring Valley, Illinois, 1935, a California high school English teacher for 25 years, best known for his 1991 book Lucy Bloomer; about a middle-aged professor who hooks up with Lucy, a 93-year-old California nursing home resident who claims to have been the mistress of five U.S. presidents.
It's poet FRANK O'HARA's birthday, in Baltimore, 1926, whose Collected Poems won the 1972 National Book Award, six years after his death.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®