Friday

Jul. 2, 1999

Temperance lyrics: "You are coming to woo me" and "One Night in July"

by Anonymous

Broadcast Date: FRIDAY: July 2, 1999

Lyrics: Two little temperance lyrics: "You are coming to woo me" and "One night in July."

It's the birthday in 1964, Los Angeles of short story writer ELIZABETH GRAVER, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her 1991 collection Have You Seen Me? — 10 stories about children using their own imaginations to make sense of the big world. Her new novel, The Honey Thief, comes out next month.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 on this day, the act which prohibits discrimination in employment and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

It's the birthday of M.A. FOSTER, Greensboro, North Carolina, 1939, who after a 20-year career as a Russian linguist and missile launch officer in the U.S. Air Force authored a number of popular science fiction books in the late-70s to mid-80s including The Warriors of Dawn, Transformer, and Preserver. And after that he said, "I fulfilled the goals I set for myself and no more needs to be said, if push comes to shove. I also realize that a great deal of the art of writing lies in knowing when to stop." So he did.

It's the birthday of writer HERMANN HESSE, in Calw, Germany, 1877; the author of Siddhartha (1922), and Steppenwolf (1927).

It's the birthday of the poet JAMES D. CORROTHERS, born in 1869, Cass County, Michigan. He became a Methodist minister and moved east, serving congregations in Pennsylvania; and continued to write: short stories, magazine and newspaper articles, and an autobiography, In Spite of the Handicap (1916); but he was best known around the turn of the century for his poems, some of them written in a black dialect.

William Booth, a 36-year-old itinerant preacher working in Whitechapel, one of London's worst slums, founded THE SALVATION ARMY on this day in 1865 — his congregation largely made up of the homeless and alcoholics.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
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