Saturday

Feb. 19, 2000

Sister Ritual

by Ginger Andrews

Broadcast Date: SATURDAY: February 19, 2000

Poem: "Sister Ritual" by Ginger Andrews, from An Honest Answer (Story Line Press).

It's the birthday of novelist Amy Tan, born in Oakland, California (1952), to immigrant parents who left China before Mao took over. She studied English at San Jose State University and Berkeley, then worked as a technical writer and reporter before breaking into fiction. In 1987, with her mother, she took her first trip to China, where she met two half-sisters, an experience that led Tan to write her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989.)

On this day in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of individuals "of Japanese ancestry" from the "military area" of the West Coast of the United States. 112,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them American-born citizens or naturalized immigrants, were forced to live in dismal conditions, under heavy military guard. Most lost their jobs and homes while imprisoned, and were penniless by the time of their release.

It's the birthday of novelist Carson McCullers (Lula Carson Smith), born in Columbus, Georgia (1917)—a shy, introspective woman who, at the age of 17, went to Columbia University to study music. Her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), published when she was 23, centers on a deaf-mute man who uncomprehendingly accepts the confidences of 4 characters who all think he is sympathetic to them. He confides his heartache to a man who is feebleminded as well as mute, further extending the line of meaningless communication. Her other novels were Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), A Member of the Wedding (1946, which she adapted into a successful stage play in 1950, and was made into a movie in 1952), The Ballad of the Sad Caféé (1951), and Clock Without Hands (1961).

It's the birthday of the founder of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus, born in Torun [taw-ROON], eastern Poland (1473)—who proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of man's universe. This defied Church dogma, based on the theories of Ptolemy [TOL-eh-mee], with his 'geocentric' universe, and Aristotle, who assumed that the Earth sat at the center of all things. Copernicus did not come to his heresies lightly; himself a monk, he studied mathematics and optics, then violently upset the view that had been firmly held for 1,400 years in his 400-page treatise, Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs, published just days before he died (1543). It took the scientific and clerical establishment nearly 200 years to accept his view.

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

 

«

»

  • “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
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show