dirt and rocks: writers

Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

A Great One Has Fallen

Anne McCaffrey, RIP

It was Anne McCaffrey and her Dragonriders of Pern series that first hooked me on dragons. I was 11. At 46, I still believe.

In the world of Pern, when a rider died her dragon would immediately go "between" never to return. When a dragon died (or went between) all the other dragons would instantly cry out as one to honor their fallen sister. I can hear the dragons crying tonight.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Ursula-isms

Today is Ursula K. Le Guin's 80th birthday. Since this blog is named for one of her quotes, I thought I'd share a few others that have been attributed to her and resonate with me:

Traveling is bad for fiction but good for poetry. That's the only cycle I have noticed.
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
Love does not sit there, like a stone; it has be be made like bread, remade all the time, made new.
The creative adult is the child that has survived.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader reading it makes it live: a live thing, a story.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not know what comes next.

Happy Birthday Ursula.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Inspiring Faces

Snow Leopard was released last Friday and b, who is crazy for all things Mac, picked us up a family copy that afternoon. Now this latest operating system doesn't have a whole lot of fancy bells and whistles for the user (actually since installing it I've lost my ability to print at the office)--although it does take up considerably less hard drive space than Leopard and that's always a plus--but the install forced me to reconsider my screensaver.

Both my work and home offices have nice large screens and, since my computer is always on in one of those places, my screensaver becomes a pretty important visual accompaniment to my thoughts. Previously my screensaver pulled random pictures of my family from one of my files and threw them willy-nilly on my desktop. This was a comforting backdrop to my academic world.

I have another file of author photos from my favorite writers. They are all women and many are in their "later years." I love looking at older women's faces--those that are "real" and not sculpted or botoxed--so these images inspire me with their natural beauty, their strength, and their wisdom. They also are a continual reminder--as I slave over scientific jargon--that there is another world out there; a world of words that sing while they tell truth. I thought I'd share some of the faces that are now inspiring me on a daily basis: