The Art and Wisdom of the Story: When Our Literary Heroes Let Us Down

 Photo by JoAnne Rawls

This Writer at Sixty-Six: We age, we go gray, we accumulate huge volumes of small wisdoms. But do they do us any good?

With age sometimes comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes all by itself.

We've all known people like that, people of great age who you would expect to be living in the glow of the great wisdoms of the life. But instead, as you interact with them, you realize with some dismay that they really missed something along the way. Out pops a racial slur or an angry epithet and you know they just didn't get it.

I have always seen writers as the holders and dispensers of the great wisdoms of life. Give me a Joseph Conrad or a Anton Chekov,  a Faulkner, or a Hemingway, or a Shakespeare over a teacher, a priest, a physician, or even a Buddhist monk any day. 

This in spite of the day, many years ago, that with some ruefulness, I discovered that while my literary heroes might possess a fine personal library of wisdom, they very often did not manage to live by it. Hemingway is a pretty good example of how the lovely and profound lessons in his prose did not translate into a lovely and profound life for the writer. He was famously drunk, famously emotionally brutal those those he loved, famously jealous of other writers, and in the end, morbidly paranoid.

How can this be? How can those who see, those who understand, those who get it so deeply that they can express it in brilliantly woven verbal tapestries be in the end just like the rest of us? Where is the disconnect? I think the answer may be that writers don't see any deeper than non-writers, that the school teacher or the nurse can learn and live by the great wisdoms, but lack the ability, the talent, the gift of the telling, the art of the story.

What wisdom there is in this observation, I'm not sure, but here's what one writer, Gertrude Stein said:

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

How Will I Pay for All this Glory?

 In Chicago last week at the Annual Convention of the American Library Association with Jennifer Szunko of ForeWord Reviews

I just got in from Chicago via Atlanta via visiting grandsons. Nice to be back home and catching my breath after a whirl-wind week away. Of course, next week, we're off again, this time to Seattle and yet another grandson.

In the mean time, I have to make sense of it all. Brothers of the Fire Star, my new novel, was selected as a finalist out of some 1,300 books from 700 publishers nation wide. It is all wonderful and I'm very excited and now I get to put this really bright gold sticker on all the covers while I figure out how I'm going to pay for those airline tickets and three nights in a fancy hotel.