Silence

On my second day at Mount St. Benedictines, I enjoying the silence. What work it is to produce a fine novel, but that is what I am intending to do. I'm girded by God prayer, walks, and reading. I’m reading at morning, noon, evening, and night Thomas Merton’s spiritual writings in A Book of Hours. I read “Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God because God never wills such work directly. He may permit that through no fault of our own we may have to work madly and distractedly, due to our sins and to the sins of the society in which we live. In that case we must tolerate it and make the best of what we cannot avoid. But let us not be blind to the distinction between sound, healthy work, and unnatural toil.” That is what I feel in my soul, the unnatural toil.

St. Benedictine Monastery allows people to reside here while they figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. The Benedictine Sisters Prayer for Vocations reads, in part, “Bless others with the courage to accept the invitation to seek you in community through prayer and ministry. May these seekers find fulfillment for the longing in their hearts: in communal life well-lived and in loving attention to the needs of your people.” What does God require of me? Brother Thomas, who lived at the monastery here in Erie for over twenty years and had studio on E. 10th Street in Erie, created beautiful ceramic art while the Artist-in-Residence. He wrote, “I am not doing art, I am doing theology.” One hundred pieces of his art are at the monastery, but his work is also at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and The Vatican. He knew he was called to do art and he pursued it, with the blessings of the church.

The main character in my book is questioning her way of life as well. She's not me, but her spirit asks some of the same questions. The questions I ask in my book are: How do we trust in love? Is love what we need or will we always be disappointed? Is God to be trusted? What does God give us?  

Writing From the Heart

The Savvy Authors asked me to be a guest blogger on their website.  I wrote about Writing From the Heart.  Read it here:  http://www.savvyauthors.com/vb/content.php?1637-Writing-from-the-Heart-by-Claudia-J.-Taller. It was one of those inspired moments, a good piece of writing that I hope you'll enjoy.

How Did Fitzgerald's First Novel Get Published?

The answer is that Max Perkins liked it and supported it.  No one else did at first.

This Side of Paradise didn’t go over so well with Book Group, even though it was F. Scott (named after his second cousin thrice removed Francis Scott Key) Fitzgerald. My job as facilitator was to help them see the merit of the work even though it is not the finest piece of writing Fitzgerald managed to produce. The theme of love being warped by status seeking and the absurdity of it all is shown through the shallow lives of the characters, including protagonist Amory Blaine, but the book is not just a statement on live but on society. That is why the book was well received by the critics. We cannot overlook that it was a book that told the story of the “lost generation” and the Jazz Age, a time whose name was coined by Fitzgerald himself.

Fitzgerald’s first novel has published in 1920, when he was just 23, soon after Zelda Sayre broke up with him because he didn’t have any money or promise. It was a typical coming-of-age book about a young man who started out with privilege, much coddling from his mother, an unusual education, and ended up at Princeton where they stamped him as the Princeton type. Parts of another book are imbedded in this one (the unpublished book The Romantic Egotist), and at times the author used a style that was more of a play, and poetry appears throughout the book, either written by one of the characters or by Rupert Brooke, whose line “Well this side of Paradise! . . . There’s little comfort in the wise” developed into the title of Fitzgerald’s book. The mixing of styles and brokenness between the parts of the whole were disconcerting to readers who are used to smooth transitions and editing that pulls it all together. The first part of the book, the story of the egotist, was painful to read because the main character was so full of himself.

There were other parts of the book that were strange, for lack of a better world: The main character left to serve in WWI, but we read nothing about that war, and when Amory’s mother dies, we again lose part of the story. The girls in the book—Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind (based on Zelda), and Eleanor—were well defined and we had a good sense of their characters and relationship with Amory, but they were immature girls and not ready for love relationships at all. We see the character trying to work through what love is and what it isn’t. Much of the latter half of the book was flawless, and the characters of Monsignor and Burne were particularly well drawn, as was Amory’s experience of death which he avoided on the surface and came back to haunt him. The character grows from a personality into a personage, becoming a thinking, feeling person who thinks about the fate of his soul. Earlier in the book “it was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” The message for all of us may be to live in the moment and enjoy life as it is now. I’m not sure that I like the message on love—strive to be your best and you’ll be loved, but if you don’t, you won’t be—is what I would want to think love is.

Those of us who have read about Fitzgerald’s relationship with Zelda (I read the book Zelda: A Biography Nancy Milford years ago), know the relationship between the Fitzgeralds was devastating to both Scott and Zelda. The book was Scott’s attempt to win Zelda back, and it did. The book was wildly popular. The initial printing of 3000 copies sold out in three days and the book went through twelve printings in two years and sold 49,075 copies. It was not financially successful, but did encourage Fitzgerald to go on to publish The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night, and The Great Gatsby. The Love of the Last Tycoon was published posthumously. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

Begin, and Begin Again

My friend Lori loves to write, writes well, and when motivated, writes.  Check out her blog at http://onewriterjourney.blogspot.com/.

Blogging

Blogging works best when we respond to other people's posts and follow each other and build up a readership through getting people to see what's being written.  It also requires that we post regularly. Journalists like me have it easy--all I need to do is sift through the hubris of my personal writings and I have words to post. As for other blogs, don't be surprised if you find yours on my list of favorites. For today, check out this one:  Chuck Sambuchino's at http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/default.aspx.

Word Lovers

The retreats bring together people who just want to write for a weekend, sequestered away with their laptops, the stories spewing from their heads to their fingertips. We also have people who want to be poets, or are poets, and want to write more deeply. Novelists come in packs, and many people are well on their way and need to only hone the writing, cut some words, twist the plot in another direction, or capture the imagination of the reader with page-turning chapters. Still others have lived a life with grandparents who immigrated during the Depression or a child battling a horrid disease, and they want to tell about perseverance and the goodness of life for those who need to know those things. I try to bring all those kinds of word lovers into the foray with writing exercises, speakers on various writing topics, time to write, Lakeside walking excursions, and critique sessions. This is what Word Lovers retreats are.

To a Monastery . . .

I'll be at a monastery this coming week, in my own little hermitage in the woods. Listening Point, a hermitage ministry on 80 wooded acres with beach access near Erie, Pennsylvania, will be where I wake up to yoga, pray and breakfast with the sisters of Mount Saint Benedict Monastery, walk, and write. My hope is to work on a memoir and a book on writing. I will be changed by a week of solitude. I will be with God, my muse.

Writing Life

If you don’t know where to begin, where to start up a true writing life, just write.  Write every day, retreat from the world in the cocoon that envelopes you and the words that you need to get out, the words that will die inside you if you don’t let them out, the words that might just cause you to blow up like a balloon and burst and fizzle out to nothing if you don’t allow them to be written.  Let the words be your own private retreat.

How To Manage All This Stuff

I asked my on-line writing group whether I had to do it all--blogging, e-mail marketing, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter--and they said I do. This was yesterday after having a real heart-to-heart with my husband about having too much to do. Instead of letting it get me down, I got busy. I had a social networking day and sent out an e-mail about the Fall retreat and book appearances, and put announcements on Facebook and Linked In. I saved blogging until this morning, and I'm glad I did because someone from that same on-line group told me she has multiple blogs as well and blogs on each once a week, and it works out because each blog has a purpose and she uses the blog to get her going on the project she'll work on that day. Not only did I move forward on my social networking chores over the last two days but I did so knowing how helpful my social networking was to me. I hope this blog post serves you well.  

“All serious daring starts within.” –Eudora Welty

C. S. Lewis wrote, “People read to know they are not alone.”  We write for the same reason. We love words because they are our way of communicating with the world, whether we’re hearing the stories or telling them. The reading and the writing are intertwined like a well-written story so that the writer becomes the reader and the reader gets into the writer’s head.

She Looks Ready

“Any mood is a good writing mood. The trick is to simply enter whatever mood like a room and sit down and write from there.”  --Julia Cameron