Category: - Marianne Murphy Zarzana

Illuminating Truth -- The Aim of Science and Literature

5/27/2011

According to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, May 27 is the birthday of zoologist and writer Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, a book about environmental pollution.

Her second book, The Sea Around Us, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. I love this quote from her acceptance speech: "The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.... The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

"We are like eggs"

5/22/2011

C.S. Lewis, an Irish-born British writer, is one of the world's most influential Christian thinkers and writers. He's written 30 books, and some of my favorites are The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed, and Till We Have Faces.

Several years ago when we took a group of SMSU students on a Global Studies trip to England and France, it was a thrill to eat at the same pub in Oxford, The Eagle and Child, where Lewis hung out with his literary friends, "The Inklings," including J.R.R. Tolkien.

Here's a quote by Lewis I just came across:
"We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." -C.S. Lewis

What are you trying to hatch in your writing life? What Lewis books have made an impact on you?

Be a Columbus

5/21/2011

"Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought." -Henry David Thoreau

Off to See the Wizard...

5/15/2011

Today is the birthday of the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, according to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

In 1900, Baum wrote the book that made him famous, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The book began as a story he told to some neighborhood children; Frank thought it was so good that he stopped in the middle of the story to go start writing it down. The story of Dorothy, her dog Toto, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man was an instant classic.

Frank Baum wrote, "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."

Last summer we were thrilled when our daughter Elaine gave us tickets for our wedding anniversary to see the wonderful musical Wicked, based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, a re-telling of the 1939 film of Baum's classic story from the perspective of the witches of the Land of Oz.

What memories do you have of watching The Wizard of Oz or reading the book? What books have you enjoyed that re-imagined a classic story from a whole new perspective?

My husband, a Brit lit specialist, and I love Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, so when I saw a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith for sale at our SMSU campus bookstore, I couldn't resist. I haven't read it yet, but I'm prepared for the laughs and the ride I know it will provide. Mary Ellen Quinn writes on amazon.com: "Mash-ups using literary classics that are freely available on the Web may become a whole new genre." I say, why not?

Happy Mother's Day

5/8/2011

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there! I am grateful for my mother, Eileen Ahern Murphy, for many reasons but especially for how she always encouraged my passion for writing. She read to all six of us kids, she always took us to the library, and she made reading seem magical. She is a voracious reader herself. I can recall her at the breakfast table reading the local newspaper, the Chicago newspapers, and the Christian Science Monitor. She loved to read Erma Bombeck's column, "At Wit's End," for the humorous slant she gave to family life. And she never missed reading Ellen Goodman's column covering the cultural and political topics of the day with insight and common sense. One of her all-time favorite writers is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of both Piltdown Man and Peking Man. Here is her favorite quote by him:

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

What part did your mother play in you becoming someone who loves to read and write?

For All the Graduates

5/6/2011

Tomorrow is the Commencement 2011 at Southwest Minnesota State University. After graduation practice this afternoon, I talked to two of my creative writing seniors getting ready to launch themselves out into the world. One is both thrilled and terrified about attending a two-month writers' workshop at the University of Iowa this summer in their legendary writing program. The other is working at a job that provides abundant material for writing if not financial gain. They're both gifted, hard-working and courageous writers. I don't know where life will take them, but I know they're more than ready to move beyond the safe harbor of SMSU.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain

Visit Jim Zarzana's website and Eclectic Blog to read his riff on graduation: www.jameszarzana.com.

Out of Some Hugeness

4/9/2011

"My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything."
-Joseph Conrad

A task at once so simple and so complex. The images and pictures that come to us, that we shape into poems, stories, and essays "come out of some hugeness," as John Steinbeck writes, "and sometimes they have startled me."

May you also be startled by the images and pictures that arrive with a sense of urgency and come out of some hugeness needing to be captured on paper and shaped by your pen.

Paying Attention as a Writer

4/7/2011

These two quotes remind me that, as a writer, my job is to pay attention, to keep my eyes and ears open, to be a keen observer.

"Nature, which gave us two eyes to see and two ears to hear, has given us but one tongue to speak." -Jonathan Swift

"Be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost." - William James

As if by Magic

4/6/2011

Great reading tonight at SMSU by award-winning writer Dana Yost from his new book of poems and essays, The Right Place. In his poems, Dana takes a brief encounter between two men outside a hardware store on Main Street in Cottonwood, Minnesota, or an afternoon working on fences to expand a cow pen, and we see these scenes in a sharp new light. The quote below describes well the "magic" that Dana creates in his writing about life in southwest Minnesota.

"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it." - Anais Nin

As writers, we know that the magic happens through hard work, through craft. Dana is a hard-working writer at the top of his craft--making magic happen. Last night he was up against the Harlem Globetrotters at SMSU. He could go toe to toe with them as far as artistry--just in a different craft.

Dana is currently at work on a book about the history of the highly successful SMSU Women's Tennis Team from 1979 to 1992 under the leadership of Head Coach Hugh Curtler, professor emeritus of philosophy at SMSU and former Director of the Honors Program.

Mistakes

3/30/2011

Today, just a good short quote by Nikki Giovanni:

"Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts."