Writers: Believe in Your Work!

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To all the writers out there, who are working on their pieces, please keep your faith. Please continue to work. Please do not be discouraged. Please believe in yourselves.

Keep Writing!

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Gallows Hill can be found here in ebook.

Gallows Hill in paperback can be found here.

An interview about Gallows Hill can be found here.

Please follow the following links to find my novel:

ebook

Print book

Thank you!

The book trailer:

Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I

My radio interview:

interview

 

Available on Amazon

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Quotations on Bullies

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“I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody.”

                                                                 Abraham Lincoln

 

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“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

                                                                Desmond Tutu

 

“It is crucial to oppose bullying whenever and wherever it may be found. Turning away from it or ignoring bullying makes the observer complicit in  the bully’s actions.”

                                                               Charles F. French

What Are You Currently Reading?

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Reading is both of one the greatest pleasures of life and one of the necessities for writers. It gives readers the chance to escape from the outside world and immerse themselves into a completely fictional place for a while, and it serves as a foundation upon which to learn and draw for writers.  To me, reading is one of the essential components of life. It is more than mere recreation; it is a central part of my being.

I do, however, read for pleasure as well as for learning and for my profession as a teacher.  I count reading as one of the essential joys of life.

I am currently reading several books: Paris In The Present Tense by Mark Helprin, the author of the magnificent A Soldier Of The Great War and Winter’s Tale. Like his other books, this one is dense and beautiful, but it requires time to digest sections that have been read before continuing. I hope more people read Helprin’s novels. I am also reading We Three: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters by Laura Shamas, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Death At La Fenice by Donna Leon, the first book in her Commissario Brunetti mystery series.

My question to those who are reading this post: What book are you reading now or have recently read?

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Gallows Hill can be found here in ebook.

Gallows Hill in paperback can be found here.

An interview about Gallows Hill can be found here.

Please follow the following links to find my novel:

ebook

Print book

Thank you!

The book trailer:

Maledicus:Investigative Paranormal Society Book I

My radio interview:

interview

 

Available on Amazon

Quotations on Diversity–Revisited

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“It is never too late to give up your prejudices”

                                                            Henry David Thoreau

 

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“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.”

                                                             Mahatma Gandhi

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It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

                                                            Maya Angelou

Quotations on Integrity

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“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

                                                                       Lillian Hellman

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“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

                                                                       Marcus Aurelius

 

(By Artur Pawłowski – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53409432)

“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

                                                                       Czeslaw Milosz

Who Are Your Favorite Latin American Poets?

As I continue this series on favorite writers, I am going to try to continue to hone in more specifically on regions as well as eras, although not always in the same post! For today’s question, I would like to learn who are some of your favorite Latin American poets. Unfortunately for me, I do not speak Spanish, so I can only address the writings of the following artists as their work appeared in translation. I am hoping, however, that the translations are accurate.

Here are a few of my most admired Latin American poets:

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Pablo Neruda

Neruda’s work might be among the best known poetry of any time or place in the world. I find his work to be astounding in its depth and breadth of subject. He was a well known political activist as well as a writer of some of the most beautiful love poetry. Neruda, from Chile, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971.

 

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Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral, of Chile, also won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1945), and has produced an enormous body of poetic work. Her work often encompasses a wide range of themes: among them: love, sorrow, bitterness, hope for the world, family, motherhood and the issue of Latin American identity.

 

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Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz completes this triumvirate of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1990). Paz is one of the most well known Mexican poets, and his work was widely varied and dealt with many themes. A few are love, death, passion, natural beauty, as well as the Modern world and surrealism.

 

So I ask all of you–who are some of your favorite Latin American poets?

The Wisdom of Walt Whitman–to Question Everything

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I have taught Walt Whitman in several classes both at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA and at the Wescoe School of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, in traditional and adult classes.

This excerpt is from his introduction to the 1855 First Edition of Leaves of Grass.

(http://www.whitmanarchive.org)

Whitman was one of the greatest American poets and has been called the Bard of Democracy. He challenged the existing views of normalcy in the United States across a wide range of topics. We live in a time, perhaps even more than in the 1800s, when great pressure exists to conform to what society defines normalcy to be. I believe it is crucial for individuals to find out who they are, for what they have passions, and what they believe. With this thought in mind, I want to share this small excerpt:

“re-examine all you have been told at church or school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem”

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Whitman shattered the conventions of his time, and his admonition to us to question everything is as important today as it was in the mid-1800s.

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Please, keep Whitman’s idea in mind, and question everything.