A friend is looking for an online writing group, if you have any ideas about locating one, please comment. Thanks.On NPR, I listened to a woman who'd basically centered her life around the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, even moving to the town where she lived on the Great Plains. I have met people like this in real life, people who are curators or docents at houses of famous people like the Alcotts or the Brontes, or those who make pilgrimages, write books about it, or collect memorabilia. A childhood passion becomes a lifelong one.
Are our childhood passions deeper than ones that come later? Why did I merely pass my passion for the books of Maude Hart Lovelace to my child rather than keep the flame going myself? Are their adult characters in adult books that hold as significant a place in our hearts as Harry Potter, Robin Hood, Thomas the Train, Nancy Drew, Tom Sawyer, The Little Mermaid, Anne Frank, Tarzan, Superman, Betsy, Tacy and Tib? What passions did you have and did they stick?
25 comments:
I've thought several times of opening a book store but I've always been too busy working to make ends meet and with folks depending on me. It would be nice to turn a childhood obsession into a career, but how many of those obsessions can you make a living from.
Sadly, many of the passions of my childhood have not passed the test of Time, Patti. I grew up reading TOM SWIFT and THE HARDY BOYS. Rereading those books a few years ago, I found them to be slow and boring. However, the music I grew up with: MOTOWN, DYLAN,ROLLING STONES, etc. still have the power to move me.
I doubt books from our childhood passed the test of either our time or time itself. Styles have changed so much.
I nearly did open a bookstore about 25 years ago. A friend had a spot lined up on the WSU campus. But she wanted to stock our inventory initially by selling our own books--that I couldn't do.
A friend of mine--who has just left the book selling business--said, "The best way to make a small fortune selling books is to start with a large fortune." The economics of publishing and bookstores have changed so radically by the Internet and ebooks, it's hard to fathom what the new business model will look like.
Perhaps the time of pilgrimages has diminished. There was once a steady flow of pilgrims to Key West to view Ernest Hemingway's home, and another flow to the Monterey peninsula where pilgrims hoped for a glimpse of John Steinbeck, or a visit to Cannery Row. There are still those who head for New Mexico to see the homes of D. H. Lawrence or Georgia O'Keeffe. One discovers plaques here and there, such as one in Rome marking the place where Lord Byron lived. My instinct is that yes, when we reverence an artist at a young age, we honor that memory. I have friends who own log cabin on what was Tom McGuane's ranch where Steve McQueen spent his dying days amid the beauty of the mountains. There is now a small, lovely portrait of him on the wall.
We have done a lot of that.Key West for Truman'w Little White House and Hemingway,Sylvia Plath's grave in Hebden Bridge, Winston Churchill in Kent, FDR in Hyde Park, the Brontes, the Alcotts, Thoreau, Margaret Mitchell, Keats in London, Wordsworth in the Lake District, Anne Frank's house--many more. All of these were passions of a sort but never overwhelming ones. The passion was in the travel, I think.
I saw T.C. Boyle standing on the roof of the house he owned built by Frank Lloyd Wright to keep the fires back. That's a responsibility as much as a passion.
I don't know of any online writing groups in particular, although I'm sure one could google the term and finding any number of the same. Whether they are genuinely helpful/free/have many members...
But - maybe if your friend asked about a good online writing group in one of the NaNoWriMo forums... at least the answers would be more helpful than a blind google search.
Regarding the bookshop comments, particularly the one by George, it's true unless you happen to be Jeffrey P. Bezos.
As for pilgrimages, I had an interest in architecture from an early age, and by high school was particularly interested in the Prairie and Craftsman styles. Still, every time I travel anywhere, I check my Frank Lloyd Wright database to see if there are any structures designed by him nearby and if so, I visit it. There are a few here in SoCal I visit every year or three. I have also visited every available (not privately owned) home designed by architects Greene & Greene, most of which are in the Pasadena area.
I go to Oak Park every time we go to Chicago. My grandfather was an architect so I have always loved buildings. He worked on the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh with Charles Klauder and I have a few of the original drawings. My favorite architectural trip is the river tour of buildings in Chicago. What an amazing array of buildings.
Thanks, Corey. I will pass that on.
When I was growing up I was horse-crazy (still am to a certain extent but not as crazy as some of my friends) and I developed a passion for the Walter Farley books (The Black Stallion etc.), the Marguerite Henry books (King of the Wind) and all of the C.W. Anderson books. And although I have certainly latched on to several other passions as an adult, every time I see one of those books in a used book store, I pause and smile and have wistful thoughts.
I still remember those books on my shelves. That was about as close as I got to horses though.
My neighbor Margot Kidder owns a Frank Lloyd Wright house a block away from me. It is classic Wright, with huge eves and windows bunched in the corners. He didn't build this one, but did design it. Unlike some of his houses, this one is very livable.
Make it eaves.
That's true. Living in an architecturally significant house must have it deficits.
For an online group, try Zoetrope. It's where I learned to write.
As for the online writing group, I'm working on a site called TypeTribe (http://typetribe.com) that will be a hub for getting targeted, timely feedback online. It might be what your friend is looking for.
Fiction magazines remain a passion from early years, when they were likely to be CHILDREN'S DIGEST or HIGHLIGHTS, even as I began reading HITCHCOCK'S at about age ten (and started buying new issues of it and then other magazines at 13). PLAYBOY was more fascinating when I was nine, but I did buy the new ESQUIRE today.
The best fiction of my youth is still something I go back to or come across on occasion...it's still pretty good. I never had much patience for the Hardys or their kin.
Always was and always will be a big magazine reader--that is unless they all disappear, which looks likely.
I loved (and still love) the books of Lucy Maud Montgomery, especially the Anne of Green Gables series. However, my kids were less-than-enthusiastic, claiming "nothing really happens." It's a chastening experience when our kids don't share our literary loves.
Re the Frank Lloyd Wright house. My in-laws live in a community with a FLW house that is on the national register. The people who own the house (there have been several over the years) always have trouble. Any house--even one designed by FLW--is going to have standard maintenance issues, and something even as simple as changing a faucet required paperwork be submitted. It's a beautiful house (from the outside), but I understand that inside it has its share of leaks and cracks that seem to take longer to repair because of the required paperwork.
I can imagine he would be very specific in such things. Maybe more a responsibility than a job.
Magazines definitely were a passion of mine. Growing up from the age of 10 in a small Canadian community north of the 53rd parallel, I stopped at a tobacco shop almost every day to see if any new magazines had arrived. That's where I first found Sport and Sports Illustrated. One magazine I often bought was Quick, a people-oriented one that was smaller than Reader's Digest. A couple of weeks ago a dealer at a book fair had a few copies for sale. As I grew older, at one point I subscribed to more than a dozen including Playboy, Esquire, Time, Inside Sports, Harpers, Rolling Stone. Downbeat and The New Yorker as well as papers such as the Village Voice, LA Free Press, San Francisco Oracle, The Sporting News and The Hockey News. I still love magazines, but only subscribe to about four these days and find that they pile up and often go unread except for a few articles. What do you think I should do with about 50 years of Playboy?
Kent, you last question: Well, there's eBay. But you have a lot of competition. (And, of course, condition is important.)
Or, of course, if you've kept 'em for all these decades, go back and reread the stories (or recheck the pictorials). PLAYBOY always was a mixed bag for fiction, but certainly has published some impressive stuff.
In 1978, I certainly preferred THE ATLANTIC to HARPER'S (despite a dubious Claire Sterling cover story on the first issue I bought) or THE NEW YORKER, as much as I was happy about TNY cartoons (even if they were about as circumscribed as PLAYBOY cartoons). The HARPER'S revival (and the increasing dullness of THE ATLANTIC after the Zuckerman takeover) certainly turned that around. I managed to drop more than a c-note on magazines yesterday, most of the literary sort from GRANTA to EQMM to CEMETERY DANCE (to MODERN ROMANCE STORIES, mostly so I could detail it for the FictionMags Index--and there's a slim chance there's some decent reading in it) but also on film, photography, the larger culture, and DOWNBEAT and JAZZ TIMES.
I keep no magazines except Consumer Reports. It's onerous enough keeping all these books.
Baseball stuck; the Hardy Boys didn't, except in my continuing love of mysteries.
I think it may have to do with how much the subject of the passion can grow to accommodate our increasing knowledge and curiosity. I'm still learning about baseball, though I'm quite knowledgeable by layman's standards.
The writing and mysteries of the hardy Boys eventually grew this for me, though they are a large part of why I read Raymond Chandler, James Lee Burke, et al today.
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