This is just plain brilliant. Love the type too.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person…they have a certain appearance of fragility, but they are really strong.”
~Tennessee Williams, from Conversations with Tennessee Williams
Photo by Emmanuele Contini / Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone.
Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
~Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
Photo by Courtney Carmody/Flickr, cc by 2.0
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
~C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays in Literature
Photo by Lucinda Lovering/Flickr, cc by-nd 2.0
“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.”
~Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967)
From The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
Photo by Jack Delano, Library of Congress
Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
— Mary Karr from her 2010 interview with Judy Valente on PBS’ Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.
(via trentgilliss)
“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination.”
~Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Listen to: Compassion’s Edge States: Roshi Joan Halifax on Caring Better
Photo Hartwig HKD
It’s hard for a client not to fall in love with Pentagram when I receive this magnificent chapbook of cowboy poetry. Giddy-up!
Boy, does this give us ideas for our own work!
Considering ways we could make chapbooks like this one from Graywolf Press for On Being. We receive so many pieces of lyrical work from people and this digestible, elegant format would be perfect. William Drenttel, call me?
A hearty congratulations to our hometown author, Louise Erdrich, who won this year’s National Book Award in fiction for The Round House! She also owns a fabulous local bookstore in a quaint neighborhood outside downtown Minneapolis. It’s called Birchbark Books. Check it out!
2012 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERS:
Young People’s Literature:
William Alexander, Goblin Secrets
(Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing)
Poetry:
David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
(University of Chicago Press)
Nonfiction:
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
(Random House)
Fiction:
Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
