Ten Commandments
by Connie Wanek

After centuries of negotiation
in the manner of writer and editor,
God himself chose the stone and font.

“How many copies?” asked Mrs. God, patiently.
“I was thinking a thousand?” God answered,
sharpening his chisels. “At least for
the first edition. Some folks may need to share.”

Mrs. God left him to it. The sound
of iron against rock grew faint.
She was shaping something milder,
a long, serious period of rain
across the outback, where such a gift
meant tears of gratitude.

Meanwhile God began to tire.
The commandments, formed letter by letter,
seemed wordy, even after he’d eliminated
most of the footnotes. His palms had blistered
without the gloves he always misplaced.
“Thou shalt not lie,” he mused. “Or is it
lay?” She would know, if only she were here.

“Ten Commandments” by Connie Wanek from Consider the Lilies: Mrs. God Poems. © Will o’ the Wisp Books, 2018. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of best-selling mystery writer Jonathan Kellerman (1949) (books by this author), born in New York City’s Lower East Side. He completed eight unpublished novels on the way to becoming a child psychologist.

Kellerman says, “It took 13 years of typing away in an unheated garage from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.,” until his first novel, When the Bough Breaks (1985), was published. It became a best-seller and a popular made-for-television movie starring Ted Danson. The novel was the first to feature empathetic forensic psychologist Alex Delaware, who appears in 28 of Kellerman’s mysteries. Kellerman says: “I tried to create Alex as a good psychologist. He’s much more sensitive than I am.”

His novels are intricately plotted and sometimes criticized for being too intellectual, but Kellerman doesn’t mind. “All good fiction involves an element of mystery. Crime novels use extreme events — matters of life and death — to catalyze the story. That kind of intensity appeals to me.”

On this day in 1854, Henry David Thoreau (books by this author) published Walden; or, Life in the Woods. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson said he saw a “tremble of great expectation” in Thoreau just before publication day. Thoreau’s previous book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), sold fewer than 300 copies. On the day he got his 706 unsold copies back from the publisher, he wrote in his diary: “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself ...” Walden didn’t do much better. It took five years to sell off the first edition of 2,000 copies, and Thoreau did not live to see a second edition. He managed to arrange a nationwide lecture tour, but only one city made an offer, and so Thoreau kept his lectures to the Concord area. Since then, millions of copies of Walden have been sold.

On this day in 1974, Richard Nixon officially resigned from the presidency. At 11:35 a.m., his resignation letter was delivered to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Gerald Ford took the oath of office. Then, at 12:05 p.m., Gerald Ford gave his first speech as president of the United States.

It's the birthday of the creator of Mary Poppins, P.L. (Pamela Lyndon) Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goff, in Mayborough, Queensland, Australia (1899). Before the publication of Mary Poppins, she adopted P.L. Travers (books by this author) as her literary pseudonym.

In 1933, while recovering from an illness at her home in Sussex, Travers wrote the first stories in the Mary Poppins series and made them into a book about a prim British nanny who appears at a household in a high wind and floats away when the wind changes. Mary Poppins was published the following year. The book was an immediate success in Britain and the United States.

Today is the birthday of biographer Izaak Walton (books by this author), born in Stafford, England (1593). As a boy, he was apprenticed to an ironmonger, and he spent his career as a shopkeeper. In his spare time, he wrote biographies of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Wotton, and several others. Many of Walton's subjects shared his main passion in life: fishing. In 1653, Walton published The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation, an extended ode to fishing, complete with tips, funny anecdotes, technical instructions, dialogues, poems, and commentary about what makes fishing so special. Walton continued to update The Compleat Angler until his death in 1683 at the age of 90. It has been in print for more than 350 years.

It’s the birthday of English poet Philip Larkin (1922) (books by this author), born in Coventry, England, and best known for his clipped, spare poems that explored post-war England. Larkin’s father was a city treasurer and a Nazi enthusiast; his mother was pathologically anxious, and she homeschooled Larkin until he was eight years old. Larkin had poor eyesight and a stammer that persisted into adulthood. He sought refuge in books and wrote stories every night.

At Oxford, he studied literature and found his footing with friends like Kingsley Amis and John Wain, with whom he drank and stayed up late at night, talking about books and listening to jazz records. After graduating from Oxford, he was turned away from military service because of his eyesight, so he joined the staff at a small public library in Shropshire and completed two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). He also published his first collection of poetry, The North Ship (1945), which received good reviews. Larkin tried to write another novel, but he simply couldn’t finish it. He said, “I didn’t choose poetry; poetry chose me.”

Philip Larkin spent more than 30 years as a librarian at the University of Hull. He was intensely private, rode a bicycle to work five days a week, 45 weeks a year, and published only four short volumes of poetry in his lifetime, fewer than 100 pages total. His collections include The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and The High Windows (1974).

Larkin never married and lived alone, cultivating a curmudgeonly, glum persona. He once said: “I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any — after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think? Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

Larkin never traveled to America and never gave readings of his poems, though he did consent to recording them once, an experience he regretted. He said a poem “represents the mastering, even if just for a moment, of the pessimism and the melancholy, and enables you, you the poet, and you, the reader, to go on.”