Dawn Aubade
by Laura Foley

If I hadn't hopped aboard the ferry
           on a rough sea day
 
stayed outside
           in the wind and spray
 
letting the salt sea bless me
           with its holy water
 
If I hadn't absorbed the surf's
           tumbling up and down
           bending my knees in a trance-like dance
 
hadn't waited for the moon to rise
           dripping orange globe
            lifting spirits in the east
 
nor felt the waves keeping my bones awake
           through all my dreaming
 
If I hadn't risen at dawn to see
           the bay's beckoning stillness
           flaming sun rising from it
 
If I hadn't plunged into bracing waters
           without thought
           clothes piled on sand like a cast-off shell
 
could I say I had lived, at all?

“Dawn Aubade” by Laura Foley from Why I Never Finished My Dissertation. Headmistress Press © 2019. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the novelist John Irving (books by this author), born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1942). His first successful novel was The World According to Garp (1978). He's written many more novels since then, including The Cider House Rules (1978) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989).

John Irving’s latest work, Darkness As a Bride, is due out in September of this year.

It's the birthday of the children's book author who wrote under the name Dr. Seuss (books by this author), born Theodor Geisel, in Springfield, Massachusetts (1904). He published his first book for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1937.

In 1955, an educational specialist asked him if he would write a book to help children learn how to read. Seuss was given a list of 300 words that most first-graders know, and he had to write the book using only those words. Seuss wasn't sure he could do it, but as he looked over the list, two words jumped out at him: "cat" and "hat."

Seuss spent the next nine months writing what would become The Cat in the Hat (1957). That book is 1,702 words long, but it uses only 220 different words. A few years later, Seuss's publisher bet him $50 that he could not write a book using only 50 different words. Seuss won the bet with his book Green Eggs and Ham (1960), which uses exactly 50 different words, and only one of those words has more than one syllable: the word "anywhere."

It's the birthday of journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe (books by this author), born in Richmond, Virginia (1931), the author of the books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flake Catchers (1970), and The Right Stuff (1979). He helped spark the "New Journalism" movement, which began in the 1960s. Tom Wolfe died in 2018 at the age of 88.

He went to graduate school at Yale in the 1950s, and in the midst of the Red Scare wrote a thesis entitled The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929–1942. He had a Ph.D., but rather than go into academia he decided to be a newspaper reporter. Then, in the early 1960s, there was a newspaper strike in New York City, and the paper he worked for was affected. He was out of a job for a while, and he decided to pitch an idea to Esquire magazine for a story about the hot-rod car culture around southern California.

The editor agreed, and Wolfe went out to L.A., hung around car shows, drag races, and demolition derbies, and ran up a $750 bill at a Beverly Hills hotel. He'd taken lots and lots of notes, but he couldn't figure out what the story should be or how to write it up —not even by the night before his magazine deadline. The editor told him to type up his notes, send them, and he'd go ahead and put together the story. Wolfe sat at his typewriter and banged out a letter to his editor with his ideas and observations. His editor liked it so much that he just removed the salutation ("Dear Byron") at the top and published Wolfe's notes as a feature article. The story was a huge hit and became the title piece in Wolfe's first published book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965).

In an essay published in 2007, Tom Wolfe argued that the newspaper industry would stand a much better chance of survival if newspaper editors encouraged reporters to "provide the emotional reality of the news, for it is the emotions, not the facts, that most engage and excite readers and in the end are the heart of most stories." He said there are exactly four technical devices needed to get to "the emotional core of the story." They are the specific devices, he said, "that give fiction its absorbing or gripping quality, that make the reader feel present in the scene described and even inside the skin of a particular character."

The four: 1) constructing scenes; 2) dialogue — lots of it; 3) carefully noting social status details — "everything from dress and furniture to the infinite status clues of speech, how one talks to superiors or inferiors ... and with what sort of accent and vocabulary"; and 4) point of view, "in the Henry Jamesian sense of putting the reader inside the mind of someone other than the writer."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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