The Voice
by Thomas Hardy

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


“The Voice” by Thomas Hardy. Public Domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Mary Robison, (books by this author) born in Washington, D.C. (1949).

She grew up in Ohio with five brothers and two sisters. She ran away from home twice when she was young, one of those times going to Florida to look for Jack Kerouac. She always wanted to be a writer, and she kept journals and diaries and wrote poetry as a teenager.

She published a short story called "Sisters" in The New Yorker magazine in 1977, and within a few years she began to be lumped in with writers like Raymond Carver and Amy Hempl, who wrote about ordinary people in a stripped-down prose style.

She published a few collections in the 1980s, including An Amateur's Guide to the Night (1983) and Believe Them (1988). In the 1990s, she was struck with a terrible case of writer's block. She said:

"For about 10 years I didn't publish much of anything, and I didn't have anything. I had nothing, and I really didn't know if I ever would again. ... It's about pride, really; feeling the words on the page can never represent you. It's the worst thing you can learn about yourself. You could go mad."

After a while of being unable to write anything, Robison began taking drastic measures. She started driving around in her car with a tape recorder, and whenever anything came into her head, she would just scream it into the tape recorder. Then she'd go home and write these things down on note cards. Eventually she had about a thousand note cards, and she realized that with a little work she could arrange them into a novel.

The result was her book Why Did I Ever (2001), a very short novel told in 536 very short chapters about a woman named Money Breton, divorced three times, who's addicted to Ritalin and trying to support herself as a screenwriter.

It's the birthday of historian Taylor Branch, (books by this author) born in Atlanta (1947). He came from a well-off family who ran a chain of Laundromats and bowling alleys and had no interest in politics. When he saw the famous photographs of police dogs attacking civil rights protestors, it was a wake-up call. He said, "Until those dogs in Birmingham, which penetrated my little world of high school sports and chasing girls, I thought that everything in America was wonderful." So he started to learn about the civil rights movement, and when he heard part of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr., he said, "I knew that I wanted to investigate the life that could produce that voice."

He has done exactly that. He worked for the civil rights movement and as a Democratic activist — he shared an apartment with Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham in 1972 to work on the George McGovern campaign. He has written several books, but he is most famous for a chronological trilogy about the civil rights movement collectively known as “America in the King Years.” The three books were Parting the Waters (1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Pillar of Fire (1998); and At Canaan's Edge (2006). His most recent book is The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (2010).

He said, "I would like my readers to entertain the core notion that civil rights history is not a quaint tale of yesteryear, but rather our best model for the urgent task of understanding and refining democracy."

It's the birthday of the novelist Anchee Min, (books by this author) born in Shanghai (1957). Her father taught astronomy. She and her parents and her three brothers and sisters lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment. Under the Maoist regime, they were suspected of being bourgeois intellectuals.

When she was 17, Min was selected to be sent to a labor camp called Red Fire Farm, where she could fulfill the noble cause of being a peasant. It was terrible, back-breaking work, and even worse psychologically. One of her co-workers, a woman named Little Green, was caught with a lover — he was executed, and she went insane and killed herself. Min herself had an intense, secret love affair with a woman named Yan, one of her commanders, a dedicated Revolutionary.

But she was whisked away from Red Fire Farm after she caught the eye of a film crew sent out by Jiang Ching, Mao's wife, to find the perfect person for a new film, she wanted a "perfect peasant-type face." Partway through production, Mao died, and Jiang Ching was suddenly hated, as was anyone connected with her. No one wanted to talk with Min or treat her like a human being.

She had a friend who helped get her to the United States. She didn't know any English, so she applied to the University of Chicago because it was the only school where she didn't have to actually prove that she knew English. She had a friend fill out her application and check the box saying that she spoke English, and she managed to make it the United States. When the University of Chicago found out that she didn't know a single word of English, they kicked her out, but she was allowed to stay in the country for six months, and was told that she would be deported if she couldn't learn to speak English in that amount of time. So she watched “Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood,” “Sesame Street,” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” She started writing as a way to improve her English, and slowly she wrote a memoir about her experiences in Communist China, a book called Red Azalea (1994). It became a New York Times best-seller, and since then she has written several more novels, including Becoming Madame Mao (2001), about Jiang Ching, and Pearl of China (2010), about the novelist Pearl S. Buck. Her most recent book is entitled  The Coocked Seed: A Memoir (2013).

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

^