| O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
by William Shakespeare O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting:
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know. What is love? 'tis not hereafter,
Present mirth hath present laughter:
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:
Youth's a stuff will not endure. "O Mistress Mine Where are you Roaming?" by William Shakespeare. Public Domain. (buy now)
It's the birthday of writer Erskine Caldwell (books by this author), born in Moreland, Georgia (1903). His father was an itinerant Presbyterian preacher, and Caldwell lived in a series of poor rural communities in the South. He said: "I could not become accustomed to the sight of children's stomachs bloated from hunger and seeing the ill and aged too weak to walk to the fields to search for something to eat. In the evenings I wrote about what I had seen during the day, but nothing I put down on paper succeeded in conveying the full meaning of poverty and hopelessness and degradation as I had observed it." Caldwell published his two most famous books back to back: Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). His other books include We are the Living (1933); You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), with his second wife, Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White; A Place Called Estherville (1949), and With All My Might (1987).
It's the birthday of novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (books by this author), born in Lincoln, England (1916). Her family was literary, but not rich — the study was the only warm room in her house. She said: "I was brought up in a journalist's home and in a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish, something." She didn't start writing a novel until she was 58 years old. Her husband was dying of cancer, and she thought that writing and sharing a novel with him would be a way to keep him entertained. He died in 1976, and one year later, she published The Golden Child (1977). She went on to write eight more novels, including Offshore (1979), which won the Booker prize; The Gate of Angels (1990); and The Blue Flower (1995). She said: "I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much."
It's the birthday of Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang (books by this author), born in Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand (1980). Her family moved to Minnesota when she was six years old. She planned to become a doctor. Then, during college, she did a study abroad program in Thailand that focused on global poverty. She said: "When I came back to America and college, I knew I could survive poverty in my life without being selfish. This is how I knew I could write." So she continued on to an MFA program, and she wrote a memoir about growing up Hmong in America, called The Latehomecomer (2008). A collective memoire about refugee lives, Somewhere in the Unknown World will be published will be published this coming spring, along with her newest children’s book The Shared Room. Yang said, "I became involved with writing like it is a love affair."
It was on this day in 1892 that The Nutcracker ballet premiered at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia. The ballet was based on a story by Alexandre Dumas, which in turn was based on The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, a much darker story by E.T.A. Hoffman. The score for the ballet was composed by Peter Tchaikovsky. The production was a huge failure with both critics and audience. Tchaikovsky died less than a year later, and had no idea that The Nutcracker would become a classic — many people consider it the most popular ballet in the world.
Today would mark the beginning of the seven-day celebration of Saturnalia in ancient Rome. For the winter festival, the Romans made and exchanged gifts, decorated their homes with holly and ropes of garland, and carried wreaths of evergreen branches to honor the god Saturn.
Poet John Greenleaf Whittier (books by this author) was born on this day near Haverhill, Massachusetts (1807). Whittier was raised on a debt-ridden farm, attended school only 12 weeks a year, and had to walk several miles to borrow books on biography or travel since his house contained only a single almanac. All of his life, Whittier suffered from the effects of the hard physical labor of working on a farm. He was a newspaper editor, abolitionist, state senator, and poet. He wrote the poem "Snowbound" in 1865, which made him enough money to retire on.
It's the birthday of Ford Madox Ford (books by this author), born Ford Hermann Hueffer, in Surrey (1873). He edited the Transatlantic Review, published Joyce and Hemingway, and co-wrote three potboilers with Joseph Conrad when he was 24 and Conrad was in his mid-40s. His best-known novel is The Good Soldier (1915). He wrote a dedication for a later edition 10 years after its original publication, and said in it that he had intended to do for the English novel what Maupassant had done for the French with his novel Strong as Death. Once, a young man, upon meeting Ford, said enthusiastically, "By Jove, The Good Soldier is the finest novel ever written in the English language." A friend of Ford's standing by said: "It is, but you have left out a word. It is the finest French novel ever written in the English language."
It's the birthday of Sylvia Ashton-Warner (books by this author), born in New Zealand (1908). She wrote several novels, but she is best known for her memoir, Teacher (1963). Ashton-Warner wanted to be a writer or a concert pianist or a painter or anything other than a teacher like her mother, but she ended up teaching in rural New Zealand schools for 15 years. She had a gift for reaching the most difficult students in the group, the children who didn't want to be there any more than she did. She said about her first year, "The truth is that I am enslaved ... in one vast love affair with seventy children." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
