Turning
by Julie Cadwallader Staub

There comes a time in every fall
before the leaves begin to turn
when blackbirds group and flock and gather
choosing a tree, a branch, together
to click and call and chorus and clamor
announcing the season has come for travel.

Then comes a time when all those birds
without a sound or backward glance
pour from every branch and limb
into the air, as if on a whim
but it's a dynamic, choreographed mass
a swoop, a swerve, a mystery, a dance

and now the tree stands breathless, amazed
at how it was chosen, how it was changed.
 

TURNING by Julie Cadwallader Staub from Wing Over Wing. Paraclete Press, © 2019. Used by permission of Paraclete Press in Brewster, Massachusetts. (buy now)

It's the birthday of poet and novelist James Dickey (books by this author), born in Atlanta, Georgia (1923). He is best known as the author of Deliverance, the novel that would make him most famous. The book was turned into a highly successful film in 1972, starring Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty. Dickey died in 1997.

It is the birthday of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (books by this author), born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia (1905). In 1917, she witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony. When she got a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, she vowed never to return to Russia.

Her first important novel was The Fountainhead (1943), followed in 1957 by Atlas Shrugged.

And it's the birthday of novelist James Joyce (books by this author), born in a suburb of Dublin (1882). He was a cheerful boy called "Sunny Jim" by his family. He spent several years at an expensive Jesuit boarding school, but was forced to leave after his father spent the family's money on drinking and lost his job. For the remainder of Joyce's childhood, the family was poor, moving to stay ahead of rent collectors.

He struggled to find work. He had been churning out book reviews for The Daily Express. His submissions to The Irish Times were rejected. He was offered a job as the sub-editor of the Irish Bee-keeper, a position he kept, he said, "for about 24 hours." He tried to start a daily newspaper with a friend, but that failed, as did his scheme to purchase books from pawnshops and resell them at a profit to rare book collectors. He borrowed his best friend's .22 rifle and sold it at a pawnshop; Joyce felt bad so he rewrote the end of his friend's poem, which then won a literary prize. He couldn't afford new clothes, so he wore hand-me-downs from friends — wrinkled flannels, tennis shoes, and a yacht cap.

In the spring of 1904, he worked as a schoolteacher for a couple of months. That was the year he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, a proud redheaded chambermaid from Galway. Poor and frustrated, with one suitcase between them, James and Nora left Ireland in October of 1904. They had enough money to get to Paris, where a doctor acquaintance lent them money to continue their journey. Joyce found work teaching in the city of Pola, in what was then Austria-Hungary. Nora got pregnant, and officials in Pola ordered all foreigners to leave. Joyce got another teaching job in the city of Trieste on the Adriatic, which was also part of Austria-Hungary (but is now in Italy). They spent most of the next 10 years there.

Joyce convinced his brother Stanislaus to move to Trieste, and that helped some — Stanislaus gave his brother money when he needed it and went out to haul him home when he passed out in the gutter. Stanislaus wrote: "It seems to me little short of a miracle that anyone should have striven to cultivate poetry or cared to get in touch with the current of European thought while living in a household such as ours, typical as it was of the squalor of a drunken generation. Some inner purpose transfigured him." Joyce tried and failed at several business ventures, including opening movie theaters and importing Irish tweeds to Trieste. He was more successful with a series of lectures on Hamlet and tutoring private students, and Nora took in laundry.

The family moved several more times — to Zurich, back to Trieste, and finally to Paris. There, for the first time, they had some level of security, mostly because the publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver was so impressed by Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) that she financially supported Joyce. It's been estimated that over the course of 20 years, Weaver gave Joyce about a million dollars in today's currency. Finally, in Paris, he could buy fancy wine and rich meals, taxis, Chanel dresses for Nora — plus he could afford to spend all of his time writing. Joyce's works include Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).

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

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