Why Literature Can Save Us
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
29•25
The remarkable Richard Bausch has reminded us that literature can indeed save us.
“For me the greatest hedge against evil has always been the power to imagine the other. To enter the reality of the other. And literature, is, isn’t it, an exploration and confrontation of exactly that.”
Bausch is a prolific American original. I could write a string of superlatives to describe his body of work, but please, do yourself a favor and explore it. He’s a master of the short story and a Chapman University professor. He says, “I create characters and put them in trouble and see how they behave. They don’t interest me unless they’re in trouble.”
Read his entire essay here.
And to further elucidate and delight you, might I suggest you also read “In That Time” another of his gems. It’s a Pushcart Prize selection and you’ll find it in Narrative Magainze.
William Butler Yeats
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
27•25
And a softness
came from the starlight
and filled me to the bone.
~ Willam Butler Yeats, from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
For more on the life of Yeats, here’s a fascinating biography and a number of poems. Started my day reading about his life and a number of his poems. It was exhilerating.
Brother, Electric
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
16•25
We’ve got rain in the forecast for tonight and I’m hoping it arrives. The break from the heat is so welcome especially since I just spent five days in Utah where the air was so parched and nasty I couldn’t wait to return to Oregon. Trouble was it was 97 when we landed. Color me thrilled to be under cloudy skies.
But I’ve stopped by to suggest you read this moving and heartbreaking essay about brothers published in The Sun and written by Doug Crandell. Every detail has weight and potency. I hope it inspires you like it inspired me.
As for Crandell, I’ve been spending time at his website trying to decide which one of his books I’m going to buy first. He’s just so good. Someone we can all learn from.
I disappeared into books when I was very young
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
04•25
Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised me was there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, and that I came out and met other people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not so rare as some people think, but purpose or vocation which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of other that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone. ~ Rebecca Solnit from Literary Hub: Rebecca Solnit on a Childhood of Libraries and Wandering
Novels change us from within
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
04•25
In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book we find ourselves slighting altered as human beings. Novels change us from within. ~ Donna Tartt in this interview in Chatelaine
The Dream Keeper
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jul•
11•25
Bring me all your dreams,
You dreamers.
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them in a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
~ Langston Hughes
