Tuesday Muse: Mary Oliver

Tuesday Muse: Book Spine Poetry

Today's Tuesday Muse was going to be "meeting your childhood heroes" (see Exhibit A below), but because the last two Tuesday Muses I've made specifically referencing people have directly followed their passing away, I decided not to curse Bruce Coville. May he live long and prosper and write many more books about unicorns and dragons.



So, instead, today's Tuesday Muse is this brilliant little bit of book spine poetry from Maria Popova:



Next time you find yourself stuck, go to your bookshelf. Grab a few books with titles that interest you and rearrange them until you have a poem or an insightful phrase.

And share your poem here, because I want to read it!

And if that fails, try a limerick. Because really, everyone likes limericks, and if they don't you shouldn't trust them.

Tuesday Muse: An Invocation for Beginnings

Today's Tuesday Muse is Ze Frank's "An Invocation for Beginnings." We all know the struggle of staring down a blank page. This is your inspiration as well as your invitation to begin.

"There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore. My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark."

Tuesday Muse: Pixar's Rules for Storytelling

Today's Tuesday Muse is this article on storytelling rules learned from Pixar's writers and animators, because whatever we think of Pixar's politics, I think we can all agree that they know how to tell a darn good story. These rules offer excellent insights on building character, getting your manuscript out of a stuck place, and figuring out story structure. Here are some of my favorites:

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

Now, head on over to the Pixar blog to check out the rest!

Tuesday Muse: A Thank You to Jean Craighead George

After Maurice Sendak's death two weeks ago, I was doubly saddened when I learned last week that Jean Craighead George, too, had passed on. She is this week's muse, and my own muse in a hundred small ways so much a part of me that I'm hardly conscious of them.

If Maurice Sendak shaped the field that I work in, well, then Jean Craighead George shaped me. I spent my childhood ankle-deep in mud or tangled in thorns, fishing for tadpoles in the brook behind my house or following foxes to their dens. Raised in the epitome of suburbia, I nonetheless learned to read the slight disturbances in grass and shrubs that betrayed a deer trail even before I learned to read words on a page. The wetlands and the woods felt like an extension of my soul.

In Jean Craighead George's writing I found that same utter devotion to nature multiplied a thousand times over. I discovered a world in which nature was home and hospice and mentor—too formidable to be a utopia, but nonetheless the stuff of pure, distilled dreams. I ground acorns into meal alongside My Side of the Mountain's Sam, soared and hunted with Frightful, and dreamed of waterfalls with Alice. I romped with wolves like Julie did, and after I turned the last page of Julie of the Wolves I hunted down every bit of information I could find on wolf pack interactions and saved quarters until I could sponsor a wolf at a nature reserve. For want of wolf pups, I named a gaggle of goslings after Julie's wolves. I still, to this very day, see hollowed-out trees and can't help but dream of slipping away to live in them.

It's not difficult to see the trail I took to publishing when one compares my high school English papers to my lackluster performance in Biology (I could never seem to find the same wonder in naming cell parts that I found in studying wolf pack dynamics), but in another life I could easily have found myself in a tent on the tundra, tracking and tagging wolves like Julie did in Julie's Wolf Pack. And there will always be a part of me that needs that pilgrimage to the Catskills, so close to me here in New York but part of another life. There will always be a part of me that's more at home on the mountain than on the M train, a part of me that skims across the top of the snow like molten silver and howls to the moon at night.

My very own Frightful

So thank you, Jean Craighead George, for making the earth your home and inviting thousands of children to join you there. Thank you for creating a world without parents, in which nature taught all the lessons we needed to learn. Thank you for awakening my wonder at the natural world, for making me dream of falconry and tanning leather, and for teaching me a new and invaluable way to see and appreciate and utterly love this complex, harsh, beautiful earth, bursting with life.

Wherever you are, I hope you run with the wolves and fly with falcons.