TWA for Saturday, February 11, 2017

Share

“Marriage of Many Years” by Dana Gioia from 99 Poems. © Graywolf Press, 2016.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2017

Screenwriter Philip Dunne (1908-1992) was born in New York City on this day in 1908. Politically active, he helped organize the Writers Guild of America and fought against entertainment industry blacklists of writers suspected of leftist leanings in the 1940s and 1950s. Among Dunne's many screenwriting credits are How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Robe (1953).

It's the birthday of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993), film director, producer, and screenwriter, who was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1909. He won many awards, including double Oscars as Best Director and Best Screenplay for All About Eve (1950), in which he gave Bette Davis the line, "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

It's the birthday of the man who gave us the phonograph, the light bulb, and the movie camera, among 1,097 patents: Thomas Alva Edison, born in Milan, Ohio (1847).

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer, born to Indian parents in Oxford, England (1957). After college, he spent a year working in a Mexican restaurant in the U.S., disguising himself as a Mexican. Then he and a friend went on a trip from California through Central America to Bolivia. He later said: "It's a great thing to take a journey like that when you're seventeen or eighteen because you're relatively reckless and you don't really know what the dangers are. And then once you've done it, anything seems possible."

He went to graduate school at Harvard, and during the summers he got a job writing for a budget travel guidebook. He traveled around England, France, Italy and Greece, living on almost no money and sleeping in the gutters and under bridges. He covered a different town each day, walking its streets and taking notes in the morning and afternoon and writing it up in the evening.

After graduating, he got a job working for Time magazine. He sat in a cubicle all day and wrote articles about places like the Philippine jungles and the Andes Mountains, from reports he got from other writers. He finally got fed up with office work and took a vacation to Southeast Asia. He fell in love with the place and decided to take a six-month leave of absence. He spent the first three months traveling through 10 Southeast Asian countries and the next three months writing the draft of his first book, Video Nights in Katmandu (1988). He's since published several more books, including the novel Abandon: A Romance (2003).

Pico Iyer said: "The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger."

And, "Home is whatever you can rebel against."

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

You’re a free subscriber to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Your financial support is used to maintain these newsletters, websites, and archive. Support can be made through our garrisonkeillor.com store, by check to Prairie Home Productions P.O. Box 2090, Minneapolis, MN 55402, or by clicking the SUBSCRIBE button. This financial support is not tax deductible.

Upgrade to paid

© 2023 Garrison Keillor
P.O. Box 2090, Minneapolis, MN 55402
Unsubscribe