Your weekend motivation ...

                   “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

                                                                                                                    – Ernest Hemingway

Readers and Writers

In "The Faith of a Writer," by Joyce Carol Oates [still living, still tweeting...], the author speaks of the many great writers who owe their love of their craft to their impressioinistic reading in adolescence.

Pick up your worn copy and remind yourself of this directive:

"Read widely, read enthusiastically, be guided by instinct and not design. For if you read, you need not become a writer; but if you hope to become a writer, you must read."

If at first you don't achieve, change your name...

Interesting article on BuzzFeed about a frustrated writer. After 40 rejections, the white American sent a submission under an Asian pseudonym, and the poem was then included in the Best American Poetry 2015 Anthology. 

Here's the article and link to the poem: http://www.buzzfeed.com/isaacfitzgerald/yi-fen-chou-is-michael-derrick-hudson#.hyOQjJZyx

David Brooks on soft skills

In the Sept. 5, 2015, New York Times, eloquent David Brooks again has an interesting column titled 'The New Romantics.'

Consider the burgeoning use of technology in use today: classrooms, medicine, commerce, even friendship. Yet Brooks sees a door opening to a possible romantic rebirth. Although computers now do much of our work for us, it is possible to consider that this gives us time to turn mundane tasks over to technology, and enjoy more time fir the relational tasks of life, including those that require accountability, authority, or roles such as being a caregiver. These are not transactional jobs, but relational ones, best left to humans, and requiring judgment, empathy, communication, compassion, and courage. The world still needs us!

Read Brooks' column, The New Romantics.