Suzanne Marrs: "What There Is to Say We Have Said"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-05-10/suzanne-marrs-what-there-say-we-have-said
Suzanne Marrs
Gil Ford Photography
Today when two friends have something to say, they usually pick up the phone or send an email. Most of us don’t have time for composing lenthy, wide-ranging letters or waiting for a response in the mail. A new book shows how much we might be missing. It’s a collection of letters between Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty and her New Yorker editor and fellow writer William Maxwell. For more than 50 years, they corresponded about work and family, likes and dislikes, griefs, joys, moments of dispair and humor. In the introduction to The Norton Book of Friendship, Welty wrote, “All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth – or perhaps untruth – some flash of light is just occurring... To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship.” Biographer Suzanne Marrs invites us into the friendship between Eudora Welty and William Maxwell through their fifty-year correspondence.
Guests
Suzanne Marrs
author of "Eudora Welty: A Biography" and "One Writer's Imagination"; a recipient of the Phoenix Award for distinguished Welty Scholarship and a professor of English at Millsaps College.
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Read an Excerpt
From What There is to Say We Have Said. Copyright 2011 by Suzanne Marrs. Excerpted by kind permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Comments
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I found your show today very interesting. I am a retired teacher and for years I have worked at getting my students to write about their own family and the life they live. I have been extremely interested in my own family, not from the tree background, but my grandparents and great grandparents and what they did, what they ate and where they went to have family togetherness.
Several years ago I published a book titled Sunday Letters which is a collection of letter I wrote to my own children over a four year period about the same time as I began writing my adventure stories for young people, (I think I am up to about sixteen or so at the moment). Sunday letters is in Ebook at Amazon and available for my own children to use for reference with their own grand children.
One of my students, a Vietnamese refugee, has finally agreed that he should write about his escape from Vietnam thirty or so years ago and he has not been my student since he graduated in 1990, but he never forgot the advice I gave him. He just visited me this year and wants help in writing his own book.
My children are all writers and have publications as well.
I loved your show today and it made me think about my own progress through life and the writings I have done.
The part about the back and forth letters were great, I have letters written to me seventy years ago and I plan to pass them on to my youngest someday. Someone will laugh and find them interesting, probably one of my great great grandchildren should I be so lucky.
Dr Robert E McGinnis
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002CB3V24
Stretching When Heard
The moon which is seen is not.
Is not the truth,
the truth with one eye open or two?
And without the face,
turned around to face you it is found where?
Your reliance upon all that it is of your mind.
To be full and filled by your gaze it becomes.
Something which already waiting it is.
Apply described the stretching when heard.
Cannot you say when it is felt by he,
and being thus felt then he comes.
If the truth is the truth then riding behind others,
is called what?
Although a deeper and firmer understanding of this.
Must he take you all the way to the base before you have?
And is it not without great feeling the ring when he does.
And by you it is very much like when first it was felt.
You understand it is rewound,
twisted into knots and is wise knowledge.
You understand you do not understand,
how one finger it does and the other finger doesn't.
Being born to worship each various form.
Exceeding what yours was, you though designed for.
If I am the knower then this feeling you know.
Stretching by you, when by you it is felt.
Become more than elastic it was but never quite torn.
Music is heard and if deaf then it is felt.
Hence stretching when heard can be felt as well.
Fetching the stick the dog just opens it's mouth.
Overcoming smoke rings of hallucinations,
which is actually when never directly, was he ever there?
Create Date: 1 July 2011
is it poetry