TWA from Wednesday, April 12, 2017

“Be Kind” by Michael Blumenthal from No Hurry. © Etruscan Press, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2017

Today is the birthday of Tom Clancy, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1947). He was the author of many military thrillers, including The Hunt for Red October (1984), Patriot Games (1987), Clear and Present Danger (1989), and The Sum of All Fears (1991). His research was so meticulous, and his books so accurate in the tiniest detail, that they were very popular among members of the armed forces. Video games based on his books are so realistic that the military uses them for training. He was invited to lecture at the Pentagon several times, and he often sat in on weapons briefings. But Clancy — although he had been a naval history buff since he was a kid — never served in the military. He did join the ROTC in college, but his eyesight was terrible, and he was rejected from service

“I tell [aspiring writers] you learn to write the same way you learn to play golf,” he once said. “You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired — it’s hard work.”

Clancy’s last book, which was co-written with Mark Greaney, was Command Authority. It was published in December 2013, just a couple of months after Clancy’s death.

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It’s the birthday of the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, born in London (1939). He dropped out of school when he was 17 to pursue a career in the theater, and he has written 81 full-length plays, including The Norman Conquests (1973).

He said, “The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.”

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Today is the 101st birthday of writer Beverly Cleary (1916), the creator of Ramona Quimby, an irascible, imaginative, feisty little girl who continues to transfix children more than 60 years after first appearing in the book Henry Huggins (1950). There are more than 91 million copies of Beverly Cleary books in print.

Cleary's books tackled difficult subjects—like Ramona's father losing his job and trying to quit smoking—with grace and humor, but minus the moralistic tone she remembered from the books of her childhood. She said, "I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything." Her books include Beezus and Ramona (1955), The Mouse and the Motorcycle  (1965), Ramona the Pest (1968), and Ralph the Mouse (1982).

You can visit Ramona, Ribsy, and Henry Huggins at the Portland, Oregon, "Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden."

On why Ramona Quimby struck such a nerve with young girls, Beverly Cleary answered: "Because [Ramona] does not learn to be a better girl. I was so annoyed with the books in my childhood, because children always learned to be 'better' children and, in my experience, they didn't. They just grew, and so I started Ramona [...] and she has never reformed. [She's] really not a naughty child, in spite of the title Ramona the Pest. Her intentions are good, but she has a lot of imagination, and things sometimes don't turn out the way she expected." Ramona Quimby has a doll named Chevrolet and campaigned to name her baby sister Aston Martin.

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

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