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Several notable writers’ birthdays in the past couple of weeks:
Dec 10: Emily Dickinson, who in 1862 alone wrote 366 poems.
Dec 8: Mary Gordon, whom we had the fortune to see and hear her read at the Story Prize Award ceremony a year ago.
Dec 2: George Saunders, one of our favorite writers, and this is what The Writer’s Almanac has to say about it:
He grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Then he went to work for an oil company in Indonesia and started writing fiction, but he said, “In all my stories, a stoic young man who has just arrived in Asia witnesses something brutal and then recoils in silent horror.” So he decided to go back to the U.S., and he thought that being poor and driftless would inspire him to write. So he went from job to job, working as a roofer, a slaughterhouse laborer, and a convenience store clerk. But he found his own stories serious and boring, and he decided it wasn’t helping his writing to be poor, so he went to work for the FDA. One night, he had a dream that he worked at a giant haunted theme park, and he wrote a story about it. For the first time, he liked his own writing. He wrote stories full of bizarre people and events, and those became his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996). He’s also the author of a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000), and his latest, The Braindead Megaphone (2007).
If you have a chance to see George Saunders read in person, you should.
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