Quotation of the Week: Steve Almond

“A generation ago, when ‘Annie Hall’ won the Oscar for Best Picture, talk therapy occupied a prominent place in our collective imagination, whether or not you partook. If you wanted to spend several hours a week baring your soul to a stranger who was professionally obligated to listen and react, you went into therapy. Today you join a writing workshop.”

Source: Steve Almond, “Why Talk Therapy Is on the Wane and Writing Workshops Are on the Rise”

(I may not agree with all of this piece, and I wouldn’t say that all workshoppers are would-be analysands. But there’s no question that I’ve been part of workshops where some of the folks in the room clearly wanted/needed to be in therapy. When I recall these individuals, I always hope that they have found the peace that seemed so sadly elusive for them.)

Quotation of the Week: Julia Alvarez

“For me, the writing life doesn’t just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. ‘My heart keeps open house,’ was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.”

–Julia Alvarez, quoted in 1998 in The Writer magazine, with the quotation republished in “Great Writing Tips from 125 Years of The Writer,” in the magazine’s April 2012 issue.

Quotation of the Week: Dr. Seuss

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”

-Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

Source: Goodreads (this was the quote of the day on March 2; Dr. Seuss was born March 2, 1904).