Louella Bryant's Blog - Posts Tagged "willard"
The zany capriciousness of writing
Creative writing is a mad and capricious process. If you’re a writer, it helps to be a little zany. After all, we invent worlds, create monsters and villains, and give our heroes superpowers even if they are just ordinary people. The trick is to create an impossible situation and have our characters figure out how to emerge unscathed—or only a little scathed.
Several years ago I drove the writer Nancy Willard from her home in Poughkeepsie to a writing workshop she was teaching and I was attending. After a fascinating three days of writing poetry, I drove her home and she invited me in. Her house looked as if a brilliant six-year-old lived there. A large wicker angel wearing a funny hat stood by the door to accept my coat. Life-sized manikins guarded the living room hearth, one with a teapot head. “Someone gave me the teapot,” she said, “and I felt sorry for it not having a body.”
The kitchen cabinets were painted evening blue and decorated with moon and stars. When a big apple tree in the back yard died, she had the hollow trunk cut down and fixed to a platform on wheels. The trunk, set in a corner of the dining room, had a door cut into the side with hinges to open it. Inside stood an angel two feet tall. When I peeked through a knothole, I found the inside lit with Christmas tree lights illuminating a Chinese Fu Manchu figure looking down at a manger while a toy tiger stood guard.
Some writers stare at a blank wall to access their creative muses. Others, like Willard, live with their creations.
Willard published two novels and eleven books of poetry for adults. She also was a prolific writer of children’s books. A Visit to William Blake’s Inn was the first book of poetry to win the Newbery Medal and also a Caldecott Honor, and she published a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for young readers. For many years she taught at Vassar College. Her work—in all genres—teaches us to experience the common in a most uncommon way.
Willard’s inspirations came largely from the house in which she grew up, which was much like the inn she wrote about in A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. Her grandfather lived on the third floor with his chewing tobacco and his books, including the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, treatises on beekeeping and osteopathy, and the shadowy works of Edgar Allan Poe, from which he recited loudly every evening. For most of the day, her grandmother talked aloud to her ancestors, and in the evening she recited prayers in German. Nancy listened to the ramblings of the houseguests and noted them in the margins of her school papers. To be a writer, she concluded, is to be a listener.
With more than sixty books to her credit, Willard seemed to have a boundless fount of creativity. What draws Willard into a story or a poem is never the plot, she says in her collection of essays, Telling Time. “No, it is the teller, the witness, who gives direct testimony, not simply information.”
Publishers have told me that it is the characters that the reader falls in love with. We have to believe in a story’s characters and care about what happens to them. When they rise up from the page with verisimilitude, we are willing to follow them anywhere.
If you’re a painter, you have to keep painting. If you’re a dancer, you must keep dancing. And if you’re a writer, Willard says, “You have to sit down every day and write. What if the angel [of creativity] came and you were out shopping for shoes? God helps the drowning sailor, but he must row.”
It can always help to believe in angels or muses of one sort or another. Nancy Willard did. She died in 2017. Quite possibly she has become a muse to another lucky writer.
Several years ago I drove the writer Nancy Willard from her home in Poughkeepsie to a writing workshop she was teaching and I was attending. After a fascinating three days of writing poetry, I drove her home and she invited me in. Her house looked as if a brilliant six-year-old lived there. A large wicker angel wearing a funny hat stood by the door to accept my coat. Life-sized manikins guarded the living room hearth, one with a teapot head. “Someone gave me the teapot,” she said, “and I felt sorry for it not having a body.”
The kitchen cabinets were painted evening blue and decorated with moon and stars. When a big apple tree in the back yard died, she had the hollow trunk cut down and fixed to a platform on wheels. The trunk, set in a corner of the dining room, had a door cut into the side with hinges to open it. Inside stood an angel two feet tall. When I peeked through a knothole, I found the inside lit with Christmas tree lights illuminating a Chinese Fu Manchu figure looking down at a manger while a toy tiger stood guard.
Some writers stare at a blank wall to access their creative muses. Others, like Willard, live with their creations.
Willard published two novels and eleven books of poetry for adults. She also was a prolific writer of children’s books. A Visit to William Blake’s Inn was the first book of poetry to win the Newbery Medal and also a Caldecott Honor, and she published a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for young readers. For many years she taught at Vassar College. Her work—in all genres—teaches us to experience the common in a most uncommon way.
Willard’s inspirations came largely from the house in which she grew up, which was much like the inn she wrote about in A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. Her grandfather lived on the third floor with his chewing tobacco and his books, including the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, treatises on beekeeping and osteopathy, and the shadowy works of Edgar Allan Poe, from which he recited loudly every evening. For most of the day, her grandmother talked aloud to her ancestors, and in the evening she recited prayers in German. Nancy listened to the ramblings of the houseguests and noted them in the margins of her school papers. To be a writer, she concluded, is to be a listener.
With more than sixty books to her credit, Willard seemed to have a boundless fount of creativity. What draws Willard into a story or a poem is never the plot, she says in her collection of essays, Telling Time. “No, it is the teller, the witness, who gives direct testimony, not simply information.”
Publishers have told me that it is the characters that the reader falls in love with. We have to believe in a story’s characters and care about what happens to them. When they rise up from the page with verisimilitude, we are willing to follow them anywhere.
If you’re a painter, you have to keep painting. If you’re a dancer, you must keep dancing. And if you’re a writer, Willard says, “You have to sit down every day and write. What if the angel [of creativity] came and you were out shopping for shoes? God helps the drowning sailor, but he must row.”
It can always help to believe in angels or muses of one sort or another. Nancy Willard did. She died in 2017. Quite possibly she has become a muse to another lucky writer.
