National Author’s Day: My Holy Trinity

It seems appropriate that today is the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, just as it is also the day to celebrate our favorite American authors. I will be honest I haven’t given much thought or attention to National Author’s Day in years past. Even though it was once federally decreed by the Department of Commerce, (probably to help boost sales of all things American in the years after World War II), it receives very little attention now, unrightfully so, especially in our very troubled economic times. (Trust me, writers need a bit of government support just as much as banks and car makers do.)  I shamefully admit I often forget this special day even exists until someone in the book world reminds us all, and I’m even more ashamed that I am often not attracted to the works of many red blooded Americans. I am more entranced by authors from all around the world and whose transplanted into America whose influences are more, well, ”worldly.”

So with the beginning of NaNoWriMo it seemed appropriate to choose today, National Author’s Day, to extol to the world a short list of my favorite authors. If you haven’t read the following authors, you should, not because I said so, but because you may be missing a collection of carefully crafted words that could change your life forever.

Here are the three writer’s that I hold closest to my heart, what I call my “holy trinity,” and I read and reread  their works as often as I can. (Yes Hemmingway, I love you, worship you, but I love them more.)

Anais Nin, whom I discovered when I was a teenager. She awakened the woman within me with her words. Then as I grew older, she brought the writer in me back to life in times when an oppressive world try to deaden my passion for writing.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Bernhard Schlink, whose book Der Vorleser, known in English as The Reader, first awakened me to a deeper understanding of my German roots, and then solidified in me a deeper understanding of the power of choices and the power of love that I could not define before I read his book.

I’m not frightened. I’m not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.

Josephine Hart, whose words are those who seem to have been written from the secret recesses of my soul, has shook me from my comfort zone more times than I care to admit. Her books reveal aspects of the human psyche that the rest of us only wish we were brave enough to say. Her death this year was a terrible loss, she was obviously filled with a vast ocean of unwritten words which death has now stolen from us forever.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home.  

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