Hi Friends of Emerging Form!
We will be doing a live presentation for Women’s Forum on creative process, play and community building in Carbondale, CO, on June 25, 2019. If you are a woman living in the area and you would like to be invited for the night to connect with other women in your area, let us know and we’ll get you an invitation!
What We’re Reading:
· Sometimes we are profoundly aware of our own becoming. That’s the theme of this poem by the wonderful Mary Oliver, “Reckless Poem,” featured in Poetry 180.
· Pam Houston, our guest on Episode 6, just published this moving essay in Outside Online about the death of her horse.
· How did writing under aliases allow this woman writer to flourish and contribute to her demise? The wild story of Letitia Landon.
· Rafael Jesús González, our guest on Episode 9, offers us this reflection on Memorial Day and the Vietnam Memorial.
Online Resources:
Check out Writers Helping Writers, featuring books, workshops, webinars, tools and a really cool thesaurus.
The Devil is in the Details:
Um, yeah. So you may recall how in Episode 9 on Awards, Rosemerry was remembering the details of a contest in 2008 on A Prairie Home Companion? She got the gist right but missed on a few details. The radio show came out in April, 2008, not near Valentine’s Day. There were 35 finalists out of 4,000 entries, not 20. And the boy that pulled the name out of the hat was 12, not 10. The effect was the same—she was a finalist and her name was not drawn out of the hat so she didn’t win 3 dozen roses and a mattress.
But this brings us to a small rumination on the phrase “The devil is in the details.” It means, of course, that you better get the details right, and if not there might be hell to pay. The first known written reference is from 1963, though it didn’t come into popular speech until the 1990s.
But this idiom came out of an earlier German phrase, “God is in the detail,” (only one detail here) which came from the German, "Der liebe Gott steckt im detail." This is a quite different connotation, something that every writer knows: It’s important to get just the right detail—because the closer you come to getting a detail right, the more you can touch the truth and the more resonance the story will have.
Sooo… sorry about flubbing the details! You can listen to the exact A Prairie Home Companion episode yourself, found in the show notes of Episode 9.
Two Questions:
Who do you know that seems to be thriving creatively?
What are two practices you could learn from this creative person?