Ellen Gilchrist
Ellen Gilchrist
Ellen Gilchristis an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She won a National Book Award for her 1984 collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 February 1935
CountryUnited States of America
wise baby race
The human race is just getting started.... The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years.
inspirational war guilt
Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.
writing mind pieces
A piece of writing is the product of a series of explosions in the mind.
joy fullness
Dance in the fullness of time.
writing long mind
Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.
writing good-friend intelligent
How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.
home college ozarks
My main home is in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town in the Ozark Mountains. I live on the highest hill in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by friends.
heart mean writing
The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.
rain doe
Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does.
wind sky perspective
Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind is bearing me across the sky.
spring flower writing
I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?
past ruins ruined
Don't ruin the present with the ruined past.
children teach brainwashing
All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.
levels language imagine
We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.