Updated my web page.

Started updating my web page: essays from Facts on File and Time magazine articles now available for your reading pleasure. Go to lauradurnell.com to read my work. More to come.

Teach Your Children to Question

More wisdom from Carlin.

George Carlin on Child Worship

Yeah, I'm knocked up, but I totally agree with him. I love George Carlin. R.I.P.  He had a daughter, so I think he knows of what he rants.

Cleaning the Temple

Since the holiday season, my home office has slowly become a disaster. First I had a horrid sinus infection and then around two weeks later I learned I was pregant. A few weeks after the first-trimester nausea entered, I still needed to prepare for my Winter classes at DePaul. While I was dealing with school and my pregnancy, my poor home office was neglected.

I am in the midst of "cleaning the temple." It is a Buddhist belief I learned about from the Mary Morris interview and profile in A Question of Balance: Artists and Writers on Motherhood. Morris states, "A lot of what I'm doing as a writer is taking a chaos of emotions tht I've lived with all my life and trying to make sense of it. I have to create outer order in order to deal with inner disorder."

Right now my home office (the sunroom in my husband's and my condo) is filled with my drafts, books, and student work that I still have from the Fall quarter. I do feel a little claustrophobic writing this.

My last week teaching at DePaul is next week. I still have some student assignment to issue comments on, but bird by bird, I will again make this place a good creative work environment.

Working on Student Papers (sigh)

Unless an artist is independently wealthy; has a trust fund; or strikes it big like Stephen King, Erica Jong, or Philip Roth; a day job is a necessity.

Today I will be reading the last of my students essays to provide comments and guidance; however, I will be breaking them up into manageable numbers under a deadline. Here's to writing later tonight.

Prayers and/or good thoughts to the Chilean people.

Fractured Atlas's Blog Post about My Work and Me.

http://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/blog/2010/02/26/if-you-dont-risk-anything-you-risk-even-more-writer-laura-durnell/

I Am Back

As you can notice, I haven't posted to this blog for a couple of years. However, because of Fractured Atlas's blog post about my work and me, I plan to post on a frequent basis.

I look forward to hearing from you.

"Saint" Thomas Merton

Since June 6, I have read a lot of spiritual books, but none has touched me more than the work of Thomas Merton. A Franciscan Friar I am friendly with at Saint Peter's in the Loop introduced me to Thomas Merton a couple of years ago. In a documentary entitled Merton: A Film Biography, one of the interviewees said when a person reads a work of Thomas Merton that person will become addicted. I second that.

Like me, Father Louis (Merton's religious name) grew up in a secular household and environment. Like me, he knew from childhood that he wanted to become a writer. Like me, Merton committed acts in his childhood and young adulthood that shamed him. And like me, God always haunted him.

Merton's writing would be welcome to any person no matter his or her spiritual leanings or lack thereof. So far I have read The Seven Storey Mountain, No Man Is an Island, and a collection of his work on writing taken from his books, essays, journals, and letters entitled Echoing Silence.

Merton's writing and spirituality matured from TSSM. Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned and am working to ingrain within me is being silent. This helps writing and, of course, becoming closer to God.

Rereading Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca

As a child and a teenager, I spent summers with my late beloved godmother. She loved old movies in addition to being a bibliophile. I first saw Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca with her the summer I turned fourteen. I loved the movie, and she said I had to read the book, which was very different from the movie and better.

How right she was. Hitchcock had cinematic style, but De Maurier's prose not only created a story with depth and resonance but also showcased a skill in dramatic story telling. I read the book again in college and again in my early twenties. I just finished reading the novel again in my late thirties, and it still remains brilliant.

Life and maturity have changed the book's impact each time I have read it; I have learned not only more about fiction's craft and art but about myself. The 1997 version featured an actress who more embodied my vision of the the novel's unnamed narrator who I identified with in terms of her shyness and insecurity. A skillful writer, Du Maurier brilliantly chose to create a narrator that would allow Rebecca's ghost to overpower her own personality.

Tatiana and Me at the Jewish Book Festival

On Tuesday November 11, Tatiana de Rosnay and I met in person. After years of connecting through MySpace, Facebook, and e-mail, I finally met my friend from across the pond. One of the women at Beth Shalom in Northbrook selling Tatiana's paperback edition of Sarah's Key thought we were related. Guess that sliver of French and chunk of English worked out.

2008 ended up an Annus Horribilis for my husband, friends, and me, yet finally meeting Tatiana in person proved to be a ray of light that helped further shatter the darkness. She's a beautiful person and artist who gives of herself to others. As I've said in previous posts, that combination are indeed rare and special. I'm blessed to call her my friend and am so grateful we connected via the web a few years ago.

Her Sarah's Key presentation at Temple Beth Shalom was beyond remarkable. Learning more about the passion and drive she had for Sarah's story and revealing the Vel d'Hiv atrocity proved inspiring for me on multiple levels.