Readers, artists, and lovers of the arts, particularly the written word, have stood up many times over the millennia to resuscitate the works of worthy authors and artists. It is said that T.S. Eliot resuscitated the works of John Donne; that without Poggio Bracciolini digging around in the basement of a German monastery in the early 15th century where he found the rotting pages of a poem by a 1st century poet named Lucretius, we would not have had the prescient, On The Nature Of Things; that without Thomas Johnson reinstating the original punctuation to Emily Dickinson’s poems in the 1950s, a century after they were written, the revolution of form and content in poetry she started would not have taken place. It took Alice Walker to rediscover the work of Zora Neale Hurston of the Harlem Renaissance, and Felix Mendelssohn painstakingly restored the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. August Derleth kept the work of H.P. Lovecraft alive until the right audience came along to appreciate it. Think of all that could have been lost. Think of all that has been lost."
James J Patterson, Henry Miller and The NEXUS
I found my way into myth as an adult. As I entered my 30s, the dialectic between romance and reality in my life had reached its inevitable combustion. It was a threshold time, and filled with losses — my parents died, my marriage broke up — and suddenly tales of trials and transformations and journeys between realms felt utterly personal. Arthurian Legend snagged me first; so many of Guenevere’s struggles, from her not-entirely-loving marriage to her childlessness to her affair with Lancelot to her rape, were mirrored in my own life and those of my women friends.
Rose Solari, Finding Myth
"I remember that the air in the stadium smelled sweet with a mixture of hot chocolate, pipes, cigars, hot dogs, and beer, the perfect aromas for a football stadium. The team had a rowdy marching band dressed like Indian chiefs, and an equally rowdy group of barrel-chested male choral singers who wore burgundy blazers. Both inhabited one corner of the stadium and played their marches and sang their songs while swaying back and forth like a battalion of drunken muppets."
James J. Patterson, Gabbing with O'Reilly
"I know how Mary Wollstonecraft felt being the only woman silenced in a room filled with “important men.” I know how Anna Nicole Smith might have felt when she had a chance to sign a real contract to be seen as a real person, and it was taken from her. I can even imagine what it could be like to be a waitress in the Golden Glow Café under that greasy light. This is not to say any piece is autobiographical. Remember the real author may be swimming laps at the local pool, on the way to the grocery store, mother of four. It’s the implied author pulling her skirts up in public who’s written all the dangerous stuff."
Grace Cavalieri, The Real Author
"To me, the idea of being able to slow or even stop entropy is a brilliant fantasy with implications that go way beyond a cup of tea or coffee. Who among us wouldn’t wish for a little creature to help us undo the past on an atomic level? Who wouldn’t want to stop the effects of aging or go back and right petty wrongs?"
Elizabeth Hazen, Waiting for Maxwell's Demon
"I started out as a fiction writer, a storyteller, a mimic. A derivative time travel piece for our middle school literary magazine was rejected and it took me eons to get back in the saddle. By freshman year of college, a quasi-Hemingway hunting story was brewing. By junior year, I was writing song lyrics to go with my bad guitar-hack noise. A poet friend told me my lyrics sucked but might possibly turn into some decent poems. Poems? What the hell?"
