
April 20, 2018 – Sebastian Faulks, Other Writers’ & Poets’ Birthdays
Today is Friday, April 20, 2018. It’s the birthday of writers Sebastian Faulks and Steve Erickson. And our poem for today is “Free Will” by Dara Wier. It’s from her collection, “In the Still of the Night,” published by Wave Books. Please consider supporting the poets whose work is highlighted here on Bidwell Hollow. Thank you, and thank you for reading and sharing us with others.
Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Faulks’s (affiliate link) father survived the Battle of Dunkirk during World War II.
It’s a legacy that in part inspired Faulks to create a trilogy of books about a Scottish woman working for the British in France during the Second World War.
The third and final book of the series is “Charlotte Gray.” It published in 1999. Over a million copies of the book have sold. And a film of the same name starring Cate Blanchett released in 2002.
“Charlotte Gray” is Faulks’s fifth novel.
Born on this date in 1953 in Donnington, England, Faulks is also the author of books such as “The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives” and “A Possible Life.”
Faulks was the first literary editor of The Independent. He left that newspaper in 1991 to focus on writing. He published his first novel, “Birdsong,” two years later.
Steve Erickson
Today is the birthday of writer Steve Erickson (affiliate link). He was born in Santa Monica, CA, in 1950.
Erickson is the author of ten novels, including 2007’s “Zeroville.” That book is about the transformation of the movie industry in the 1970s. Erickson wrote it in four months.
A movie based on the book directed by James Franco, starring Franco, Megan Fox, and Seth Rogen, is currently in post-production. It’s expected to release this year.
Along with writing fiction, Erickson is the film and television critic for Los Angeles magazine. Other periodicals he’s written for include Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
And Erickson co-founded and edited for 12 years the literary journal Black Clock.
Erickson’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and an Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature.
“Free Will”
When the baby girl
would not stop crying
I had to wonder
how much pain
unrepeatable,
unbearable
and not to be balmed
can one child suffer?
The blossoming pear trees
invade the city,
and the plums
and the other
white blossoms
that lead to nowhere
and nothing.
Half the sidewalks
still wet
with what had been
pitiful spring showers.
The other half
not hot enough
to steam.
Some areas hazed
pink with wilting petals.
Some petals stuck
on crosswalks.
Some footprints
evaporating
in the dead center
of spring on this spring
afternoon.
Everything in the background
stays in the background.
As if this might as well be
the beginning of all time.
And this time time
will be kinder to everyone.
Though no one knows
whether this means more
or less of it.
Some people are stuck
with themselves forever.
When we willed eternity
into existence,
we might as well
have damned some of us
to some forever
without end.
What someone says
somewhere for,
for what.
I’m blind to something,
indifferent to something.
An indifferent monster
of oblivion am I,
sometimes.
My carelessness
guarantees
my indifference
will be monumental.
As though
I’d purchased my life
like—
what—
what might
a life be
like other than
what it is.
Like a flattened penny,
like a steamboat.
Like good money
unalike after bad.
My concerns are thin-
strapped and see-through
as any chemise
of cotton and lace.
Sometimes the loud
fake call
of mechanical birds
feels like
a slap in the face.
I’ve been slapped
in the face once.
But only once.
I’ve been strangled
but not to the point of lost consciousness.
I’ve been thrown against a wall.
What difference does it make?
Whether that’s a fact
or it might as well have been?
You work backwards.
You take
what we quaintly call
a broken heart.
You take its pieces
in practically undifferentiated parts.
You take your time with them,
turning them over.
in your quicksand mind,
the mind with quicksand in it,
so that any little stray
thought
will fall in
and never leave.
If you were the first person
to notice how dangerous
an overindulgence
in material goods is,
something would be
done about it.
If you were the first
to notice
we take advantage
of one another without fail
I’m fairly sure
we’d be living in a different world.
– “Free Will” from In the Still of the Night. Copyright 2017 by Dara Wier. Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.