Four Articles on Writing

First and foremost as a force in forging a writer is the family. Every article puts the family at the center of the development of both the writer and the person. Although the four writers were born and raised in very different social, ethnic and economic environments, their families played central roles in their creative evolution.

Apple's grandmother, for example, educated him as to the differences between Jews and goyim, and made him proud to know and speak Yiddish, although he would write in English. His grandfather was a baker, his mother ran the household, and his father was a scrap dealer.

Fox begins her account with "My father was an itinerant writer" (Fox 7) and she focuses primarily on his influence on her writing development.

Louis Simpson focuses on his Jamaican-born father and Russian-born mother, declaring "I trace my beginnings as a writer to the stories my mother read to me" (Simpson 11).

Alice Walker puts great emphasis on the influence of her mother in her connection with life and imagination, although more than any of the other three writers she focuses on the general influence of families---particularly mothers and grandmothers.

The point to be understood here is not that the mother

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ountain where I went to school. There was a plain stretching below, and beyond it an empty sea (Simpson 12). Walker speaks of the imaginations of her foremothers who sought in imagination freedom from oppression: "They dreamed dreams that no one knew---not even themselves . . . ---and saw visions no one could understand. They wandered . . . crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls" (Walker 17). We see, then, that the family has given these writers a solid foundation in the specifics and particulars of reality, and that foundation has given them the ability and freedom to develop their imaginations---based on those specifics and particulars. In all cases, the writers have grown up inspired and driven by what happened in their childhoods. Simpson speaks for the other three writers when he declares that "I write poems in order to express feelings I have had since I was a child" (Simpson 15). Walker expresses the same thought as if the feelings which her foremothers had inspired in her were a part of a mission passed from generation to generation: And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower t
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Approximate Word count = 1621
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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