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
drawers kept pages since suppose
Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook.
I never thought it was unusual to write, and I've been writing or pretending to write since before I even started school.
admit ashamed becoming life love medical waste
I love 'E.R.' and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It makes me know I did not waste my life after all by not becoming a medical doctor.
firsts income source
The first thing a writer has to do is find a new source of income.
party moving school
I have been moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine.
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.
dream drama air
We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not to sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed.
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.
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 mind pieces
A piece of writing is the product of a series of explosions in the mind.
inspirational men levels
At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do.
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.
fighting hills love people snow
I love Fayetteville. I like hills and vistas and hardworking people and fighting snow in winter and chiggers in the summer.