Janet Cameron

Ernest Hemingway, Image: Open Culture This Sunday, 2nd July, is the anniversary of the death of the novelist, Ernest Hemingway, in 1961. A prolific writer and storyteller, Hemingway was not religious but he was a great moral thinker, using biblical concepts to inform his writing. Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American writer of novels and short stories, although he is more highly regarded for his short stories. He was the son of a doctor from Illinois and began his writing career as a Kansas City reporter. In 1918 during the First World War, Hemingway volunteered to serve on an ambulance unit on the Italian front, where he was wounded. Later, he became a reporter for the Toronto   Star . In time he was mixing with such icons as Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein. He became a war correspondent during the Second World War, and in his later years, spent his life in Cuba, which, together with his liking for deep-sea fishing, provided him with the back...

I love linked short stories. People who prefer novels often say it's because they have become attached to the characters - a short story doesn't fulfil that sense of "I'm going to be with this narrative for a while and, yes, I really care about what happens next."  So, if you want to get to know a character and make him or her part of your precious inner fictive reality, then maybe a short story isn't going to work for you. I understand this completely, although I truly love the short story as a particular literary form that is spare, concise and self-contained and sometimes poetic or lyrical. BUT - YOU CAN GET THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Inspired by an excellent TV series based on Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," I picked up a book from the shelf, one I've had for some time. It's a linked series of stories by Margaret Atwood entitled "Moral Disorder" and was published in 2006. I have read a lot of her work...

You were an engineer before you retired, but when did you actually start writing, and why?    I wrote on and off throughout my adult life. I started doing it seriously – as my main occupation – after retirement at an online magazine called Suite101 (I think that's where we first encountered each other!) This was 2010 and about the same time I heard of a local writers' group and joined them. It was all good experience and encouragement. Was it something you always wanted to do from childhood? Absolutely. When I left school I thought I might join the local weekly newpaper as a junior reporter. I was told that only a handful of those who became reporters actually made it as professional writers. “Get a trade: you can always try writing later, then if you don't succeed you'll have the trade to fall back on”. So I took up an apprenticeship as a Mechanical Engineer. Your blog says you "retired" to Ireland. Are you actually Irish?   No....

Photo Copyright Janet Cameron Dr. Melvin Morse's Transformed by the Light challenges the inability of the scientific method to explain near-death experience. Prepare to be enlightened. Dr. Melvin Morse,MD, in the book written with Paul Perry,   Transformed by the Light,   says that the near-death experience does not resemble drug-induced hallucinations, transient psychosis, schizophrenia, psychotic breaks, anaesthetic reactions or dreams. Nor is it like any medically-described hallucinations. He says:  "The near-death experience is a logical and orderly event that involves floating out of the body, entering into darkness and experiencing a wonderful and indescribable light."  Dr. Morse explains that, unlike people who hallucinate or experience episodes of mental illness, those who encounter a near-death experience feel in control of their situation and are not detached from their being. Transformed by the Light   is a powerful and convincing boo...

Copyright K. Kendall, Wiki Adrienne Rich, poet, activist, thinker, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, died 27 March 2012 aged 82. “There is no writer of comparable influence and achievement in so many areas of the contemporary women’s movement ,” says the   Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States.   The British newspaper,   i,   quotes Rich’s own description of herself as “…a white woman, a Jew, a lesbian and a United States citizen.” Rich married economist Alfred Conrad but eventually she began to reject conventional family life and heterosexual relationships. The couple separated in 1970 and Conrad committed suicide a few months later.  Her collection   Diving into the Wreck   in 1973, was committed to “…breaking down the artificial barriers between the private and the public” and it won her the National Book Award, an honour she shared with fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. In 1976 she ...

Writer and poet Pam Brown says, “Women feel guilty to sit down and do nothing. Usually they are spared this emotion.”  This is true, but Birthdays and Mother’s Day are different. On these special occasions, enjoyment is mandatory and guilt is banned. Mum's Special Days Years ago, in my own childhood, paste brooches fashioned into the word “Mother” with shiny stones were popular for mothers' birthday presents. They were priced to suit a child’s pocket money, and the child would feel s/he was giving Mum a wonderful and valuable gift! Nowadays, of course, gifts are likely to be more sophisticated than this, but the old tradition of sparing Mum the daily grind of cooking and housework by taking on some of her chores still holds good. It’s claimed that the tradition of celebrating Mothering Sunday dates back to the 16th century. A young girl in service would bake a Simnel cake to take home to her mother on her day off. The Simnel cake was a fruit cake, rather si...

Saussure on Language - Limited Boundaries Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is widely held to be a father of twentieth century linguistics. He says: “Language is a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units,” and this leads him to believe that units do not have value except within the system to which they belong. They have value only: “…from the simultaneous presence of other units.” To be of value, the unit must function and establish its role within the system. This leads on to Saussure’s conviction that no thing has intrinsic value. His example is that “…chess pieces change in value according to the moves that are made.” By this, he means that the pieces are the internal grammar of the set, taking on a diachronistic (ie. historical) role within the synchrony (the now) of the game. This can be applied to any other set, for example, language. Saussure's Linguistics - Signifier and Signified The most obvious point is that a book or a symp...