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Excerpted Inspirations #254

Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
5 minutes ago
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[Dorothy Canfield Fisher, at age 26, is embarking on her first novel, and beginning to come to terms with the magnitude of her calling as a writer, as she recounts in a letter from Norway to her family in the United States.] I’m afraid I’ve set myself too hard a task in managing so many people: but it won’t do any harm to be thinking about it. Do you know I had a long letter from Mr. [Ellery] Sedgwick (Leslie’s Editor you know) very warm and friendly and unexpectedly serious. He says that my “talent, heaven be praised, lies outside the ordinary channels of magazine literature. Don’t try to make it run in those shallow ways. You can write stories with big ideas and true ones, back of them. Do it! Don’t be willing to be amusing when you can do more” etc. etc. He winds up by saying he doesn’t want to spoil my holiday with over-earnest exhortation but I am to bear in mind that “we in the office are following your work with the greatest interest and belief” – something like. I’ve mislaid the letter somewhere as I’d send it to you. I was pleased because you know I think a lot more of Mr. Sedgwick’s opinion than that gushing Mr. Hall on Everybody’s! I wrote Mr. Sedgwick that his letter came most opportunely when I was just getting up the nerve to take my writing more seriously. I said “big ideas” as he put it weren’t exactly in my line but I did mean to try honestly to have the ideas I was trying to express true ones, and to move people to more than a passing interest in verbal dexterity. I was ashamed to send the letter for a while after I’d written it. It’s all very well to say to my family whatever “biggity” idea is in my head, but I was afraid to him it might sound pretentious. I sent it all the same. I’m getting up a fine strong variety of “literary nerve” if you know what I mean by that. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, ed. Mark J. Madigan (1993), Letter 6 (1905), p. 30

 
 
 

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