NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Glen Donaldson.

Last year I went along to see an arthouse movie a lot of people were raving about starring William Dafoe and Robert Pattison called The Lighthouse. I wasn’t that fussed on it but it led me to seek out an autobiography of sorts published the same year called The Last Lighthouse Keeper.

Exhilarating, profound and exquisitely written, probably the highest compliment you can pay a memoir once you’re done reading it is think to yourself—even if it’s only for a few brief moments—”I wish I’d lived that life.” That’s how I feel about The Last Lighthouse Keeper.

John Cook spent twenty-six years as one of Australia’s longest serving lighthouse keepers. In the 1960’s, he was running a service station and picking up the pieces after a marriage breakup. Seeing an ad one day in the local newspaper, he applied for a position with the Australian Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. So began his decades-long love affair with ‘a life in the lights.’

The book centers chiefly on his time spent on two Tasmanian lighthouse islands, Tasman and Maatsuyker (the last spot between Australia and Antarctica). It ends with his transfer to a third, Bruny, where he stayed on for another 15 years.

The presiding tone of the book is summarized on page 55 when the author, referring to his first posting on Tasman Island, notes, “Either people come here crazy or this place turns them that way.”

From fisticuffs with fellow lighthouse keepers to removing his own rotten teeth with a wood punch to the microscopic gaps in brickwork that, via howling winds, could turn a lighthouse into an oversized whistle and drive a person insane with the sound, this book is crammed full of riveting anecdotes.

Simply one of the best reads I’ve ever enjoyed.

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The Last Lighthouse Keeper by John Cook with Jon Bauer. Allen & Unwin, July 2020.

Reviewer bio: Glen Donaldson pens weekly and uniquely at both SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK and LOST IN SPACE FIRESIDE.

Guest Post by M.G. Noles.

Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches is a book that lends itself to this hour in history when nothing seems certain. This collection, assembled by his grandson, Winston S. Churchill, includes his many famous speeches and some that are less widely known.

At this moment, while the entire world seems to be holding its collective breath, Churchill’s words offer hope and solace. His extraordinary knowledge and insight glisten though these speeches. His call for bravery and courage strike a vibrant chord at a time when tomorrow seems to be as unstable as anything we have ever known.

Take a moment to read his speeches and find yourself infused with a sense of destiny and the hope that we may overcome this dark hour just as the British overcame theirs in WWII. As he most nobly said, “We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.”

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Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches by Winston S. Churchill. Hachette Books, November 2004.

Reviewer bio: M.G. Noles is a freelance writer and history buff.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Kim Horner.

The first time I heard of Audre Lorde was on a Facebook page for women who had gone flat or who, like me, were considering going flat after having mastectomies. Posted on the site was one of the poet’s striking quotes: “If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.”

Lorde wrote those words in The Cancer Journals, a collection of essays about her breast cancer experience. First published in 1980 and reprinted this past October, the author’s entries still resonate decades later as she confronts her diagnosis and questions the norms and expectations for women facing the disease. Especially powerful are Lorde’s passages about not wearing a prosthesis after her single mastectomy. In one entry, she says a disapproving nurse told her that not wearing her foam padding was bad for “morale” in the breast surgeon’s office.

Lorde’s work comes as many women continue to face social pressure to have reconstruction or wear prostheses. More than 40 years after its initial publication, The Cancer Journals is inspiring new generations of women to deal with breast cancer on their own terms. Lorde’s essays, as Tracy K. Smith writes in her new foreword, serve as a “guide to survival for the twenty-first century body and soul.”

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The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, with a new foreword by Tracy K. Smith. Penguin Classic, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Kim Horner, author of Probably Someday Cancer: Genetic Risk and Preventative Mastectomy, is a writer who lives in Richardson, Texas. Connect with her at kimdhorner.com.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by James Gering.

The rudimentary jacket design of this book is deceptive—you suspect 179 Ways to be another generic book on craft. Not so. What you have here is a treasure trove of writing insights delivered in no-nonsense fashion by a natural teacher and wordsmith. Peter Selgin expertly balances analysis of craft with the more elusive elements of art to deliver a masterful study of fiction at its best.

179 Ways begins by addressing that perennially perplexing issue—is autobiographical material taboo? No, Selgin says, so long as you deftly employ the imagination to elevate the substance of your story into the realm of art. The challenge lies in sifting through the dross to find the dream—fresh events that defy mere anecdote, have a current of emotional significance, and a sense of inevitability.

Selgin supports his flow of ideas with pertinent references to successful stories and novels. What often distinguishes the master works, he says, are two things: a sense of authenticity and an unswerving flair for storytelling. In other words, be true to the work and find the drama in your tale.

Let me finish this brief commentary with a Selgin quote from the final section, “Each of us must strike our own balance between Apollonian impulses (harmonious, measured, ordered) and Dionysian (wild, orgiastic, unbounded) . . . . However we do it, somehow we have to find ways to put our own visions into the heads of strangers.”

After 30 years of collecting books on the art and craft of writing, three hundred of them grace my study shelves. Peter Selgin’s text is one of my top five.

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179 Ways to Save a Novel by Peter Selgin. Writer’s Digest Books, 2010.

Reviewer bio: James Gering is a poet and short story writer from the Blue Mountains in Australia. He welcomes visitors at jamesgering.com.