A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Words don’t take much room.  They don’t need feeding, vacuuming, washing, or tuning.  No need to buy insurance or locks.  How many words does one really need in life?  The more the merrier.  You don’t have to use them all at the same time, but you never know which word might come handy when. 

graphomania  (graf-oh-MAY-nee-uh)  noun  An obsessive inclination to write.  From Greek grapho- (writing) + -mania (obsession).  Earliest documented use: 1827.

boreal  (BOH-ree-uhl)  adjective  Northern; relating to the north, north wind, northern regions, etc.  From Boreas, the god of the north wind in Greek mythology.  Earliest documented use:  1470.  The opposite is austral.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day  From:  Milo Grika  Subject:  graphomania
I don’t have graphomania, but I do suffer from editomania:  obsessive inclination to edit.  I even had a complete addiction to editing Wikipedia articles; took a few hassles with Wikipedia admins to break me of it.  I still find that I can’t pass a poorly written sign, doc, or article without going into full editor mode--at least in my mind.  

Alice Ann Munro (born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.  Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time.  Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."  Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario.  Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.  Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction", or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."  Munro has received many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the contemporary short story", and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work.  She is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway.  Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario.  She began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship.  During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk.  In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro.  They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store.  In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.  See selected awards and honors at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro 

For many years, Neil McMahon (born 1949) worked half the year as a carpenter and spent the other half focusing on writing.  "I started working as a carpenter in 1973, thinking it would be a summer job," the author told John Marshall in an interview for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  "But it turned out to be a convenient way to support myself while I learned to write.  I've done each half time for 30 years and being a carpenter paid the bills until recently."  McMahon's wrote his first book, Next, after Lucifer, under the pseudonym of Daniel Rhodes. The supernatural story, published in 1987, revolves around the ghost of a Templar knight whose evil spirit infects the American residents of a villa in Provence, France, and the local villagers as well. McMahon wrote four more books using the pseudonym Daniel Rhodes.  In 2000, writing under his own name, McMahon began his "Carroll Monks" series, which features a San Francisco, California-based, emergency room (ER) doctor who has a penchant for righting wrongs involving sick or dead patients.  https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/mcmahon-neil-1949  Neil McMahon collaborated with James Patterson to create the 2011 novel Toys which was a New York Times #1 Bestseller.  

Brandon Sanderson, the prolific fantasy author, broke the record for the most-funded Kickstarter recipient by bringing in more than $20.3 million on the platform since March 1, 2022.  Sanderson created the Cosmere universe in which multiple stories like the “Mistborn” series take place.  He originally sought $1 million in 30 days for the project, which includes four new books.  Sanderson had written them in secret over the last two years.  He hit that $1 million target in just under 35 minutes.  After Sanderson hit that first million dollars, he went on to set the record for the most money raised in 24 hours, notching $15.4 million—more than double the previous record, according to the platform.  Frank Pallotta  https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/04/media/kickstarter-brandon-sanderson-books/index.html 

Squiz Hazelton, flute teacher of the young Meredith Willson, of Mason City, Iowa, had come to town with a musical show, and his methods employed a travelling performer’s inventive pragmatism.  “Squiz found out I could fake, so he suggested my doubling on the banjo,” Willson wrote in his 1948 memoir, “And There I Stood with My Piccolo.”  Willson played in his high-school orchestra, and later in John Philip Sousa’s marching band; he went on to write “The Music Man,” about a musical faker so deft that he conjures an imaginary marching band for kids, and mesmerizes an entire town.  In February 2022, “The Music Man” returned to Broadway, with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, after two decades and two pandemic delays.  Opening night featured Harold Hill levels of chutzpah:  a red carpet full of dignitaries and movie stars; signs reading “opens tonight!” and “whadayatalk!”; and, under the marquee, a forty-five-piece teen-age marching band, in plumed-busby regalia, playing “Seventy-six Trombones.”  The musicians had been recruited from Brooklyn and Staten Island high schools; jacket inspection revealed distinctions between Fort Hamilton, Susan E. Wagner, and Tottenville.  They wore masks, as did the wind instruments, but the sound oompahed up and down Times Square.  David Banks, the chancellor of New York City schools, addressed the crowd.  What would it take, post-isolation, to get the city’s kids back to where they need to be? he asked, with a dash of “Ya Got Trouble” panache.  “Well, I’ll tell you what it’s going to take!” he said.  “It’s going to take music!  It’s going to take theatre!  It’s going to take the arts! ”  People cheered, and the band kicked into “The Wells Fargo Wagon.”  Cops and publicists cleared a path for the musicians, who marched onto Broadway, assembled into the shape of a square, and played on.  Sarah Larson  The New Yorker  March 7, 2022  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2504  March 7, 2022