25th January - A Writer's Almanac Kind of Day

I get The Writer's Almanac from National Public Radio via email every morning. I subscribed in Barrett because radio reception was notoriously poor there - every time we pulled into town most of our favorite stations would go to static. So now I get the WA in my email every morning. It means I don't get to listen to Garrison Keillor read the thing, but I find that's okay; after seven years in Minnesota, you can almost hear him reading it in your head (right up on the mic, breathing through his nose, with his red shoes on, of course).

Today's WA was pretty potent - I had no idea that 25 January was such an important date for writers. The Bard, Robert Burns, the famed Scottish poet; W. Somerset Maugham, a British writer of the early 20th century who is still fairly well-known today, and Virginia Woolf, the great American modernist writer whose classics Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse changed American fiction forever (and doomed her to forever haunt the halls of sophomore level Literature classes, where she is vilified as one of the most unreadable writers in history by college students too busy to take the time to challenge themselves with good literature. Present writer included, natch) were all born today. Huzzah for writers!