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Great Lakes Mentor Blog
Many of our contributing artists have inspiring stories about how they got their start. Want to share yours? Send it to glyoungwriters@yahoo.com.
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Becoming a creative artist: April Anderson
The nature of sharing
It is natural for you to share. You’ve been doing it for years. When you were a tot, you shared toys, years later in the school cafeteria you shared chips. Conducting experiments in science class, you shared your research. Sharing brings friends closer and makes the unfamiliar seem less mysterious.
For quiet people, writing is a way of sharing without saying a word, inspiring others without knowing who they are or having them know you. It’s a place to escape from the stresses of every day life and be with friends – characters and settings that exist in your imagination, ideal world, or suspenseful novel.
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Writing, Ron Dale with Parks Canada
Writing did not play a role in the culture of my ancient Celtic ancestors. Knowledge was passed from generation to generation through the spoken word and through poetry and song. Anything that was important was to be memorized and recited by bards, passing the wisdom of the ages from memory to memory. The bards who kept the stories in their memories are gone, the chain was broken and the oral history is lost. Fortunately, some of these early people scribbled down some of the poems, history and legends on scraps of parchment and some of those writings still exist. It is the written word that gives us a glimpse into that past. The written word is power and the words of a person, once committed to paper or more modern electronic formats may be still read long after knowledge of the author has faded into the dust. The written word can stimulate, inspire, inform, infuriate, calm, and entertain the reader. Where would Christianity be without the Bible, Judaism without the Torah or Islam without the Koran?
