If there isn’t a link to the entry, it’s one that’s scheduled but not posted yet. They come out by noon every Wonderful Words Wednesday.
1: Vladimir Nabokov rapping about a richly rhymed life
2: Marcel Proust on the distance of days
3: Jorge Luis Borges on the beauty of a DIY soul
4: Chuck Palahniuk on the creative process
5: Harper Lee on what we take for granted
6: Homer illustrates how to open an epic
7: Alizée and the power of the particular
8: Julia Alvarez and how stories change but stay the same
9: William Blake on how to look at the world
10: Kurt Vonnegut and the etherality of the self
11: William Mann and a story that goes from the bottom to the top in a single paragraph
12: Amy Hempel and one of the most powerful opening sentences ever.
Note: October 2024 has no TBS posts because the entire month is NaNoWriMo prep month!
13: One of my favorite passages from my own NaNoWriMo works over the years: 2020
14: One of my favorite passages from my own NaNoWriMo works over the years: 2021
15: One of my favorite passages from my own NaNoWriMo works over the years: 2022
16: One of my favorite passages from my own NaNoWriMo works over the years: 2023
17: Mystery author and “guess the book this passage opens”
18: Haruki Murakami and the value of old books
19: Robert Frost gets teary-eyed
20: Francine Prose and what books can still do better
21: Gary Lutz on what makes a beautiful sentence beautiful.
22: Colleen Doran and the gap the size of the universe.
23: Ernest Chausson shoots straight for the heart.
24: Zadie Smith gets nauseous.
25: A St. Patrick’s Day clover from William Butler Yeats.
26: Forrest Gander’s feral vocabulary.
27: Marc Chagall on where art begins.
28: Barbara Kingsolver’s excess of story.
29: Milorad Krstić and a world that is more powerful than reality.
30: Christopher Jones and art as a flawed object.
31: Rick Ludwin on the secret of Seinfeld’s success.
32: Ursula K. Le Guin on pushing until completeness.
33: Albrecht Dürer on extracting art.
34: A goodbye to George Wendt.
35: John Steinbeck on making it look easy.
36: Yehudi Menuhin on the importance of play.
37: Dr. Charles Tart on falling dreams.
38: Djuna Barnes on shrinking boundaries.
39: Czesław Miłosz’s shimmering weave.
40: Naguib Mahfouz condenses beauty upon us.
41: Gilgamesh opens with a bang.
42: Douglas Adams says eff it.
43: M. Scott Peck on education as a process of bringing forth.
44: Eric Idle gets loquaciously bombastic.
45: Uesugi Kenshin gets nostalgic.
46: Omar El Akkad on joyless reasons to read.
47: Thomas Hardy embrowns the opening of a new novel.
48: Sepp Herberger gives the ultimate sports theory.
49: Thomas Malory walks through the garden of May.
50: Voltaire gives us a ratio.
51: Jorge Luis Borges has the whole world in his hands.
52: Mary Oliver gives instructions for living a life.
53: Saul Steinberg on exploring our own lives through others.
54: Carl Jung on who creates who.
55: Émile Zola on gift-work balance.
56: Alfred Hitchcock, master of terror.
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