“Today is Father's Day, a holiday in this country that goes back to a Sunday morning in May of 1909, when a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother's Day sermon. She thought of her father, who had raised her and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth, and she thought that fathers should get recognition too. So she asked the minister of the church if he would deliver a sermon honoring fathers on her father's birthday, which was coming up in June, and the minister did. And the tradition of Father's Day caught on, though rather slowly. Mother's Day became an official holiday in 1914; Father's Day, not until 1972. Mother's Day is still the busiest day of the year for florists, restaurants, and long-distance phone companies. Father's Day is the day on which the most collect phone calls are made”
—http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/06/16“It's the birthday of Joyce Carol Oates (books by this author), born in Lockport, New York (1938). She's the author of books such as Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). She grew up in a rural part of New York, which she later used as the basis for the fictional Eden County, where many of her stories and novels are set. She began making up stories as a child, even before she knew how to write, and drew pictures to record them. When she was eight, her grandmother gave her a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which she loved so much, she memorized the whole book word for word. She said Alice's calm and rational demeanor when facing nightmarish situations made a strong impression, and ever since she has tried to write about nightmares and bizarre things in a coherent, calm way. Oates published her first story, "In the Old World," in Mademoiselle magazine (1959) just before her senior year of college, and she published her first book of short stories, By the North Gate, a few years later, in 1963. She has gone on to become one of the most prolific writers of her generation, writing more than 70 books in 40 years, including novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and essays. She writes almost everything in longhand before typing, and she usually cuts out a few hundred pages from every novel before it is published. It was Joyce Carol Oates who said: "I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (books by this author)
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/06/16
“The Swiss Family Robinson by Ron Padgett I never quite understood who the Swiss Family Robinson were. The inversion of their name confused me at an early age, just as the name of Mary Baker Eddy sounded as though she started out as a woman and turned into a guy named Eddy. At Walt Disney World there is an attraction called Swiss Family Robinson that involves a tree house, so I assume they lived in a tree. Why they did I don't know. It sounds rather stressful to me, the fear of falling out. I could look up the Swiss Family Robinson in a reference book, but it's interesting not to know something that everyone else knows. However, I would like to know if there are many people named Robinson in Switzerland. If there are, I would know something that most people don't know. "The Swiss Family Robinson" by Ron Padgett, from How to Be Perfect. © Coffee House Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. ”
—http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/06/17
