First from California--this is just a great wine company. I like Merlot or the Chardonnay (tastes like I imagine sunlight would taste). And I want the poster, which I'll order right after my FEAR THE POET t-shirt comes off backorder. I think I'll post a photo of myself wearing this if I ever receive it. (Thanks, Anne, for the link!)
Second, straight from Writer's Almanac:
It's the birthday of Isak Dinesen, (books by this author) born Karen Dinesen on a rural estate called Rungsted near Copenhagen, Denmark (1885). She came from a wealthy family of landowners and writers. Her grandfather was a friend of Hans Christian Andersen. She started writing at an early age, and one of the first stories she published was about a woman who has a love affair with a ghost.
In college she fell in love with the son of Baron Blixen of Sweden. But when he refused to marry her, she decided to get revenge by marrying his twin brother. She and her husband then moved to Kenya where they started a coffee plantation. She fell in love with Africa, and thought of it as a kind of Eden.
But she and her husband did not get along and they separated in 1925. She was alone and unhappy on the coffee plantation, and said, "I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times." The plantation grew less and less profitable and she struggled to stay in business. After a swarm of locusts and a drought, she finally had to sell the farm to a local developer.
But just as she was leaving Africa for good, Dinesen sent some of her stories to a publisher, and they were published as the collection Seven Gothic Tales (1934). Out of Africa came out in 1937.
Isak Dinesen said, "All sorrows can be borne, if you put them into a story."
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