#donaldhall — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #donaldhall, aggregated by home.social.
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What We Write About When We Write About Grief
Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.
—Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
Although I can claim no awareness of a comprehensive survey on the topic, it’s been my impression as I reflect on the novels I’ve read that an all-too-common way of portraying grief in fiction is as a trope to depict vulnerability, to suggest the character possesses some profound awareness of loss, sorrow, suffering, and thus the human condition writ large, providing a signal to the reader that your character has some gravitas. This can be done reasonably well, as in the first example below, or it can come across as a contrivance, a shortcut, a gimmick.
https://writerunboxed.com/2026/05/08/what-we-write-about-when-we-write-about-grief/ -
#JaneKenyon (1947 – 1995) was an American poet and translator. Her work is often characterised as simple, spare, and emotionally resonant. Kenyon was the second wife of poet, editor, and critic #DonaldHall who made her the subject of many of his poems.
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Derangedly, I thought I'd try to sketch headshots of each author of a book I finished in 2022. Here's 1-8 (chronologically from when I read them this year). Yeah, the scale's screwy, but at least you don't know what most of 'em look like: #VirginiaWoolf, #DavidThomson, #RamanSehgal, #FordMadoxFord, #GlennKurtz, #ScottMeslow, #ItaloCalvino, and #DonaldHall, for whom I just decided to go with ink. I'll work on the other 49 (!) over the holiday.