Diane Ackerman free essay sample

I dont want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well† (Quoteopia). Diane Ackerman was born in 1948. She considers herself a poet, a naturalist, and an essayist. She spent a year at Boston University in the late 1960s and transferred to Pennsylvania State University. She intended to study physiological psychology, but a computer error during transfer had her major listed as English. She accepted this mistake as fate. She received MFA, MA, PhD from Cornell University and taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Washington, University, New York University, Cornell, and Columbia. Diane Ackerman was not comfortable as a child with her creativity or her expression never being encouraged. She was considered strange with her gift of very keen senses and a need to write her experiences down. She worried neighbors by talking to herself, she was reprimanded for coloring trees that werent green, she proposed experiments to determine whether people could fly, she imagined that the dark fruits in a nearby plum orchard were really bats. We will write a custom essay sample on Diane Ackerman or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I was ashamed because I had a secret world. Children are the biggest conformists: They dont want to be different, they want to be like their chums (Veslany, â€Å"Conversation†). ?She continued secretly writing for herself. It was not until she met her partner, novelist Paul West, that encouragement came. Ackerman studied English literature at Penn State under West who tutored her informally in prose writing for nearly 10 years.? When Ackerman began to publish her work in graduate school and get some response to it, she was stunned. It was amazing to me that people would actually praise me for and enjoy what I was most ashamed of for so many years of my life. It made me part of a community spread out in time and in country: a community of writers, some of whom were dead some of whom I felt closest to were dead. Such feelings of kinship extended to John Donne, Colette, Lucretius, Boethius, Virginia Woolf, Rilke and Proust (Veslany, â€Å"Conversation†). Her creed is: â€Å"All life is sacred, life loves light and we can always improve our behavior towards one another† (Richards, â€Å"At Play†). Half of Diane Ackerman’s books is poetry. Hers was a typical drama of a gifted child: her parents were unsure if her creativity was healthy or normal. When her college major was switched from physiological psychology to English due to mistake, Diane Ackerman accepted it as fate. However, her interest to this field never disappeared: her prose books are an example of fine science popularization. She is undoubtedly a poet who is capable to see beauty behind the life’s chaos: â€Å"I think, that being at a point in your life when you can accept all of the mischief and mayhem that the universe is going to throw at you and nonetheless feel a sense of praise. Not because youre in denial about all the harshness. The tough thing is to get to the point where you can accept it and still think its grace to be born and live† (Richards, â€Å"At Play†). Her last book is about coping with a crisis of your loved one. She wrote it after her husband, novelist Paul West, had a massive stroke in 2006, lost his ability to speak and later miraculously regained it. They have been married since 1970, he is 18 years her senior.