Carlos the Cardinal – Watercolor ATC

“All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: act as if it were impossible to fail.  That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.”
–Dorthea Brande



Carlos the Cardinal – Watercolor ATC

“I’m Carlos the Cardinal.  The thing I like best about spring is a clean birdbath!  Humans always clean the birdbath in the spring!”

This little card went to Briar in Aukland, New Zealand.  Carlos does look like he is giving that birdbath a good inspection. 


Dorothea Brande (1893 – 1948) was a well respected writer and editor in New York.
She was born in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago, the Lewis Institute in Chicago (later merged with Armour Institute of Technology to become Illinois Institute of Technology), and the University of Michigan. Her book Becoming a Writer, published in 1934, is still in print and offers advice for beginning and sustaining any writing enterprise. She also wrote Wake Up and Live, published in 1936, which sold over two million copies. It was made into a musical by Twentieth Century Fox in 1937.

While she was serving as associate editor of The American Review in 1936, she married that journal’s owner and editor, Seward Collins. Collins was a prominent literary figure in New York and a proponent of an American version of fascism, which he explored in The American Review.

Dorothea Collins died in New Hampshire.