Fifty

Once again, we are up at the River for the month of July, in the very same house we rented last year. My books and papers are unpacked. I have to return to the long-neglected edition of Mrs. Dalloway, cast to the side in the fall when I had to take over a colleague’s course, and again in spring because of the Woolf Conference. I also want to do some reading around in lesser-known modernist women writers for a graduate course in the spring. When I left New Jersey, I was still a-jangle, still exhausted from the conference and jet-lagged from a whirlwind week in Seattle visiting my family with my daughters.

It made packing hard, so I just threw everything in.

I see now that I have brought fifty books with me.

5-0. 50.

Half of them are books for work on the Dalloway edition:

1. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3 (1919-1924)
2. The Letters of VW, vol. 1,
3. vol. 2,
4. vol. 3. It was the letters that undid me last summer: so much more sad (so many deaths, in such quick succession, and then pretending for weeks that her brother Thoby was not dead so as not to upset her friend Violet until Violet herself had recovered) and show-offy (just the worst of Woolf: brittle, “brilliant,” too clever, snobby) than the diaries which I find deeply moving. Still, I need to read through them and make my notes.
5. The Diary, vol. 3 (1925-1930): I don’t need to read much of that.
6. the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway
7. the Uniform Hogarth edition of Mrs. Dalloway
8. the Oxford paperback edition of Mrs. Dalloway
9. the newly annotated Harcourt edition of Mrs. Dalloway not mentioning my electronic copy of the first English and American editions, that’s a lot of copies of one book, though I’m mad at myself for forgetting the Penguin…
10. Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, the only short story sequence associated with a novel in Woolf’s whole oeuvre
11. Night and Day Woolf’s second novel, which I don’t know well, but to write the footnotes for Dalloway, I need to know any prior appearances of characters, placenames, even metaphors, just to be able to refer readers back
12. Woolf Studies Annual volume 8 for David Bradshaw’s essay on Septimus and the war
13. The Years
14. A Room of One’s Own
15. The Oxford Book of English Verse, the edition that Woolf herself read so that I can refamiliarize myself with the poetry she loved best in case that helps me catch an allusion
16. The Metamorphoses because Jane DeGay had an intriguing argument about Ovidian metaphors in Woolf that I’d like to follow up on, though it’s a challenge for me
17. Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies
18. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf because I promised, over a year ago, to review these books
19. Clarissa Dalloway Harold Bloom’s collection of the classic essays on her: I’m still amazed at how little I know given how much I know…
20. Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past Jane deGay’s monograph on Woolf’s allusions
21. Continuing Presences almost a reference book of all the literature Woolf alluded to
22. Virginia Woolf and London an older monograph by Susan Squier which I’ll return to with new interest after my crash course in urban theory surrounding the Woolf Conference, hoping to catch a footnote or two to the placenames in Dalloway
23. Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks, Brenda Silver’s transcription of Woolf’s notebooks provides clues to what Woolf was reading when and thus, clues to where to look for possible allusions
24. Then, there are the books that I’m considering for my fall grad class on Transatlantic Modern Women Farewell Leicester Square Betty Miller’s novel of a Jewish film director in London in the twenties, which I began last night and am already sure I’ll teach
25. The Desert and the Sown about the explorer Gertrude Bell: I wonder about including one of these non-fiction explorers on the syllabus and this one is about Iraq, so it’s of special interest
26. Jean Rhys: the Complete Novels: I hate The Wide Sargasso Sea and a colleague often teaches Good Morning, Midnight, so I’m wondering if there is another Rhys to teach—and I’ve downloaded Maud’s Granta conversation with Alexander Chee to teach me more about the Rhys/Ford affair
27. The Montana Stories by the great and neglected Katherine Mansfield: these masters of the short story so often get short shrift, but I will be giving Mansfield a week without doubt and am excited to dip into her again
28. The Well of Loneliness: Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic, as yet unread by me. The Unlit Lamp, also by Hall, shook me to my core as a girl
29. Seven for a Secret because my friend Jane Garrity is interested in Mary Webb and other neglected rural and/or conservative women of the period
30. and then a trio of novels to read (or re-read) by my beloved Elizabeth Bowen to see if I want to do The Death of the Heart again—I love it but never teach it well—or something else: The Hotel
31. The House in Paris
32. The Last September
33. Tayari suggested Alice Dunbar-Nelson, so I brought along The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson , vol. 2, because that volume (of 3) had the most exciting-sounding titles in it
34. Not sure if I’m up to Mina Loy’s The Lost Lunar Baedeker, but I’ll give it an hour or two and see
35. Testament of Youth because I’ve never read Vera Brittain
36. Complete Poems by Marianne Moore, who has already made the cut
37. We’ll do two weeks on Stein, whom I love but have mostly forgotten so I’m refreshing my memory with The Yale Gertrude Stein
38. and Ida
39. sad to say, I’ve also never read Sylvia Townend Warner. My friend Jay raves about Summer Will Show, a lesbian historical novel about the 1848 revolutions (hard to wrap my mind around that), but the NYRB reissue isn’t quite out, so I’ve brought alone a collection of stories called One Thing Leading to Another
40. I am tired of Nella Larsen and the theme of passing, but Jessie Fauset’s first novel sounds interestingly Jamesian, about an educated, ambitious black woman: There is Confusion
41. tons of people have told me over the years that I’ll love Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer: I’ll let you know
42. I will certainly teach my beloved Stevie Smith, but I know less about her than I’d like, so I’ve brought along Frances Spalding’s biography, Stevie Smith
43. Even the reading for pleasure this summer is work-like: Manhattan Transfer
44. in the afterglow of the Woolf Conference, Vanessa & Virginia came along
45. as did Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows
46. I read and loved my former professor’s memoir Meatless Days and had so much to say about it that my mom urged me to write an essay—we’ll see if that happens
47. and Lizzie brought over an advanced copy of her new book, Shelf Discovery, before she left, which is like dessert, so I dip in and out in the margins
48. Gwen Raverat’s memoir of growing up in Cambridge as Darwin’s granddaughter,Period Piece, is meant to be fantastic and has lots of Bloomsbury resonances
49. my grandmother went to high school in Shanghai, so I was already excited about Lisa See’s new novel Shanghai Girls before I read praise for it in the NYT. When I admired my mom’s copy, she gave it to me (thanks, mom!) and I’m already enjoying the atmosphere. Besides, it’s all about sisters!
50. With fifty books, I’ll have to read one a day to merit the lugging, but I’ve already read one: What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell’s NBA winner—I’ll blog about that soon, no doubt.

And this doesn’t include On the Banks of Plum Creek which I’m almost done reading aloud the big girl and By the Shore of Silver Lake because I couldn’t stand to leave Mary blind for the whole summer, not to mention a handful of board books for the toddler (no longer a babe at 3, and full of mangled Mother Goose, recited inaccurately but with great enthusiasm), story books, chapter books for the big girl to read on her own (Junie B. Jones, Roald Dahl’s the BFG, etc.)

Killing the Fat Angel in The House

It’s boring, isn’t it, how often we tell ourselves these stories of silencing the voices of criticism and defeat?

I can teach my students to sympathize with Lily Briscoe’s efforts in To the Lighthouse to get past Charles Tansley’s “women can’t write, women can’t paint,” but as I teach the passage, it feels to me like a story from another era. So does the story in Woolf’s essay, “Professions for Women,” of killing the angel in the house. I am confident in my profession. I am happy with my writing: it’s never as good as I want it to be, it’s not nearly as good as I’d once dreamed it would be, but it perks along and I am generally all right with what I write and how it’s received.

Still, though, one of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me continues to ring in my ears when I get tired or start to falter. I’m ready to be done with it, but I’m not quite sure how to let it go.

Years ago, a boyfriend and I had some people over for dinner. This couple, his college friend and wife, are good-looking, athletic, easy-going. They are a lot like the Seattle people of my youth: smart liberals, committed to living an ethical life as long as they can still wear technical fabrics on their weekend outdoor challenges. I liked them a lot and, though I suspected they didn’t like me, I really tried my best to be my warmest self that night. I pushed my bookishness and clumsiness to the side, embraced as much as I could about open water kayaking and the importance of volunteering at the local midwifery practice. I did all this, cooked dinner, smiled, and tried to keep my equilibrium.

At the end of the night, after an evening that had gone from my being nervous to my being relaxed and everything being genuinely lovely, I looked at my guy. He had a real glow of affection in his eyes. I noticed this because I don’t usually get that look. I’m pretty enough. A handsome woman, I suppose. But I don’t spend a lot of time on my looks—I love pretty clothes, but other things in life—books, friends, cheese, social justice, flowers—are more important, so I get dressed in the morning, run a brush through my hair and call that good enough. Plus, I’m busy, competent, practical, and a little nervous. Not a seductress, but a nice woman trying her best. Not the kind of person who gets fond glances or inspires double takes. Sometimes, I remind myself to try to slow down enough to note the looks of affection, the moments of flirtation, so when they come I don’t miss them utterly. So this look on his face, I noticed.

“I was just thinking,” he said, “that if you lost ten pounds, you’d be as pretty as Jess.”

I know.

It totally shocked me, too. It still does. I mean, twenty years ago, when I went to Oxford for summer school, I was friends with a very pretty woman. She left the class after three weeks and I stayed on for another three. The night she left, someone came up to me and said, “I wonder what it will be like for you now that you’re not hanging out with someone so much prettier than you.” I was stunned: I knew Elizabeth was beautiful, but I had never thought of myself as her ugly friend. No more had I ever thought of myself as less pretty or fatter than Jess. If you’d asked me, objectively, to rank myself against these women, I would have said we were very different types. That’s all. For all my anxieties about beauty and weight, I liked these women and, in liking them, didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about them as greater beauties.

I look back on the Oxford comment and laugh. I don’t remember it exactly. I don’t know who said it. It seems clearly like the remark of a mean person, jealous that I had befriended her idea of “the prettiest girl here.”

The difficulty in exorcising the “if you lost ten pounds….” remark is that it was said by someone I loved. In a moment when I felt especially full of love and especially confident that he loved me. How do you forget boneheaded meanness at that level?

I’m no longer angry at the old boyfriend for this. It was clearly a testosterone blurt: a moment of uncontrollable male idiocy. But the lesson I took from that night—that people who love you may also be ranking you on some “objective” scale of their own making, that at any moment (especially when you let your guard down) someone you love may be at the ready with your grade for the evening—is harder to forget. It’s made me cautious, self-doubting, and self-hating. It comes back to me in private moments—just before falling asleep, on a run—and fills me with grief and rage. I would love to move on. But how?

Woolf 09

I'll try to write up some text of Woolf 09 for you soon--the conference was incredible--but for now, how about a few images:
Here, you see Woolf Conference publicist, and Fordham student extraordinaire, Megan Branch posing with the fabulous Cecil and Jean Woolf. Megan and I paused a moment at the pre-banquet reception, and here I am posing with our plenary panel, Inspired by Woolf. The inimitable Katherine Lanpher interviewed three fabulous women inspired by Virginia Woolf: Dr. Ruth Gruber (she wrote a dissertation on Woolf at age 20 and went on to be a journalist and activist), Susan Sellers (who was launching her new novel, Vanessa and Virginia), and Kris Lundberg, actress and founder of the Shakespeare's Sister Theater company.

You can read Paula's account here.

It's not too late to attend the Woolf Conference at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus.

We're expecting over 200 people starting on Thursday. The first talks begin at noon.

We have plenary sessions every day. Rebecca Solnit will be giving the keynote address on Friday afternoon at 3:30.

You may purchase a day-pass for $45. 4-day passes are $175. We will have volunteers helping register people beginning at 10:00 on Thursday morning. All events are in our classroom building at 113 W 60th, with plenary sessions in Pope Auditorium (street level), registration one flight up (escalator) on the Plaza, and most sessions on the 5th floor.

We have some wonderful fiction writers and poets reading from work inspired by Woolf on Friday, 1:30-3:00 and on Saturday, 11:00-12:30. On Saturday, 2:00-3:30, NYC public high school girls in Girls Write Now will be reading their work inspired by Woolf and from 4:00-5:30 we will have a panel discussion featuring three amazing women inspired by Woolf.

We also have two ticketed events. On Thursday at 8:00 we will be hosting a staged reading of "Vita & Virginia" directed by Matthew Maguire. Tickets are $15 at the door. On Friday at 8:00, The Stephen Pelton Dance Theater and the band Princeton are presenting a one-night only collaboration of Woolf inspired modern dance & pop music. Tickets for that are $20 at the door.

You can find more information about the conference at our conference website. Please note that the website lists the Merc reception as being on Thursday: we changed the date to Friday.

Not about Virginia Woolf: Fiction Conference at Fordham University

The Mercantile Library is so awesome! I cannot exaggerate how much fun I had leading one of their reading groups this spring. I love teaching, but there is something really special about a non-credit class, with a bunch of adults who give up an evening just to come together and talk about a novel.

And, as all blog readers know, there is nothing more awesome than Beatrice’s own Ron Hogan.

So, when then Merc asked me if I could get Fordham to co-sponsor the Mercantile Library Center For Fiction’s Writer’s Conference, I said YES!

Now, I’m emerging from my pre-Woolf Conference flurry to encourage you to register for the conference and spread the word.

Ron has put together an amazing day of information and advice for writers. PLUS for the registration fee of $200, you also get a month of studio space at the Mercantile Library. Who is speaking? Well, the fabulous Lauren Cerand of luxlotus, Toure himself, Ben Greenman, whose been getting such amazing publicity for his funky new book. Also: the funny and wise Jennifer Weiner. And Sara Nelson, former editor Publisher’s Weekly. And the dry and intelligent Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull. And Sigrid Nunez, who wrote a book about Leonard Woolf’s marmoset (among other things). In short, in a single day, you have the chance to hear from novelists, publishers, publishing insiders, and publicists.

All of this is happening at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, my home base: 113 W 60th, just one block west of Columbus Circle. Register today and pass it on! It’s going to be great.

it was this : it was this:

Even if you're not coming to the Woolf Conference, you should make time for June 5th's one night only music and dance performance, "it was this : it was this : "

it was this: it was this:
songs and dances inspired by the life and work of
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
with Princeton & Stephen Pelton Dance Theater
at the 19th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference
Friday June 5th, 2009 8pm
Pope Auditorium, Fordham University
113 W 60th St, New York, NY 10023

Tickets $20. Available online today & tomorrow only & then at at the door.

But don't take it from me. Here's what the collaborators say:

Southern California frolic meets Northern California serious in a one-night only collaboration of song and dance.

Princeton, the Los Angeles-based trio, join forces with San Francisco’s Stephen Pelton Dance Theater in it was this: it was this: an evening of songs and dances inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

Princeton will perform all of the songs from their recent EP Bloomsbury, each lyrically focused upon a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Portraits of Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes are each presented in a different musical framework with lush orchestral arrangements. The band is comprised of twin brothers Jesse and Matt Kivel and Ben Usen. The band will be joined by 8 additional musicians in recreating their frolicsome, exuberant take on the cast of Bloomsbury characters.

Stephen Pelton Dance Theater, known for known its intimate theatricality and emotional intensity, may be familiar to audiences from previous Woolf conferences. This year the company will perform several new works including the premiere of it was this: it was this: a choreographic study of Woolf’s punctuation. Using a single paragraph from To the Lighthouse, the company dances their way from the first word to the last, pausing briefly for every comma, parentheses and semicolon in-between. The company also performs a revised version of The Death of the Moth, first seen at the Plymouth State Conference in 1997.

The artists will combine forces for the premiere of Lytton/Carrington, a portrait-in-miniature of this most original of love stories.

Pelton writes, “What is most interesting to me in this collaboration with Princeton, is how remarkably different our approaches to Woolf are. I suspect that some of this may be attributable to the fact that we are from completely different generations—I am in my mid-forties, they in their early twenties. Their sweet, light-hearted and, at times, irreverent response to the material would have been unthinkable to me twenty years ago when I started to read Woolf and make dances inspired by her. Though they are always respectful, their songs embrace the playful spirit in Woolf’s work and in the lives of her colleagues; whereas I have tended to focus my response on the gravity of Woolf’s concerns. This contrast should make for a very fascinating evening in the theater.”

Tickets are selling fast, so hop online & buy one: no need to register for the conference, just get a ticket (or four or five). And big, big, big thanks to Paula Maggio of Blogging Woolf for turning me on to Princeton in the first place!

Grading

Grading, grading, grading.

Then, THE WOOLF CONFERENCE!!! It's coming so soon.

Then, well, my precious little blog, I will return to you, I vow.

In the meantime, grading (checking my RSS reader), grading (refreshing my email inbox), grading (watching goofy video clips on Jezebel & HuffPo).

Rivals and Orphans: H.O.W. Launch Party, 5/13

Last summer, I wrote an essay on rivalry. It's one of those things that came out in a couple days and was good enough, in the draft to actually polish up and make into an essay. In the fall, I had coffee with my friend Natasha. What should I do with the essay?

Well, we're actually looking for nonfiction for the next issue of H.O.W....

And there you have it: the journal launch party is next week. The journal is out. If you're in the city, come on down to the Bowery Poetry Club & celebrate. If not, you can buy a copy of the issue online: it's very pretty, features a new Susan Minot short story, really interesting visual art & much more.

Here are the details:

H.O.W. Journal Issue 4 Launch Party & FUNdraiser

A reading by the legendary Eileen Myles and the hilarious Sam Lipsyte.
A performance by Drug Rug - groove to sweet rock and roll, and pure bluesy chaos.
A silent auction with luxurious items at crazy discounts!
(DVF dress! Fancy dinners! Art!)

And just by showing up you will be supporting the work of emerging artists and writers, keeping a small non profit journal alive in a dark dismal time, AND HELPING ORPHANS WORLDWIDE.

ALL this good stuff for the low low price of $15 (or $20 dollars at the door)

COME OVER!

May 13, 2009
7-9:30pm
Bowery Poetry Club
380 Bowery, (between Houston and Bleecker)
BUY TICKETS NOW FOR $15
www.howjournal.com/spring
Or $20 at the door!

H.O.W. Journal publishes a mix of prominent writers and artists alongside new talents with an effort to raise money and awareness for the 15 million children worldwide that have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS. We publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art.

Flush and Mrs. Dalloway.

I’m rereading Woolf’s 1933 novel Flush for my class at the Mercantile Library on Monday night. It’s such a delight.

Lighter than Orlando, it shares with Orlando the mock-biographical form. Flush was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s beloved spaniel. The book is arch—perhaps too arch for some—but once it gets going it’s hilarious. Woolf writes in a confident third person, describing the smells that enchant and disgust Flush in detail. She also describes Flush’s bewilderment at Barrett’s writing: daily, she sits silent in her room on Wimpole Street, “passing her hand over a white page with a black stick.”

But what roused me from my sofa in my Victorian sitting room (equipped, it is true, with a piano but also a tv with internal DVD—Mary Poppins is currently in heavy rotation with the younger set--and a very nice radio/CD player with iPod dock) was the list of her siblings, one of whom was called Septimus!

That’s a footnote, isn’t it? That, among other things, Septimus Warren Smith’s name is an homage to one of Elizabeth Barrett’s brothers. (There were 12; there was an Octavius after Septimus.) In Mrs. Dalloway, 8 years earlier, Woolf wrote: London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. “

Though other scholars have written about Woolf and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when I was working on my chapter on Byron and Woolf, I got the notion that there was a deep, deep unexplored connection between the two of them. The time spent on the sofa, an imaginary (or real) invalid; the revelatory freedom into marriage and away from father; the feminism; the commitment to political freedom; the linking of feminism with other political causes; the love of dogs. I’m getting ahead of myself, but you see the point: there is a lot to say here.

In other Flush news, the early thirties were a little bit of a boom period for EBB, as I like to think of her. Not only did Flush come out in 1933, but, in 1934, Norma Shearer starred in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” The 1934 New York Times review (on my birthday!) praises the film highly, with special mention for the dog:

A report on the acting would be woefully inadequate without a tribute to Flush, the cocker spaniel of Elizabeth. His almost human and occasionally superhuman powers of expression are so remarkable as to cause some alarm for the superiority of the human race.

More E.B. White

In my head, I have a thoughtful but somewhat scathing critique of the deficiencies of last week's event.

On my desk, I have more work to do than hours in the day.

Plus, I've been sitting in my workout clothes for 3 hours.

In the absence of a proper post, I lead you to GalleyCat, where you can see a video of me talking about E.B. White.

Omit Needless Words

I'm off, in a few hours, to a celebration of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style at the Museum of the City of New York. I am so excited! One of the panelists is Barbara Walraff, who was interviewed about the book's continuing relevance on NPR this morning. Also, Roger Rosenblatt, Roy Blount... It should be interesting and festive.

In middle school, I found and took over my father's copy. We passed it around amongst ourselves and marched around the playground declaiming the rules: "Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"

I don't know what I learned from that book, but it's just about everything. It's a style book that I've read again and again and something about it resonated deeply in me.

So I was puzzled and bewildered by the Geoffry K. Pullum's Strunk-bashing in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week. Pullum writes patent nonsense. His main claim is as follows:

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

A claim he goes on to "prove" with a long list of grammatical pedantry, of citations of exceptions to their principles, etc. Utterly missing the point of a book on style: that it is not a grammar guide or a handbook, but a style book. White has a very specific style: elegant, clear, and journalistic. That is not the goal of every writer, nor should it be. But for me, and for many others, his suggestions--which I embraced as rules as a girl--helped me find my voice and convey my ideas with more grace than I ever would have found without them.

Pullum can sit this one out. I'll be raising my glass to my hero, E B White, and his great teacher and collaborator, William Strunk.

Life in Woolf’s Shadow

It won’t always be like this, I know, but it’s all Woolf all the time around here these days. It’s strange, but I love it.

When my book came out, I thought I’d leave Woolf behind. I thought I’d quickly finish editing Mrs. Dalloway (ha!) and move on. But I wanted to host the Woolf conference, so then, perhaps, after the conference…

So, on Monday, I stayed home to prepare for the week’s teaching: 1) leading a reading group on Mrs. Dalloway at the Mercantile Library Monday night, 2) teaching the end of The Waves to my undergraduate class on Tuesday, and 3) leading the Modern British graduate students’ group on editing Mrs. Dalloway on Tuesday night. That’s a lot of Woolf.

I didn’t expect Woolf to continue to loom so large. I certainly never expected to continue to be so riveted. I half-fear that it may be some kind of mental flaw: a scar in my brain that makes this one writer continue to resonate so powerfully.

Sunday night, I was reading some urban theory. Specifically, I was reading a discussion of the links between city life and agoraphobia, of Freud’s interpretation of the tension between women’s desire to sit in a window, beckoning men, and the fear of their sexual feelings. Freud and his generation (Woolf’s generation) also linked such moods to male homosexuals. Suddenly, I could see the dim outlines of a footnote, something about Septimus’ method of suicide as deeply connected to the modern city.

I was so excited that I could read no further.

Anita Desai’s Diamond Dust

I first read Anita Desai in a graduate class on Anglo-Indian narrative, but I don’t think I finished the book. I remember simultaneously loving it, feeling it worthy of better attention than I had to give, and being impatient and bored.

A few years later, an elderly man fell in love with me, and, in an effort to impress me, invited me to a small luncheon at MIT where I had the chance to meet her in person. She was lovely: beautiful, kind, and interested in me. I squirmed from the attentions of this elderly man, whose intentions were gradually dawning on me (He was over 70! I thought he was going to introduce me to his son…). Desai gently telegraphed to me just the kind of sympathy I needed: she was not condescending, but she pitied me in a way that woke me up and helped me shed his irritating attentions.

I kept Desai in mind as an underrated writer, a writer of great skill and grace who, I thought, might owe a debt to Woolf. I was all the more impressed at her grace and delight for her daughter’s win of the Booker Prize a few years back: it made me realize the maternal care and kindness in her pity of me at that one sad lunch.

So, I read Diamond Dust in the hope of finding a story to share with my Woolf class, a story that would shed light on an Indian successor to part of Woolf’s legacy. I enjoyed the collection and my students enjoyed the story, “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown,” but I no longer see Desai as an inheritor of a Woolfian voice. And I still feel deeply ambivalent about exploiting the theme of drowning when another story, “The Artist’s Life,” was just as Woolfian. But, being set in South Haldley, MA, with all white characters, it didn’t do what I wanted it to do on the syllabus. Once again, Desai’s gracious craft and ability to imagine others keeps her best work off the syllabus: that seems really unfair and I’m sorry about it.

As I sit here, looking at the Table of Contents, I see more winners than losers for sure, but the experience of reading the collection overall was a bit of a slog: partly, I think, from the unfairness of my goal, my wrong hypothesis. The first story, “Royalty,” about a self-regarding friend, whose visit to India from the States delays his old friends escape to the cool hills, is wonderful. “The Rooftop Dwellers,” a long story about a young woman who finds an apartment in a tiny, tiny rooftop shack and, in so doing, carves out a bit of independence for herself, is stunning and beautiful: a little masterpiece of small feminist triumph.

I loved the story “Winterscape,” too. It begins as the story of a new mother, white, married to an Indian man, but the focus gradually shifts to that man’s mothers (the sister who bore him and the wealthier one who raised him). These elderly, provincial Indian women are coming for an extended visit. This open-ended visit is the source of anxiety for the new mother and her conversations about it with her own mother mark the only missteps in the whole volume. That older white woman, Doris’s voice isn’t quite right. She says to her daughter: “Looks as if he never told you who his mother was though, or his father, the real ones, I mean. I call that peculiar, Beth, pec-u-liar!”

Something in this exchange, in Doris overall, sounds like parody to me. And it strikes me, once again, how even gifted writers who are great at writing race and class, still struggle to write about interracial interactions. Desai’s white characters seem like real, whole people to me. So do her Indian characters. She can write men and lower class characters that convince me of their authenticity. And the interracial marriage in “Winterscape” works. But there is something about the casually racist white mother that eludes her.

It pains me to make this observation, given what I owe her as a person and a reader, but I think it helps us remember just how very, very hard it is to write about race.

Short Stories

Though I seem to have the time to tweet away, to post mobile phone pictures of Easter eggs to facebook, blogging has fallen by the wayside this late winter (I don’t yet dare call it spring).

But I’ve been reading more than ever and I’ve mostly been reading short stories. In the rush of the semester, of administrative work, of new and absorbing responsibilities in teaching teachers how to teach, of giving two conference papers in one week (a record, and one not to be repeated), these stories have been vastly absorbing and satisfying. I want to tell you about the ups and downs of all of them—and of the two lovely novels—one at a time, but for now, a little list:

• Sima’s Undergarments for Women a debut novel by Ilana Stanger-Ross and recommended by Sarah Weinman,
• Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
• Diamond Dust, Anita Desai’s short stories,
• Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe by Doreen Baingana, and recommended by Tayari Jones,
• and Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson.

It’s funny, there was a day back in winter when Sarah mentioned Sima’s Undergarments for Women just as I was thinking (as I often am) about the need for a new bra. I loved the title, so modest and old-world. That same day, Tayari raved about how well Tropical Fish had worked in her FemWrite workshop in Uganda. I ordered both books immediately, they came, and I read them. So satisfying. So rare.

Woolf and the City at the Merc

I'll be leading a Reading Group at the Mercantile Library in New York leading up to the Woolf Conference in June. We'll read four Woolf novels and talk about Woolf & the city:

Mondays: April 6, April 20, May 4 and May 18
6:00pm–7:30pm
Led by Anne Fernald
$50 for members; $65 for nonmembers
Virginia Woolf made a permanent mark on London when she left the staid neighborhood of her birth and moved to Bloomsbury in 1904. This group will focus on Woolf as a city writer: how the city inspired her imagination and how she chronicled its many aspects. This focus allows us to celebrate Woolf’s London, to explore how she turned her daily walks into adventures, and to discuss the place of the city in our imagination. For April 6, please read Mrs. Dalloway. We will read Orlando, Flush, and The Years in subsequent weeks.

Click here to sign up!

A Happy Story from Publishing 100 Years Ago

I’m attending bits and pieces of the Society for Textual Scholarship Conference at NYU this week (and giving a paper there tomorrow). Today’s plenary panel was terrific. Bob Scholes gave an engaging paper on advertising in modernist magazines. He compared Pound's injunctions for writing imagist poetry with advice for admen written at the same time: it would be hard to tell them apart. Full of lovely irony. My old friend Cliff Wulfman gave a really smart paper about all the technological challenges of digitizing literature.

But, in light of the dire news about publishing that’s been floating around these past months, I thought you might be especially interested in George Bornstein’s “The Colors of Modernism: Publishing Blacks, Jews, and Irish.” (Shouldn’t it be “the Irish?”) He offered a history of New York publishing houses in the early 20th century.

While we think of Viking and Knopf as powerhouses of publishing, these houses were founded by Jews who’d hit the glass ceiling in WASP-dominated Boston. These editors, according to Bornstein, moved to New York, but couldn’t afford to acquire the established texts. So, while Houghton Mifflin up in Boston was publishing new multi-volume sets of Longfellow and Emerson (this made me laugh out loud, but I was the only one), Ginsburg and Oppenheimer of Viking and the Knopfs set out to find avant-garde texts, texts by other Jews, by immigrants, and by African-Americans. Harcourt Brace was the only Gentile-run house to join this trend. They did so because they hired Joel Spingarn, a Jew, an early supporter of the NAACP and colleague there of DuBois, and a former professor of comp lit at Columbia. Professor Spingarn had been dismissed from his job at Columbia for defending a colleague’s dismissal (ah! academic freedom!) so, his former students hired him at Harcourt, eventually making him a full editorial partner.

First among these was B. W. Huebsch, the first American publisher of James Joyce. Bornstein showed us Huebsch’s device, a seven-branched menorah (it looked like a fancy Georgian candlestick to me, but I trust him), on the title page of Joyce's Exiles.

This paper was a really lovely cultural history. A rich celebration of how a group of artists, exiled from the mainstream, became the mainstream by banding together.

Harcourt’s big moneymaker was Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace and it’s through Keynes that they got their entrée to Bloomsbury. Harcourt remains Woolf’s American publisher to this day.

Bornstein’s story emerges, I think, out of a desire to counter a narrative, common in the 1990s, of high modernism as politically right wing, elitist, and narrow.

But it’s too easy to turn the cosmopolitan story into a dream sequence that overlooks the broader truths of anti-Semitism, race riots, lynchings, and anti-immigration legislation of the time. Or the facts of rifts within even the cosmopolitan circles of artists. I would like to have heard more nuance there, but it mostly flickered behind the paper. He told us that Harcourt is to be commended for publishing Sandburg’s essay on the Chicago race riots without pausing long enough over the fact of that unrest. He saluted Knopf’s courage in publishing Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven without pausing long enough (though pause he did) over the opportunism of that white promoter of Harlem.

He ended with T. S. Eliot, whose politics I don't admire (duh!) but whose "The Waste Land" I adore. Boni and Liveright, the house that made their name with Toomer's Cane were Eliot's American publishers. And, Bornstein argues, that Eliot's appearance on the Boni and Liveright list emphasizes the polyglot nature of the poem: something that was supported by the list itself. That is, every title on their list was jazz-influenced, so the jazz and pop elements of the poem, the parts of the poem that celebrate immigration and cosmpolitanism, and cultural hybridity, are all familiar to anyone who's familiar with that house. This, he argues, helps account for Ralph Ellison's somewhat surprising over-praise of Eliot. There is a lot more to say about that: about Eliot's racism, about whether or not people know books in the context of their publisher, about Ellison's snobbery, and about the greatness of both Ellison and Eliot.

I do think this is, in the main, a really really good story for us to know. As we think about Kindle and digital rights management (DRM to you) and the death of the newspaper, it’s really thrilling, I think, to remember, too, that 100 years ago, there were people in New York who loved great writing and didn’t pause over creed or race or ethnicity to publish it and, in so doing, were able to serve both art and commerce. So, though I have my questions about the emphasis of this paper, I mostly found it very, very interesting and inspiring. And though I've ignored the women here, Bornstein did not: he continually referenced Lilian Hellman, Nella Larsen, and more as crucial players in this story.

As we sit here, trying to earn a living with our tweets and our blogs, shaking our heads at the ginormous advances offered to another idiotic memoir by a celebrity, it’s moving and encouraging, I think, to imagine Knopf, Huebsch, Ginsburg & Oppenheimer, Boni & Liveright, gutting it out, making money, and bringing us great, great art.

Bornstein’s paper is part of a forthcoming book from Yale University Press. A chapter of it appeared in the September 2005 issue of Modernism/modernity (which may be behind a firewall for you). He has a very sweet pro-Obama op-ed here.

War and Fate

All the work I do on Mrs. Dalloway has had me thinking a lot about war, soldiers, and war writing. I have become convinced that the very minor character in that novel, Miss Isabel Pole, is a character of bad faith, urging Septimus to read Antony and Cleopatra and comparing him to Keats. No wonder he volunteered to fight; no wonder he returns traumatized.

I have been thinking a lot about returning soldiers. Worrying about them and listening intently whenever Paul Rieckoff is on t.v. talking about IAVA and veteran’s issues. He was the guest on one of the WNYC podcasts on my iPhone, so I listened on the plane out to San Francisco. I also checked my email, and there was a message from the academic vice president announcing the creation of a task force on welcoming returning veteran’s back to Fordham.

Then, just to continue the theme, once at the conference, I saw that San Franciscan Dave Eggers was speaking on a panel on war writing. I loved Heartbreaking Work, advised a thesis on McSweeneys. Though I know it’s fashionable to turn up my nose at Eggers, I actually think he’s amazingly cool. I’d love to be the one to have founded 826 Valencia, to have resisted all that rampant snark. At the panel, the moderator interviewed Eggers about What is the What and then six veterans read from the work they had done in Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing group. They spoke about their book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. It was deeply moving.

They spoke about listening to difficult stories, telling them, and not asking stories to turn out to be inspirational or moving or redemptive. They read a wonderful Tim O’Brien quote to the effect that if you feel redeemed at the end of a war story, you have been lied to.

At the book exhibit, then, I bought A Soldier’s Heart, Elizabeth Samet’s account of teaching at West Point. So far, I find that she capitulates too much to the military perspective for my taste. But she is smart and I’m learning about military culture from it.

All of which to say that I think I’ve found my way in. Maybe nothing will come of it; maybe something will. But I’m going to write to my university’s committee and see if they will think about writing and reading as a piece of the veteran’s program. I don’t know what will come of this, but perhaps this can be a way for me to contribute… We’ll see.

When You Were Small

I was in San Francisco over the weekend at the CCCC (the National Council of Teachers of English’s big Conference on College Composition and Communication). It’s a HUGE conference, held this year at the downtown Hilton, much bigger than the MLA.

But of all the many books I read, bought, and acquired over the weekend, the one that’s haunting me is a children’s book that I didn’t buy: Sara O’Leary (text) and Julie Morstad (illustrations)’s enchanting When You Were Small. I ran across it at an amazing little store of letter press cards, books, and ephemera, Little Otsu, across Valencia from both 826 Valencia and Range where we had a GREAT dinner.

Little Henry asks about what it was like when he was small and his dad tells him a series of wonderful, fanciful lies: you had a pet ant, we used you as a chess piece, you used to take baths in the teapot... Don’t you remember?

The haunting and detailed illustrations and the dry humor make it a tender little Edward Gorey fable. There’s a second book, too, and Morstad has some ABCs as well.

I’m urging the Easter Bunny to fill the girls’ baskets with these books this year! You can see their titles at the lovely Simply Read Books website. Julie Morstad's drawings are at Canada's Atelier Gallery. And Sara O'Leary has a blog.

Frog and Toad Are Friends

I’d like to sing a little ode
about my good friend Toad,
Toad with whom I frequently take tea.

He’s not so good at sports,
and of course he’s got those warts
but Toad has been a lovely friend to me.

We took the girls to “A Year with Frog and Toad” at the Atlantic on Saturday. It was so adorable—nearly as good as last year’s awesome “Really Rosie.” The Atlantic’s children’s theater is so great. First, it’s affordable ($50 for 4 tickets—that’s practically free in NYC terms). Then, the theater itself, an old brick church, is both grand and homey. It makes the matinee into an occasion. (Pics here.)

But the songs are so charming. The opening song of friendship is all charm: admitting that one’s friend has warts but “has been a lovely friend to me” captures many deep and important ideas about friendship all in one: flaws, “loveliness”—that gentle, important, grounding quality, and then “to me,” because friendship is ours and special: it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it, he’s been my friend.

My kindergartener was delighted that some of the episodes she knows from her I Can Read books were featured in the show.

And the song, later in the show, about the pleasure of eating cookies is totally exuberant and joyous: Like the happiest love song ever, but song to the pleasure of gorging on cookies!

Eating cookies
Eating cookies
We’re so happy eating cookies
Cookies cookies cookies we adore….

The children were rapt.

I was interested to see Mark Linn-Baker thanked in the program. I always loved that silly sitcom, “Perfect Strangers,” and I liked him in it. It made me happy to think of him as a working actor, supporting this little venture.

But this morning, downloading the soundtrack for the kids on iTunes, I see that he originated the role of Toad on Broadway (the baby’s hands-down favorite character; the big girl just loved it all). What’s more, his wife Adrianne is the daughter of Arnold Lobel, the author of the Frog and Toad books. So three cheers for Mark Linn-Baker! And three cheers for great children’s theater in Chelsea.

Their run was extended for 2 weeks: this coming weekend is the last: call quick to reserve your seat!

PHOTO: Ahron R. Foster from the Playbill site.

Exasperation and Elevation

Ed Champion asked me to participate in a roundtable on Eric Kraft's new novel, Flying. (It's actually a trilogy, bound together into a very big book). I am a big fan of Ed's & I am, occasionally, nostalgic for the days of the Litblog Co-op, so I said YES.

The first installment of five is up at Ed's place.

It's a very weird book, one that I found exasperating and fascinating, as you'll see when I weigh in (at a late phase in the conversation). The conceit, however, is really interesting: a boy in the 50's builds an aerocycle, based on improbable plans from a mechanics magazine, and flies it from Long Island to New Mexico. As you might expect, the aerocycle doesn't fly, BUT many people want to believe that it does and the boy is simultaneously buoyed and ruined by keeping alive the fiction of himself as a pilot. The book we have in our hands purports to be the record of the much older man today, striving to write a memoir that sets the record straight.

There's a lot that's funny here, but the book is a spot too long for me. In any case, do pop over to Ed's blog throughout the week and listen in.

Metaphor: Bad prose and inspiration

I'm growing weary of the abundance of post-its on my computer monitor, so I'm trying to take them down today. (Don't worry, it doesn't take long the for the clutter to reaccumulate...) And, while I don't often blog about my students or my teaching, two of the little scraps I'm tossing seem worthy of sharing.

First, from a textbook, for the BLOCK THAT METAPHOR file:

"In reality personal and professional ethics share some common ground and this makes the perceived clash between the two easier to digest."

All last year, I worked one-on-one with an ESL student. Mostly, we marched through readings from class. The textbooks were so badly written and so abstract that I could see where the struggles came. This sentence was so difficult to parse and it yielded so little meaning (ethical behavior at work overlaps with individual ethics? really? stop the presses!), that I couldn't stop laughing and I copied it down just to remind myself how not to write, how much were were asking of our students.

Then, from an application, a wonderful moment of heroic rhetoric right here in the 21st century: "Like Leonidas at Thermopylae, my grandfather did not stop fighting..."

Rebecca Solnit inspires

I knew that I was onto something when I invited Rebecca Solnit to be the keynote speaker at the Woolf conference. I knew that her admiration for Woolf was enough: that all that is interesting about her writing would make her an inspiration to the 200 or so scholars and readers who are coming to New York in June.

Still, how exciting to read that Solnit's book on walking (that most Woolfian of topics) inspired director Astra Taylor's latest film. The 29-y.o. director of "Zizek!" wanted to make another film on philosophy, but:

If people found talking-head films uncinematic, what would they make of a talking-egghead film? “Secretly I thought it was going to be disastrous,” Ms. Taylor said in a recent interview. “I might as well do an audio interview.” Then it occurred to her that her talking heads should walk and talk. She had just read “Wanderlust,” a discursive study of the history of walking by Rebecca Solnit, and was reminded of the figure of the peripatetic philosopher, from Aristotle (who paced the Lyceum while teaching) to Kierkegaard (a proponent of thinking while walking, which he frequently did in the Copenhagen streets) to Walter Benjamin (the embodiment of the Paris flâneur). She realized that putting her subjects in motion would elicit a different kind of interview than if they were seated behind their desks in offices. This conceit became a guiding principle for a film that would attempt to take philosophy out of the ivory tower and affirm its place in the flux of everyday life.

I share this sense that walking is central to thinking. Had I more patience, I could regale you with smart reasons why, but let's leave it at:

Isn't this cool?

Beyond Suspicion by Tanguy Viel

In Three Lives back in December, my favorite clerk told me to slow down on the Bolano craze. She could see my fatigue, my lack of commitment to a new big book. Try this, she said, passing me a copy of Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion, it got me through a reading slump.

Reading slump: that is certainly where I was in December. No fool I, I knew that a single stylish French thriller couldn’t kick me back into gear, so I eased back into reading with the latest Eloisa James. She never disappoints. But, back to the Viel. What is it and what did I think?

It’s a slim little noir volume. The blurbs compare it to Patricia Highsmith, whom I have not read, but it does have that Talented Mr. Ripley perverse-Hitchcockian flavor. The story centers on two couples: an older pair of brothers and a brother and sister pair who target the older couple in a gold-digging scheme.

The brother and sister are also lovers. Or the lovers are pretending to be brother and sister. Part of the pleasure of the text is the coyness on that front: the frisson of incest. The incest taboo also insures that they will be beyond suspicion (the title) in their scheme to hook, marry, and murder the one brother.

I liked the book, but it’s not going to resonate with me long term. At the same time, I would read another of these little confections. It’s stylish, slick, and short. Even I, distracted and slow, consumed it in a couple days. It’s very cinematic for sure, without reading like a film treatment. And yet it really is just very very elegant candy: there isn’t much to it. The frisson of incest is important to the plot, sure, but it doesn’t lead to any insights, it doesn’t really lead anywhere. The book does have a thriller-climax, but it’s not thrilling: there’s a dead body, the murder hasn’t quite gone as planned, there is a witness…or is there? Isn’t that the way they all end?

Sarah, she who reads all, read it too.

Cause and Effect

The toddler was in the highchair, wailing, when I came to pick her up yesterday after my day at the museum with the big girl. She was in time out.

She ran to me for comfort. I scooped her up, but then asked her why she was in trouble. I got some confused, panicked finger-pointed about how he did this and he did that and then she put me in chair and I cry. The teacher explained: she doesn't listen when the teacher says no. They've been working on this, but she still doesn't listen. So, she had a time out. Mommy approves.

So, later, we are reviewing the lesson:

Mommy's prompt: "So, when Miss Lizbeth says no...."

Baby's answer: "I get time out."

I love that naughty, unreconstructed baby. She cuts right to the chase.

The Met and the vet

Even when it’s a school holiday, I usually forge ahead. Especially since having kids, I feel all the more sure that time is slipping past, writing is not getting done, and every three-day weekend needs to be seized as a chance to write a bit more, to catch up (with what? sometimes I wonder).

I don’t quite know why I decided, against my workaholic ways, to take today off. It’s true that I am tired beyond tired, so tired that the tears were flowing down my cheeks the other day and I was powerless to stop them.

In any case, I did the supremely indulgent thing of sending the toddler off to daycare and taking the kindergartener into the Met. We had a spiral notebook and a mesh bag of colored pencils for her. We quickly suss each gallery for a place to draw. She chooses a work of art—preferring three- to two-dimensions—and begins sketching. I have time to read and study every work of art at great leisure before she’s done with a single sketch. We walk quickly through a few rooms and then it’s time to sketch again.

I haven’t had such a leisurely visit to the Met in years. We caught the last day of “Art and Love in the Renaissance,” lingering over cradles and birth bowls, moving more quickly through the room devoted to courtesans (although a majolica platter featuring a head made of a collage of penises did make us both giggle); some Impressionist paintings (including Degas’ sculpture of the 14-year-old dancer); the shark in a tank (which she found terrifying and puzzling “why would you want to make art that upsets people mommy?”); Egyptian art, including, of course, the Temple of Dendur.

By then, it was time for lunch. After all this sophistication, all our chat about the jubilant brushstrokes of Monet and how this or that painting looked slightly pointillist, she chose the taxicab: a dozen chicken nuggets, a bag of Lay’s, and a juice box served in a cardboard box that looks like a taxicab. She drove it around the table, making “stops” to pick up nuggets and chips, in spite of my pleas that the table might have germs on it. She is still six, after all.

We had a totally amazingly fun day. It is so immensely great to have such a companion: I feel overwhelmingly lucky and also sheepish to take such pleasure in my own child.

And lest I feel any pang of guilt over playing hooky, I remind myself that the day began cleaning up after a sick dog and ended at the vet’s office, getting medicine for same. She is fine. One of the most amazing and hard things about adulthood is the sheer relentlessness of life: even on a day dedicated to art and ease, there is a load of laundry to cycle through, ditto for the dishwasher, and a sick dog to clean up after.

Happy President’s Day!

We interrupt this litblog...

An occasional feature just to remind us that we live in a world that is...well, very, very scary.

(h/t Rachel Maddow for showing the graphic after Obama's masterful first presser.)

Blossom Dearie

Blossom Dearie has died, of natural causes, at 82.

If you don't know her wonderful hip, very, very white jazz style, you owe it to yourself to check it out. She'll have your fingers snapping and have you feeling like a really happy, very posh beatnik in no time. Just the antidote to my February blues.

She is amazing. She takes a simple little song like "Tea for Two" and slows it WAY down, making it sultry and cool. Or "Surrey with a Fringe on Top," from Oklahoma of all things, suddenly is full of a sexy urban wink: something utterly different from the great but totally straight version by Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae. I love her "Rhode Island is Famous for You," one of the great place name songs.

Verve Records has a nice compilation of her essential hits. I was collecting those at some point in the 90s and somehow this one made my list. I've never regretted it. Terry Teachouts much smarter and more informed remembrance is here--with a video clip of "Surrey with a Fringe on Top" as a bonus!

I am so grateful to her for her lovely songs. May she rest in peace.

February

We're deep in the semester all of a sudden and my inbox is burgeoning with all kinds of texts to read and review. The most literary of the lot: proofing my own prose. It's a lot of donkey work for the next few weeks and I'm finding it hard to leave it behind even in my dreams.

Last night? I was an apprentice in a sighted (i.e. not blind) John Milton's print shop, keeping him company as he composed an elegy for John Donne. Then, I fashioned an ear of corn out of straw: the sole decoration on the pinecone wreath. He saw this as a delightfully frivolous touch and wondered aloud at how beautiful the other mourners would find it. He felt that he was really pulling out all the stops.

No Puritan, I knew that others would be leaving gaudy wreaths of yellow and gold mums. Still, I saw how starkly beautiful it was and thought that it would be the most unusual and glorious wreath in the graveyard.

Yes, it’s February.

Three Cups of Tea

My sister-in-law gave me Three Cups of Tea for Christmas 2007. I was a snob about it: it looked so Oprah, so popular, that I was skeptical. But also curious. I finally read it. It is amazing that Greg Mortenson could manage, with a ghost-writer, to take such a gripping, thrilling story and write such a clunky book. It took me a very long time to get past the clumsy prose. I would read a page and come across an inadvertent pun, an odd Germanic neologism, a word that might be an adverb or a verb, rendering the sentence needlessly ambiguous and confusing.

And then, Mortenson is such a Western type. He reminds me of guys I used to date—or try to date—out in Seattle. Living in his car, dating a doctor, he grows angry at her desire for a meal. He is saving his pennies to build a school in Pakistan! She should be happy with ramen! Believe me, I’ve been there. I once made ramen and a tuna sandwich for a boyfriend who grew enraged that I had cooked two nights worth of food in one.

But I remembered that Nicholas Kristof (who shares the Western boy ethos but remains a hero) had written a glowing account of Mortenson’s work, founding schools in remote Pakistan and Afghanistan, focusing on girls education. I know, too, I need to know more about Pakistan and that when faced with a more serious article, I tend to skip or skim.

There is quite a bit of The Man Who Would Be King to this tale. There are definitely moments, especially early on, when Mortenson’s story made me uneasy. The son of missionaries (as I am the great-granddaughter of missionaries, so I cast no stones, only recognize the dangers of that drive to set off to elsewhere in the hopes of changing it), Mortenson failed to reach the summit of K2, got lost and disoriented, and, after a long recovery, promised his host village that he’d return to build them a school.

When a fellow American arrives at the construction site and Greg asks him to march around like a “Big Man,” I grew really worried. The account of his detention in Waziristan, too, reads like a scene from any recent Muslim-baiting Hollywood film. (This will be a film, mark my words.)

But there is a lot more here. The prose improves as the story chugs along and the adventures make the lousy prose less obtrusive in later chapters. (Still, if you read it, I counsel you to read fast and for the plot! It could have been so much better.)

Mortenson seems to have learned genuine lessons about cooperation and humility. So, although his charity now trades on his story as the cowboy who singlehandedly built over 60 schools (a major, major achievement, there is no doubt), what I love about the book is the way that he has the village elders cut the ribbon at a school’s inauguration.

I am most moved, however, by how this man grew to recognize the power of educating women. When he sets off to build that first school, the town surprises—and frustrates—him by asking for a bridge first. But that bridge suddenly permits women to walk home to their mothers every Friday. In a remote, craggy region where marriage often means saying goodbye forever, this is a huge gift to a community: young wives remain connected and, through this connection, are happier people. When he returns, years later, a young girl marches into a council of elders and demands tuition for a certificate program in maternal health. Now. Mortenson first puts her off, but then suddenly sees that she represents all he has been working for: a young woman, leapfrogging over centuries of patriarchy, to stand up for herself and the women of her village, proud, confident, and utterly unafraid of men. It is hard not to see the goodness—the greatness of this.

Education matters and it matters most among those who have so little access to it.

If, as Kristof argues, as Mortenson shows, we cared more about education and less about bombs, we might just remake the world. For all the posturing and purple prose, I came away impressed by the book.

If personality-driven charities make you more allergic, Kristof also recommends this one, Developments in Literacy, run by Pakistani-Americans. It’s all about the kids.

The Women’s Project Presents Freshwater

When I first got word that there would be a first-ever professional production of Virginia Woolf’s only play, Freshwater, I was cautiously excited. It could be terrific; it could go so wrong in so many ways.



Freshwater is a farce, a little drawing room romp, that Woolf wrote for her niece Angelica’s birthday party. The inside jokes are thick and fast: Bloomsburies played on the roles of their Victorian elders. The characters are Julia Margaret Cameron, the great Victorian photographer (and Woolf’s great-aunt); her husband, Charles Hay Cameron; the painter George Frederick Watts; his child-bride Ellen Terry; Tennyson, and Lt. John Craig, the only character not based in history.

While Tennyson, the Camerons, and Watts expound on the purity and beauty of art (with Tennyson quoting himself often and at length), Ellen Terry chafes under the strictures of a life that is bohemian and strangely dull. She jumps at the chance to escape to Bloomsbury where she and her beau will dine on sausages and kippers, far from any nightingale’s song.

But allusions to “Maud” are just not hilarious to most people and there is little more tiresome than going to the theater to congratulate yourself on what a clever little English major you are. Director Anne Bogart, dramaturg Megan Carter (who came to talk to my class on Friday!! Thank you!), and the rest of the cast and crew have figured out ways to translate Woolf's highbrow farce for a 21st century audience. In doing so, they show us how funny Woolf can be, and, more importantly, have created a really fun, happy bon bon of a show.

This charming production begins with the glorious set: step off the frigid streets into the tiny, dark lobby of the Julia Miles Theater, and then, into the house itself to see James Schuette’s joyous set, lit like a summer’s day, festooned with a crazy amateurish patchwork curtain, sewn together from dozens of primary-colored pillowcases. The amazing Akiko Aizawa, playing the maid, sets the merry tone: she marches back and forth across the stage, military style, only to look out, sternly counting the audience and then, suddenly, girlishly, to break character, giggle and point, as if at friends and family. Meanwhile the actors backstage whisper and hush each other. It feels as much like being at a village pageant or a local theatrical as possible.

Then, out pops the daffy Gian Murray Gianino, in full Gilbert and Sullivan style military garb to sing “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor.”

All the nice girls love a sailor
All the nice girls love a tar
For there's something about a sailor
(Well you know what sailors are!)

It’s very hard not to smile. What a relief! Hilarious and delightful, the show continues, drawing from vaudeville, music hall and Monty Python to make sure that even long parodic speeches on the importance of art are full of pratfalls and laughter.

The show is funny and meant to be, but it also makes pointed fun of the self-absorption of artists. Woolf admired artistic dedication, but, as director Anne Bogart pointed out in the talk-back after the show, it’s also about not hurting others in the pursuit of art. For this, the youthful Ellen Terry is our guide: she is bored, posing for a painting, and no one cares. It’s one thing for Watts to dedicate his life to perfecting a painting, but quite another to demand his wife spend her days perfectly still. This is the comic version of Woolf’s critique of Milton and Carlyle.

I have a lot more to say, but other things in my day are calling. You can read reviews in Variety and the New York Times.

“Freshwater” is playing in limited run until February 15. There are discounts available, but even the full-priced tickets are an affordable $42. It’s a little dose of summer in midwinter. Do go!

En mi pais…

Today was the Family Feast at kindergarten. It was the culmination of a month of studying “What Makes a House a Home.” All the mommies and daddies who could take time from work, brought in a dish representing their heritage and we had a huge buffet lunch. A feast of filled dough from around the world: empanadas, tamales, samosas, Indonesian pastel! There was also spiced rice from Puerto Rico, India, and the Dominican Republic. The potato pancakes, German-style, were fantastic. I made kringle, a very simple Danish figure-8-shaped cookie, not too sweet, with a pinch of nutmeg.

After lunch, the children treated us to a song, “Que Bonita Bandera” (What a pretty flag). Each child got up and said a sentence in Spanish about her country. After, eveyrone sang, "Que bonita bandera (x2) / es la bandera _____ [Colombiana/Dominicana/de Gales/de India]" It was so sweet to hear what they chose as the special thing about their nation. Of all the many nations we are from, my daughter picked Wales because it has the most bonita bandera, with that great dragon on it. She asked me about Wales: what makes it famous. I was cooking dinner and gave it a quick try: um, the Prince of Wales, coal mines, and dragons.

Well, the dragons aren’t real, she noted. They probably just used to have really fierce dinosaurs there. And coal mines? No romance there. Tell me about the Prince of Wales, Mama.

So, there she was, kicking off the song, with her little sentence about how in her country (!) lives the Prince of Wales who is the son of Queen Elizabeth.

She was far from the only child to pick royalty and parties: Trinidad has Carnevale and India has lots of palaces. Food figured large among the 5- and 6-year olds too, with Guatemala growing lots of rice, and a couple other children mentioning crops and dishes (between their mumbles and my very rudimentary Spanish, I missed a lot).

All the children joined together at the end to announce that in their country, the United States, there are fifty states and everyone is happy.

One wants to say “isn’t it pretty to think so?” But I wonder. It was such a touching day, with parents awkwardly circling around each other and one child, it seems, in tears, at all times. We are all so different; we all anxiously watch over our beloved little ones. All these years of theorizing and thinking and talking about racism and culture and multiculturalism and here it is, in action. It’s very sweet, but is this the best way to do it? I am not skeptical—it seems like a winner event to me—but I do wonder.

“Virginia”

When I was younger and less ambitious—or just as ambitious but more naïve—I thought of projects like Edna O’Brien’s “Virginia” as derivative donkey work.

Now I see the incredible care and art that goes into creating a script—and, for director Joannie Mackenzie, cutting it—that blends together biography, fiction, essays, diaries, and letters.

Although I’ve known of the show “Virginia,” I’d never seen it before Sunday. It was a really satisfying show. I know Woolf well enough that nothing surprised, but O’Brien and the actors’ spin on familiar material was a real delight. I particularly loved the way Woolf’s haunting story “Lappin and Lapinova,” becomes a metaphor for the Woolfs’ marriage. The story is about a sweet young bride who imagines her husband as a rabbit king. He indulges her, and the nightly fairy tale becomes a path to intimacy. Then, he tires of the story and asks her to stop it. The story has one of the best final lines I know:

So that was the end of that marriage.

Hearing that story alluded to at Sunday’s staged reading in the basement of the Drama Book Shop was deeply moving.

Kris Lundberg, founder of the new Woolfian Shakespeare’s Sister Company, played Woolf. She managed to show the full complexity of Woolf’s character: the grief, the joy, the complex sexuality, mental illness, humor, coyness, sharpness, and wisdom.

Shelley Ray and David McCamish had smaller roles, but other kinds of challenges: without costume changes, each had to portray several characters (Leslie Stephen & Leonard Woolf; Julia Stephen, Vanessa Bell, and Vita Sackville-West). There was a moment at the beginning of the show where Virginia describes her mother as “beautiful, gracious, and afraid” or a similar trio and the slight twitch in her face on the beat of “afraid” was just perfect.

I do fear a little that the show tends to being not adventurous enough, too pious, too honorific.

But it’s deeply moving and very fair. It did avoid all the many, many painful ways that depictions of Woolf seem to go astray and it really moved my students. In all, those are very, very good things.

7 Questions

Carolyn Kellogg of the LATimes blog, Jacket Copy, and formerly of the still-lamented Litblog Co-o, interviewed me on Virginia Woolf. Here's a taste:

Jacket Copy: I've never read any Virginia Woolf. Where should I start?

Anne Fernald: There are a lot of ways to start Woolf. If you are interested in experimental fiction, then "The Waves," her most experimental (and perhaps her most difficult) text, can be a good starting place. It follows six friends from childhood through middle age, all in interior monologues -- you flow, like waves, in and out of the thoughts of Rhoda, Jinny, Susan, Neville, Louis (based on T.S. Eliot, from St. *Louis*! ha), and Bernard.

But, if you prefer your novels more autobiographical, then "To the Lighthouse" is a lovely entry point. Woolf's most autobiographical novel, it depicts a large Victorian family on summer vacation and then charts the impact of WWI and other life events over the years. It's got Woolf's best artist-figure in it: Lily Briscoe, a frustrated painter.

For sheer perfection of prose, I love "A Room of One's Own," her 1929 feminist masterpiece. It's a great manifesto for all writers: the need for both privacy and the ability to roam about unmolested in the world. But I love it for its gorgeous sentences, its glorious metaphors, the amazing way that its pieces all fit together into a symphony.

Overall, for me, her masterpiece is "Mrs. Dalloway." There is a lot not to like about the main character, a hostess throwing a party (snore), but Woolf knows that and teaches you to care about her in spite of Clarissa's flaws. It's an amazing book and one of the best treatments of shellshock I know. A great version of the novel set in a single day, too.

You can find the whole interview here.

My Off-Broadway Debut

I am still glowing from yesterday’s wonderful, festive tribute to Virginia Woolf on the occasion of the 127th Anniversary of her birth. Kris Lundberg, the actress and founder of the new Shakespeare’s Sister nonprofit theater company, organized the day, a staged reading of Edna O’Brien’s play, “Virginia.” She wrote to me about the Woolf conference and asked, oh, by the way, did I know a professor who could offer a brief pre-performance talk.

I volunteered with alacrity, half-expecting a “gee, thanks, but we were hoping for a famous and important Woolf scholar.”

But then, what to say? As I said out loud yesterday, I found myself imagining a really dull and dutiful talk. Then, I imagined something better and got really stressed until I remembered that I had just written an essay on Woolf and the common reader. I read that.

The essay was so long in the coming that I’m shocked. Years ago, when my book was about to come out, Joel Whitney invited me to write an essay on Woolf as an essayist, on my book and what inspired me, for Guernica. I accepted right away and then found myself utterly unable to write anything worthy.

And this wasn’t for lack of effort. I wasted my writing group’s time on a couple different failed attempts.

But then, last year, the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain announced a contest in honor of my late acquaintance and mentor, the beloved and dearly missed Julia Briggs: the best essay on the theme of Virginia Woolf and the Common Reader would win a generous sum of 250 pounds! That’s a motivator.

The piece I wrote turned out to be almost entirely about my grandmother. Not nearly as intellectual as I had thought, not formally innovative, not chock full of dazzling insights, not any of the things that might impress a reader at first blush. But, the more I looked at it, the more I thought it was ok as it was.

Actually, it felt great to read it aloud.

I should, by rights, talk less about myself, and tell you something substantive about how wonderful Shelley Ray & David McCamish & Kris Lundberg were in “Virginia.” I’ll have to save that for tomorrow.

A new era

If I had more energy and were so inclined, I would fashion this into a proper editorial. But, while inspiration is here, let me just quickly note that the withdrawal of Caroline Kennedy from consideration for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat is but one more sign that a political era has ended, that a newer and better politics has, for the moment, come to claim the stage.

Don't get me wrong. I admire Caroline Kennedy. I feel for her many losses. I think she is beautiful, smart, classy. She has handled her life in the public eye with grace and with a deep commitment to service. She is also a scion of America's greatest political family.

We bid goodbye yesterday to a horrible president whose main claim to power was that he was a president's son.

The election to replace him saw the failed bid of a supremely qualified woman who came to our attention primarily as a First Lady.

Now, a woman who wanted the former First Lady's seat has withdrawn. Her main claim to fame is as the daughter of a president.

This is a democracy.

It feels divine to put nepotism to rest.

Divine but also problematic for women: it's been hard in this patriarchal nation for women to find paths to power without the authorization of men. Being a daughter or a wife marks a woman as acceptable; it marks her ambition as an understandable family trait: the tomboy daughter, the wife who learned from the sidelines. Unmarried woman like Condi Rice or Janet Napolitano, are suspect. Married women, well, let's talk about married and partnered women.

See, there is this whole problem of child-bearing, child-rearing, childcare, that comes right at a really strong moment in women's lives. Just when your career seems to be taking hold--BOOM!--you're spending five or six pretty intense years wiping bottoms and wiping tears. Or, maybe you have your kids on the early side and, when jobs beckon you back, there is nothing on your resume to catch anyone's eye, so you end up with a dull job, a job with no leadership potential.

I have no doubt that both Hillary Clinton and Caroline Kennedy were able to fulfill the posts that they sought and, for different reasons did not get. I do not doubt, either, that Obama will be a better President, that Clinton was a better Senator than C. Kennedy.

It just feels more democratic, better, more redemptive, and more politically right to have elected someone who fought for the post out of intelligence, canniness, and good policy.

It's too bad that we're still a long way from having a path for women that permits a Barack Obama to emerge.

Cost by Roxana Robinson

Back in August, Lauren sent me Roxana Robinson’s Cost with a note saying that she couldn’t resist sending me a book about a professor.

That interested me. Cost had been getting a lot of press for being (or not sufficiently being) a book about addiction. Addiction isn’t a big theme of interest for me. But I am enough of a narcissist to enjoy the occasional novel about a professor. And, having returned from our annual sojourn on the St. Lawrence River (remote and cheaper than Maine), I was intrigued by the story of a college professor spending her sabbatical at a tumbledown Maine house that she can ill afford. It seemed a nice way to extend the summer, to ease the ache of leaving the River behind.

I absolutely gobbled this book. I cannot explain why it’s taken four months for me to blog about it. Clearly, I’m not cut out for a career in publicity or reviewing. I’m poky. Still I remember getting up at 5:00 one morning and hiding in the bathroom, racing through the book’s tense final half before the children began stirring. Cost starts out dreamy, sleepy and very WASPy. But it builds to a real plot-driven climax with some suspense. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but this is a novel that earns its exciting ending.

Levi has written about the novel’s parallels with King Lear: the protagonist has two sons, a kindly one who suffers because the (possible) bastard son sucks all the attention and energy from the family.

I heard the parallels to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The protagonist, Julia Lambert (itself a Woolfian name—Woolf’s mother was a Julia), a divorced mother of two sons, is a painter, up for tenure after years of adjuncting in order to raise her children. Like Lily Briscoe, she works and works at paintings that no one seems to believe in, hoping to have “her vision.” The notion of a summer house, too, is at the heart of both books: a place to retreat from the world’s cares. And, in both books, the world—in the form of violence, illness, danger, mortality, and death itself—intrudes, reminding the privileged ordinary characters that there is no safe place.

It’s a really smart book, with moments of great humor. I loved all the ways the title itself gained resonance: the house was a major part of the divorce settlement, its cost an issue between the estranged couple. There’s a cost, too, to putting your career on hold for children. And the cost of the adulteries that brought the marriage down is high. Then, as the second son, maybe conceived during an affair, descends into heroin addiction, the costs mount and mount. How much for heroin? How much for treatment? How much had we saved for the other son to go to law school? What will it cost to explain that cruel choice to the kind son who had been promised help?

The literary foundations that undergird the story, the Woolf, the Shakespeare, are not showing off but genuinely enriching intertexts. The writing is lovely, neither pretentious nor very experimental.

Anyway, Cost has been sitting staring at me all fall from its corner of the apartment, asking “When are you going to tell people about me?” Consider yourself told.

Inauguration Celebration

I must admit, the Rick Warren debacle took the wind out of my sails. I tried to view it pragmatically, but the anger and pain in the voice of a good friend washed all those excuses away. Her sense of having been betrayed--just as she (a Hillary supporter) always knew she would be--, that same sense of defeat and betrayal among many of my friends, added to my own disappointment, were too hard to overcome for much of Christmas.

That flatness has faded. I am excited again. I read on Jezebel that Obama’s letter to his daughters in Parade magazine was unbelievably adorable; Girls Write Now’s Twitter feed confessed to tearing up. On the strength of that, I decided to read it. But it didn’t come up on my iPhone before the train drifted out of range. I read it aloud to my 6 y.o. daughter as part of her bedtime reading, tears streaming down my face. She thought it was nice, but beloved children are used to hearing our outsized hopes for them and their future. It’s the grown-ups, parents or not, who understand the odds against those dreams coming true and the faith it takes to commit yourself to working toward dreams in spite of those odds.

The next day, I asked her to write a letter to the President. She came up with a sweet, noir note that makes Jersey City sound like Dodge:

"Dear Presudint Obama I am vere happy that you are going to be our
Presudint love Olivia age 6
In a town wer crims are arownd evre cornr ples make those crims stop."
That is, in conventional spelling:
Dear President Obama, I am very happy that you are going to be our President….In a town where crimes are around every corner, please make theose crimes stop.”

I find this both odd and dear: not a letter for the ages, not really about a top pressing issue for the nation or even for our lives here. Still, I’ll stick it in an envelope with our fervent prayers for some of the promises of this election to be fulfilled.

I have been thinking since November about what this Obama victory means. Those thoughts are on two tracks: one is about race and identity, one is about competence and ideas. As for competence and ideas, I am moved and humbled and also angered to feel the tremendous relief of knowing that Obama’s election brings some grown-ups back to Washington. On the one hand, he calls us to be more engaged in our country. On the other, I can relax in the assurance that my President is not actively seeking ways to begin wars, to circumvent the Constitution, to ignore the entrenched problems of poverty.

As for race and identity, I am so relieved to move a new generation into the White House. It’s moving and meaningful to me, as the working mother of two little girls, to think that my concerns are not far at all from their concerns. For all that is incredible, outsized, and amazing about the Obamas, I have more in common with them than with any other First Family in U.S. history. Selfishly, this makes me hopeful that issues that matter to me will also naturally occur to him to work on. But I have not failed to notice race, of course. And that matters more than I can say with any great intelligence or insight.

I do however, think about two crucial facts of my elementary school days and how different they will be from now on: Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month. Both celebrations, central to my schooling forever, were always accompanied by some grouchy, skeptical racist mumbling from somewhere in the back of the room. Now, think how that curriculum can change to shut up the doubters. Even in the most conservative corner of the most conservative state, the narrative has a happy and victorious chapter. This is not the whole story, by any means, but it’s a useful piece, especially for those children under ten: to be able to say, “….and then, 40 years after 1968, Barack Obama was elected President.”

I keep thinking about the shoebox diorama I lovingly made in my 4th grade class. Toilet paper rolls for tree trunks, moss growing on the north side of the tree, Harriet Tubman running sure-footedly through the forest. What is Mrs. Goings thinking this week? What would Harriet Tubman make of this? I was raised on hope. I’m a sentimental West Coast girl. I can’t say this moment surprises me, but it moves me deeply and I do think it changes the world for the good in profound ways.

What will my daughters’ dioramas look like?

Woolf's Birthday Celebration in New York

Last week, I got an email from Kris Lundberg, the founder of a new nonprofit women's theater, Shakespeare's Sister. She wanted to know if a talk by her would be the kind of thing that would interest people at the Woolf conference (of course) and, by the way, did I know anyone who could give a 20-minute talk to open her celebration of Woolf's life? (but of course!) So, here it is, a staged reading of "Virginia" with a short talk by me to start it off! Please come & please do open your wallets w/the small $10 donation to help this exciting new company!

Here's the press release:

THE DRAMA BOOK SHOP
in association with the
SHAKESPEARE'S SISTER COMPANY
presents
a staged reading of
Edna O'Brien's award-winning stageplay
"Virginia"
in honor of Mrs. Woolf's 127th birthday
Sunday, January 25th at 12:30pm

Arthur Seelen Theater
Edna O'Brien's spectacular play encompasses Virginia Woolf's mercurial inner life, as well as the relationships of her three great loves: her husband, Leonard; her lover, Vita and her greatest writings. Ms. O'Brien touches the heart and captures the essence of Virginia's character and brilliant mind.

Running time is ninety minutes plus a post-performance Q&A with author, Anne Fernald; director, Joannie Mackenzie and SSC Artistic Director, Kris Lundberg. Directed by Joannie Mackenzie. Starring Kris Lundberg* as Virginia, David McCamish* as Leonard and Shelley Ray* as Vita *All performers appear courtesy of the Actors' Equity Association.

The Arthur Seelen Theater is located on the Ground Floor of the Drama Book Shop at 250 west 40th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue.

Event is free to the public with a suggested $10 donation
in support of the Shakespeare's Sister Company.

Tweet, tweet

Well, I have signed up for a Twitter account and it's a delicious time suck. You can sign up to "follow" me. It's not that interesting, I promise.

Still, you can go there and find all kinds of wonderful news and terrible things and links, like this one to a hilarious video parodying the process of getting a book published, from typewriter to bookstore. (Via Sarah Weinman) Oh, it's worth every second of its 3:37.

New Year, Same Site

Every time the thought of resolutions for 2009 passes through my mind, I can hear the sweet strains of Death Cab for Cutie, “So this is the new year. / I don’t feel any different.”

I don’t, and no wonder. I was all set to write a December post apologizing for light posting when I saw, thanks to the slightly new format here, that I wrote three more posts in 2008 than in 2007. 2006, the year I had a maternity leave, saw a handful more. In short, my reading and blogging life seems to fall in to a pretty distinct pattern, one that is a surprise only to me.

As for resolutions, I seem to have dropped into 2009 at a rocket's pace. Reflection time has been curtailed. On New Year’s Eve, we were visiting my mother-in-law in Utica, skiing Mt. McCauley in the Adirondacks. I fell asleep by 8:30 and we spent the first day of the New Year driving back down to the city. The next day, I thought I’d catch up here, but the toddler woke up with a raging ear infection. The following day was Saturday, thanks to penicillin, the ear infection had abated enough for us to go to the park where she was scratched by a squirrel! (She couldn’t resist feeding it some of the fish crackers that another toddler had dropped on the ground. I said NO! but she is 2: "No" means, "Try it for yourself.") It turns out, one ER visit later, that squirrels don't carry rabies. Good to know.

All of this to say that I’ve been reading Scott’s series on reading resolutions and Sarah’s amazing accounts of daily books with interest, but the most I seem able to do is an occasional update to my twitter feed.

But, now the semester begins and it’s that lovely new moment in which I feel like this is the semester when the work won’t get away from me….so, Alison Light, Tanguy Viel, Eloisa James, Jean Rhys: it’s hard to know where I’ll go next, but there’s a lot awaiting the telling.

ISO: Writers Who Read Woolf

At the 19th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference (June 4-7, 2009, Fordham University, Lincoln Center), I want to feature some creative writers who will talk about Woolf's influence, for good and ill, on their work. I especially want those writers to not be all nice white women. If you or someone you know has an interest in participating, please be in touch with me and my graduate assistant at our conference address, woolf@fordham.edu.

We are already planning a plenary panel, hosted by Katherine Lanpher, host of Barnes & Noble’s “Upstairs at the Square” featuring three artists and activists influenced by Woolf.

The conference will have about 225 attendees, Woolf scholars and English professors, mostly, but also students and common readers. We will have about 30 90-minute concurrent sessions (about 5 per session; about 6 sessions over the 4 days). Most of these will be reserved for academic papers, but everyone really enjoys the option to attend a reading and discussion in lieu of another panel on theory and Woolf.

Several creative writers have already submitted proposals to read but I am actively seeking more. I am especially interested in hearing proposals from men, from writers of color, and from anyone who reads Woolf but does not simply worship at her shrine.

So, if you’re a creative writer and would like to give a brief (15-20 minute) reading on a panel with other writers, please do consider submitting a proposal. You can find the Call for papers here. You can read anything you like, but your proposal should articulate how your work connects to Woolf and you should be prepared to discuss that in the Q & A.

The conference will have a book exhibit, staffed by Bluestockings Bookstore. We will be happy to have them stock your book.