A Tribute to Barbara Oliver (1927–2013)

This week the San Francisco Bay Area received the very sad news that the wonderful actor, director, and arts administrator Barbara Oliver passed away on May 20, 2013. Barbara cofounded the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California, and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. This blog is dedicated to Barbara. 

                                                              Barbara Oliver

Here is a tribute to Barbara from one of her close collaborators, the writer Dorothy Bryant, author of the play Dear Master (which Barbara appeared in) and numerous novels, including the amazing The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Confessions of Madame Psyche.

“The idea for Aurora Theatre Company began in the late 1980s with a luncheon conversation with Barbara (just turned 60) about the paucity of plays featuring older leading ladies. In my ignorance I offered to write a two person ‘reading’ based on the friendship between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. (I had no idea of the work and the cost of what seemed like a modest effort to fill some time before Barbara got another role with a ‘real theater.’)

“A year of research later, plus another year of mostly unpaid public readings (followed by my rewriting) by Barbara and Ken Grantham (and other actors) transformed this ‘dialogue’ into a play, performed successfully at the Berkeley City Club, (where she [Barbara] was a trusted member), and the beginning of Aurora Theatre Company. Her achievement was monumental—a fact I learned (knowing nothing about how a play went from page to stage) as we moved along. I would never have attempted such a thing without Barbara’s staunch belief that it could work, and her willingness to do these readings, her incredible savvy about climbing all the hurdles to production, her use of contacts built by solid respect for her work at Berkeley Rep and other theaters. She was totally creative and totally practical. Whenever we hit a snag that might have made others give up, she would nod thoughtfully and then work her way toward a solution.

"Thanks to her I wrote five more plays that were performed here and in other cities. Barbara had taken what had seemed like a setback and transformed it into an opportunity to display and use all of her talents, which, with her quiet, unassuming manner, few people knew she possessed. I learned a lot from her.”

My own connection with Barbara also began through the play Dear Master. I was teaching a summer literature class for high school students at UC Berkeley in 1995, and we were reading a translation I’d done of the novel Horace by George Sand, and a novella by Flaubert. To make that period come to life for the students, I persuaded the university to host a reading of Dear Master, with Barbara recreating her role as George Sand. Barbara was so moving and wise and memorable in that part. She embodied George Sand.

After that Barbara supported my efforts at playwriting, which were very rough at the beginning. I was working on a play that consisted mostly of dramatic monologues, and Barbara gently informed me at one point, “It sometimes helps if the characters talk to one another when they’re onstage.” She was infinitely patient and read draft after draft of my plays, but she never failed to let me know when I could do better—had to do better. Barbara was a fantastic and enormously generous mentor, and she had a great respect for writers.

After retiring from the Aurora Theatre, Barbara couldn’t stop developing new plays, and she founded a reading series called Four New Ones, where each year she planned to direct staged readings of plays in progress. She only got through the first year because of commitments to act and direct for other companies.

She directed several staged readings of another play of mine, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved. I admired the way that Barbara worked with the actors, choosing people she respected highly, and letting them find their way into their roles.

I had a chance this week to speak with Barbara’s daughter, Anna Oliver, who is a costume designer. Anna shared a few of her memories of her mom.

“My mom’s dad was a missionary, a Northern Baptist preacher. When she was three years old, my mom went with my grandpa and grandma to India. She came back to the U.S. when she was seven, speaking Hindi.

“When my mom was very young she used to listen the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Sunday afternoons. She wanted to be an opera singer. It was outside the norm for the world she grew up in to go on stage.

“There were several roles she performed that she talked a lot about. Studying drama at Carnegie Tech, she played Cordelia in King Lear. One of the roles she was most challenged by but most glad she did was in The Chairs by Ionesco, at the Aurora Theatre. She also enjoyed doing The Gin Game there opposite my dad, Bill Oliver, though it was somewhat harrowing because my dad was ill.

“In her directing, she did a lot of George Bernard Shaw, and adored it. She also directed Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Aurora—that was Babs at her best. She was very happy with the production of Wilder Times [short plays by Thornton Wilder] that she directed at the Aurora in 2012. The short Wilder play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden—a lot of that was informed by Barbara. She knew those folks.

“My mom always said that theater is a three-legged stool—the play, the production, and the audience. It can’t stand without all three of those. What struck me about her perspective was how much the audience mattered. My mom cared so much about writers and language, but theatre for her was communication to a purpose—to connect with an audience.

“She was generous and gracious, but it wasn’t all selfless. She did it because she loved the theater. She genuinely believed in the transformative power of theater.”

Interview with Liliana Heker

This blog is an exclusive interview with the wonderful Argentine fiction writer Liliana Heker. Thanks to Andrea G. Labinger for translating the interview.

                                                         Liliana Heker

ZR: I've read that you studied physics when you were younger. How did that influence your writing?

LH: I think that although my study of physics has left some traces in my literature, the real significant influence must be traced back to the fact that in my adolescence, a time when writing began to be my essential activity, I chose to specialize in physics. As it happens, ever since I’ve had use of reason, both predilections, mathematics and literature, have been very strongly apparent in me. Beginning at the age of four I can recall making up stories, feeding voraciously on the stories people told me or read to me, as well as those I listened to in secret, and later, when I learned to read, devouring fiction. And at the same time, by age four I see myself trying to provide a rational explanation for everything that surrounds me and turns out to be inexplicable. At school I was good at writing compositions and nearly infallible in math. In adolescence, it seemed natural for me to express everything that was excess and madness through writing, but (perhaps for that very reason) it never occurred to me to choose literature as a formal course of study.

ZR: What changed, then, to make writing your career?

LH: For me writing was a place of freedom, where I could discover and reveal myself exactly as I was. I didn’t hesitate to choose physics as a major because scientific thought was a passion of mine and because, somehow, I felt that this type of thought could contain me and help me get organized. At sixteen I entered the College of Exact Sciences and, at the same time, began to work for a literary magazine, El grillo de papel (The Paper Cricket) and write my first short stories. At twenty-one, with one book of short stories nearly complete, I left the College of Exact Sciences because I realized that I was still passionate about science, but I had nothing to contribute (to create) in that field. Where I really did have something personal to contribute was in writing, in which I could express even my scientific self. And that’s what I think has happened. In several of my short stories, and also in my novel Zona de clivaje (Cleavage Zone), the character who tries to organize reality logically appears at the forefront and is challenged.

ZR: What other ways did your study of the sciences affect your writing?

LH: As I’ve already intimated, my study of physics made concrete contributions to my writing. Above all, it has refined my ability to structure and organize both fiction and essays. But it has also made very concrete contributions in terms of acquired knowledge. In my works of fiction the reader will detect that Entropy, the Uncertainty Principle, or the planes of cleavage form a natural part of my experience. And in the novel The End of the Story, the College of Exact Sciences appears as an unavoidable locale. In short, I think that one very chaotic, nonsensical area and another, very rational and systematic one, coexist within me, and as far as I can tell, it’s a fairly peaceful coexistence.

ZR: Do you have a theory about why Argentina has given birth to so many short story writers over the last century? I think about Japan, how it has given us so many great short poems—haiku, tanka. It seems as though a country can specialize in a particular literary genre, but why?

LH: As you very correctly point out, Zack, Argentina is a country of notable short story writers. Even a tremendous novelist like Roberto Arlt has written exceptional short stories, and Borges, the canonical Argentine writer, didn’t need to write a novel in order to attain that status. I think, rather, that there are a number of factors, sometimes interconnected, favoring the abundance and excellence of short story writers in Argentina. I’ll mention a few. 1) Unlike what happened in other Latin American countries, in Argentina, in the beginning, there was very little influence from Spanish literature (which is very lush and has little to do with the austerity of the short story), and on the other hand, a great deal of influence from English and French, and later, North American literature, three literatures in which the short story has been very important.  2) In the River Plate region we have had, in my opinion, the first great short story writer in Latin American literature: Horacio Quiroga. Quiroga was born in Uruguay (another country with notable short story writers) and lived nearly all his life in Argentina. He was a bad novelist, and in every sense, a master of the short story, since he didn’t just write remarkable stories; he also wrote masterfully about the secrets of the genre. In his Decálogo del perfecto cuentista (Ten Commandments for the Perfect Short Story Writer), he points out those whom he considers to be the masters of the genre: Poe, de Maupassant, Chekhov, Kipling (a selection that illustrates what I said earlier). 3) In Argentina there is, by and large, a starker, less exuberant countryside than in other regions of Latin America, a phenomenon that, in a complex way, influences the choice of worlds and narrative styles. 4) There is a type of speech and syntax (connected, in turn, with a unique way of seeing reality and a predisposition to irony and doubles entendres) that perhaps draws us Argentines to the unique effect the short story presents. No doubt these are approximations or points of departure to try to understand this phenomenon. The fact is, in Argentina there are great masters of the genre and several generations of noteworthy writers of short stories, which makes it more likely that new writers will write short stories. For various and complex reasons that exceed the limits of this response, a short story tradition has become ingrained in Argentina and that trait, literarily speaking, makes us who we are.

ZR: Could you say something about how your family came to Argentina?

LH: My maternal grandparents arrived as children in 1889 on the Weser, a mythical ship that brought the first [Eastern European] Jewish immigrants to Argentina that same year, those who established the first colonies in Entre Ríos and Santa Fe. My great-aunts and uncles were “Entrerrianos” (from the province of Entre Ríos); the first to be born in Buenos Aires was my mother. My paternal grandparents arrived in 1905 at La Pampa, with my father, who was a newborn baby, and two other small children. All of them came from Russia, from the Ukraine area. I don’t know much more than that.

For more on Liliana Heker, please see this blog.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Liliana Heker: A Writer We Should All Know

Scanning the shelves of the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library one day, hungry for good fiction, I ran across Liliana Heker’s The Stolen Party. The book is a collection of short stories translated from Spanish by Alberto Manguel. Rarely does it happen that I make a selection almost at random in a library and end up dazzled. But dazzled I was.

                                                           Liliana Heker

Several of the stories in that book were among the most memorable I’ve ever read. Heker is a master of magical realism, but she has her own take on it. The first story in the book, “Georgina Requini: or the Chosen One,” telescopes the entire life of a wannabe actress into 30 pages. It’s breathtaking, zooming from one phase of the main character’s life to the next, in and out of her fantasies, so we rarely know where and when the action takes place until we get our bearings a couple of sentences into each episode. That puzzle is one of the most fun aspects of the story. But this disorientation also mirrors the main character’s bewilderment about how her fate plays out. The story is a technical tour de force, warping the space/time continuum, but it’s also deeply moving and knowing, a combination that magical realism doesn’t always deliver.

The title story of The Stolen Party is also amazing. More in the vein of naturalist fiction, it tells the tale of a nine-year-old girl who is the daughter of a maid, but gets invited to the birthday party of the girl whose family employs her mother. I won’t give away the shocking ending.

Julio Cortázar, like Heker, an Argentine master of fiction, said about her writing, “Liliana Heker is a magician. She turns little daily objects and trivial events into pieces of gold. She is wise, she is frightening. She must be read, she must be read.”

Also available in English is Heker’s novel about the period of the dictatorship and the Dirty War in Argentina, The End of the Story, translated by Andrea Labinger. The novel caused a stir both on the left and the right, because one of the revolutionary characters is subjected to torture, turns informant, and then becomes the lover of her torturer.

Heker was born in Buenos Aires in 1943 to a family that emigrated from Europe. In response to a question about her roots, Heker responded: “My maternal grandparents arrived as children in 1889 on the Weser, a mythical ship that brought the first Jewish immigrants to Argentina” from Eastern Europe. Her ancestors settled in Entre Ríos province, home of the Jewish gauchos.

Interestingly, Heker began her academic career as a student of physics. That might explain her comfort in playing with the rules of time and space in her fiction. She was also a literary prodigy, publishing her first stories at the age of 17. She’s well known in Argentina for cofounding two important literary journals: El Escarabajo de Oro (The Golden Beetle), and El Ornitorrinco (The Platypus). Her work has been translated into numerous languages, and fortunately for us, English is one of them.

My next blog will be an exclusive interview with Liliana Heker, featuring information not available elsewhere in English.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Part 4, Part 5
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Writers I Can’t Stop Reading, Part 6: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) grew up in small towns in the state of Maine in the U.S.A. Millay’s mother was her only parent for most of her upbringing, and the family was so poor that Millay and her two sisters would sometimes ice skate in the living room on the water that had flooded their house from a nearby creek and had frozen. 

      Edna St. Vincent Millay by Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village

 

Millay's mother was a visiting nurse who was often gone from the family. An intelligent, self-educated woman, Millay’s mother instilled in her three daughters a love of learning and poetry, as well as providing a strong role model. Here’s Millay’s tribute to her mother:

The courage that my mother had

Went with her, and is with her still:

Rock from New England quarried;

Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore

She left behind for me to wear;

I have no thing I treasure more:

Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me

The thing she took into the grave!—

That courage like a rock, which she

Has no more need of, and I have.

By an odd set of circumstances, Edna St. Vincent Millay became a famous poet at the age of nineteen by losing a literary contest. She entered her poem “Renascence” in a contest called The Lyric Year, something like The Best Poems of… series that is published today. The judges wanted to pick Millay’s poem for the first prize, but when it became known that the winner was an unknown young woman from a small town, they changed their minds and gave her the fourth prize. A judge who opposed the decision publicized his grievance, and the ensuing scandal made Millay a literary celebrity, as well as helping her to gain a full scholarship to Vassar College.

Millay (who went by the nickname “Vincent”) went on from there to conquer Greenwich Village’s literary bohemia. She wrote startling poetry that embodied the values of the Roaring 20s and the radical 1930s: free love, opposition to World War I, support for the republic in the Spanish Civil War. Here is her Sonnet CXXVIII, with its frank confessions:

I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex,

Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,

Leaving the lofty tower I labored at

For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex

With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks

Of neighbors sitting where their mothers sat

Are well aware of shadowy this and that

In me, that’s neither noble nor complex.

Such as I am, however, I have brought

To what it is, this tower; it is my own;

Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought

From what I had to build with: honest bone

Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;

And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

I keep going back to Millay’s poetry, partly because she is such an unapologetic advocate of passion, but with so many nuances—check out the word "anguish" in the penultimate line of this sonnet. I also read her poems over and over because she chooses such unusual and modern topics, curiously combined with a retro love for and mastery of the sonnet form, particularly the very continental Petrarchan sonnet, while most English-language poets favor the Shakespearean. This is one of my favorite sonnets of Millay’s, because it contains such a modern sensibility in an ornately carved ivory box:

Sonnet XLIII

Still will I harvest beauty where it grows:

In coloured fungus and the spotted fog

Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog

Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows

Of rust and oil, where half a city throws

Its empty tins; and in some spongy log

Whence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog….

And a black pupil in the green scum shows.

Her the inhabiter of diverse places

Surmising at all doors, I push them all.

Oh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge

Turn back forevermore with craven faces,

I tell you Beauty bears an ultra fringe

Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!

This is not just a poem about pretty, little moments. It’s about seeking and still finding beauty in a world where pollution and urban life deposit “rust and oil” in nature. The last four lines contain a challenge to anyone who refuses to see that our era, flawed by progress though it may be, is still a time of great beauty, beauty that might be more “ultra” (what a great word!) than what came before.

Millay was also a philosopher. Her literary work features five plays in verse, including Conversations at Midnight, where a group of men conduct an after-dinner Platonic dialogue over whiskey and cigars, discussing politics, art, and other topics. The play has an interesting history. Millay wrote a draft of it while on a road trip in Florida with her husband in 1936. The two of them checked into their room at a hotel and went for a walk. As they returned from their stroll, they noticed a column of smoke rising in the air. The hotel had burned down, along with her manuscript. Millay had to recreate the entire script from memory.

Among Millay’s more philosophical works, I like many of her later sonnets where she contemplates the large questions—the place of humanity in the long history of Earth and in the cosmos. Here is her Sonnet CXXIV, again featuring the moon:

Enormous moon, that rise behind these hills

Heavy and yellow in a sky unstarred

And pale, your girth by purple fillets barred

Of drifting cloud, that as the cool sky fills

With planets and the brighter stars, distills

To thinnest vapor and floats valley-ward,—

You flood with radiance all this cluttered yard,

The sagging fence, the chipping window sills.

Grateful at heart as if for my delight

You rose, I watch you through a mist of tears,

Thinking how man, who gags upon despair,

Salting his hunger with the sweat of fright

Has fed on cold indifference all these years,

Calling it kindness, calling it God’s care.

Fascinating that she uses "rise" for the moon in line 1 and not "rises." I think she is addressing the moon—"you that rise." What is so haunting for me about this poem is that Millay refuses a sloppy faith in a caring divinity she cannot see in the skies. But this is not a bleak world she describes, despite the absence of a god or goddess to protect us. There are sagging fences and chipping window sills and tears of pity for the millennia of ignorance that came before. But Millay balances those imperfections with the plenitude of a twilight where the moon floats upward as “the cool sky fills/With planets and brighter stars...”

_____________________________________________

Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack”s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 5: June Jordan

There are so many qualities I admire in June Jordan’s work that it’s hard to know where to begin. 

                                                           June Jordan

I’ll start with the experience of hearing June read her poetry out loud. It was literally a physical sensation. Hearing her read, there were times when I would laugh as hard as I ever have—June was one of the funniest human beings I’ve known. At other times I thought I was going to burst out sobbing, and I couldn’t hold back a few tears. Sometimes I got goose bumps, and the hair on my arms stood up. Other passages in her poetry were incredibly sexy. It wasn’t like the experience of hearing any other poet. Why?

June committed herself to her readings like no one else She believed 100% in what she was saying in her writing. Maybe that’s how she had the courage to stand up in front of a large audience and read in a dialect of English—Black English—that most people just considered wrong. June helped to revive and honor Black English as a literary medium, and she wrote gracefully and adamantly about its beauty and unique grammar. In her essay written in 1972, “White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation,” from her book Civil Wars, June quotes Shakespeare’s Elizabethan diction and concludes, “Now that ain hardly standard English.” She asserts that “…the Elizabethan, nonstandard English of Romeo and Juliet has been adjudged, by the powerful, as something students should tackle and absorb. By contrast, the Black, nonstandard language of my novel, His Own Where, has been adjudged, by the powerful, as substandard and even injurious to young readers.” She was not afraid to measure her English against Shakespeare’s.

Maybe June Jordan could evoke such a response from her audience because she spoke out against crimes and injustices that you just weren’t supposed to talk about in polite company. She championed the rights of so many, from Puerto Rican and Palestinian independence to blacks who experienced police violence.

Maybe she reached that level in her readings because her way of living was a full-court press. She knew she had only a limited time to make her points, and she made them regardless of what anyone else thought she should be saying. June resisted being pigeon-holed in any way: “Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?/And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.” (from “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades” in her book Passion)

At a time when many writers and literary critics in the U.S.A. regarded love poetry as a naive throwback to Edna St. Vincent Millay and the flapper era of the Roaring 20s, June took to heart the work of writing great poems of passion. She looked not to T.S. Eliot and the New Critics and as her role models, but to Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman.

Part of the appeal of her writing is her amazingly musical sense for language. While she was an undergraduate at Barnard College, June studied piano with a faculty member at the Julliard School of Music. She was at that level in her instrumental talents. Given the musicality of her poetry, it’s not surprising that June collaborated with a stellar array of composers, including Leonard Bernstein, Bernice Johnson Reagon, John Adams, and Adrienne Torf. Here are some of the concluding lines of her great poem, “On a New Year’s Eve”:

but all alive and all the lives

persist perpetual

in jeopardy

persist

as scarce as every one of us

as difficult to find

or keep

as irreplaceable

as frail

as every one of us…

all things are dear
that disappear

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Part 4 

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 4: Virginia Woolf

Next on my list of writers I can’t stop reading is Virginia Woolf. No one can get inside the thoughts of characters like Woolf. She shows how luminous a brief moment in human life can be, in all its nuances. Her ear for language is flawless. All her metaphors still feel as new today as water.

                                                          Virginia Woolf

One book of hers that’s rarely read that I like a lot is Flush: A Biography, which is not at all a biography. It’s the story of the elopement of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, told from the point of view of her lapdog. Such a strange and beautiful premise, and only Virginia Woolf could actually make this work.

But my favorite novel of Woolf’s is Mrs. Dalloway. To bring to life one day among one circle of friends in the way that she does in that novel, with all the moral and emotional shadings that she exposes, is the literary equivalent of Renoir’s The Luncheon of the Boating Party. I suppose it’s no trick for an author to read the minds of the characters that author herself creates. But if those characters feel like real people, with the longings and failings of real people— the characters in Mrs. Dalloway—then yes, it is a feat to read their thoughts, to sympathize so deeply with such an array of human fates. There is something godlike in Woolf’s compassion and understanding, because it is so wide-ranging, and so wise.

Here’s one of my favorite passages from Mrs. Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway is lying down shortly before the party she is throwing that evening, trying to defend herself in her thoughts against the more intellectual and artistic Peter Walsh, the suitor of her youth, a man she refused:

"But suppose Peter said to her, 'Yes, yes, but your parties — what’s the sense of your parties?' all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out that life was all plain sailing?—Peter always in love, always in love with the wrong woman? What’s your love? she might say to him."

Why does Mrs. Dalloway call her party an offering, an explanation she doubts anyone will understand? Maybe her party is an offering to personal interactions between individuals, the sorts of interactions that happen at social gatherings such as parties. These interactions are not momentous, but they celebrate and build lasting emotional bonds. Woolf champions the importance of the everyday as opposed to the impulse toward the heroic or the earth-shattering event. It’s the small moments between people that count, both in Woolf’s writing, and in the lives of her characters.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 3: Willa Cather

I love the work of Willa Cather. I was introduced to her books by the children’s writer Marilyn Sachs, who pointed out to me that Cather is much deeper than the feel-good chronicler of the American West that middle school kids encounter when assigned My Ántonia or O Pioneers! Both of those are good novels by Cather, but they don’t compare with her more mature books such as A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House.

                                                   Willa Cather (1873–1947)

Cather was a late bloomer as a fiction writer. She earned her living during her early decades writing for, and then editing, women’s magazines. She didn’t really hit her stride as a novelist till she was in her fifties in the 1920s (a good lesson for those of us starting our writing projects later in life). Her work grew darker and more complex in that decade. You have to read all her books to get a sense of her incredible mastery of character, plot, and description.

She has an amazing eye for the unique characters and landscapes of the American West. Here’s a description from The Song of the Lark, one of her most autobiographical books: “Every rabbit that shot across the path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway thought, a message that one sent into the desert.” The topography is so specific to the West, and yet conveyed in a way that any reader can visualize.

Her descriptions are like portraits by a great painter: “Frizzy bangs were worn then, but Mrs. Kronberg always dressed her hair in the same way, parted in the middle, brushed smoothly back from her low, white forehead, pinned loosely on the back of her head in two thick braids. It was growing grey about the temples, but after the manner of yellow hair it seemed only to have grown paler there, and had taken on a colour like that of English primroses.” I love the primroses! This portrait gives you a strong sense of a woman who takes pride in herself without needing to be trendy, a woman who is not young, but is worthy of our attention. This passage is also from The Song of the Lark.

Cather certainly knows her characters, their quirks, and their beauty. Here’s her description from the same novel of Ray Kennedy, a railway worker: “Ray had a collection of good stories. He was observant, truthful, and kindly—perhaps the chief requisites in a good storyteller.” Tells us a lot about Cather’s own values as a writer. She goes on to describe Ray’s background: “Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had, almost from the time he ran away, tried to make good his loss. As a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters, and read instructive books with the help of a pocket dictionary.” What a great verb there, “worried”!

But there’s more: “By the light of many campfires he had pondered upon Prescott’s histories, and the words of Washington Irving, which he bought at a high price from a book agent.” No detail is without purpose. Every morsel of information tells how this man without means educated himself, and applied his keen mind to all he read. She tells us also about the complexity of Ray’s thoughts, and how knowledge was a two-edged sword for him: “Ray was a free-thinker, and inconsistently believed himself damned for being one. When he was braking down on the Santa Fé, at the end of his run he used to climb into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read Robert Ingersoll’s speeches and The Age of Reason.” Robert Ingersoll was a nineteenth century abolitionist and agnostic orator who delivered the eulogy at Walt Whitman’s funeral: “Whitman announced the gospel of the body,” said Ingersoll. The Age of Reason is Will Durant’s history of the Enlightenment. Even though Cather is creating a regional Western landscape, she is dealing with the larger issues of the day.

Cather’s novel A Lost Lady is also remarkable. The book has one of the most convincing male narrators any female author has ever created. Halfway through the plot, the reader has one impression of the main characters, for good reasons. Cather then turns the tables upside down, and by the end of the book, the reader comes to exactly opposite conclusions, also for good reasons. In The Professor’s House, published in 1925, she wrote about the Anasazi Indians with as much sympathy and understanding as any person of European descent has ever done. I can’t stop reading Willa Cather, because I can’t stop trying to absorb the many lessons that her books hold for writers.

I'm excited that the letters of Willa Cather, long unavailable, have recently been published. More writing by this great author, so long after her death, is great news.

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