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Archive for May, 2021

Come one, come all to the virtual 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf

Posted in 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, conferences, coronavirus, events, Virginia Woolf, tagged , on Saturday 29 May 2021| 1 Comment »

Come one, come all to the 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which for the first time will be held virtually via Zoom. Postponed last year due to COVID-19, the conference will be held online from June 10-13. And all are welcome.

On the bright side

While Woolfians won’t be able to meet in person this year, there is a bright side. This virtual conference will allow more folks from around the world to attend, something that some global attendees lobbied for when the last in-person conference was held in 2019. It will also allow those who cannot afford to travel from afar to be a part of things.

Profession and Performance, June 10-13

The Department of English will host the four-day virtual event at the University of South Dakota. The theme of the conference, “Profession and Performance,” brings together two significant terms.

The first term, profession, mattered deeply to Woolf. It calls to mind not only her sense of herself as a writer but also the set of specialized occupations she addresses in “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) and “Three Guineas” (1938), areas of study and livelihood traditionally reserved for the sons of educated men.

The second term, performance, invokes the Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf’s commitment over the past three decades to the arts, to theater, to music, to the spoken word and to their resonances with the performance and performativity of Woolf’s life and writing.

Attend one or all

Since the conference is on Zoom, you can register, download the program, and attend as few or as many of the panel discussions and plenary events as you like. Plenary sessions feature:

  • A roundtable with Mark Hussey (Pace U), Urmila Seshagiri (U of Tennessee–Knoxville), Drew Shannon (Mount Saint Joseph U), and Jean Moorcroft Wilson (U of London)
  • Monumental Close Reading: Entering the “The Mark on The Wall” as an

    Ane Thon Knutsen with her hand-printed volume “A Printing Press of One’s Own,” introduced at the 2017 Woolf conference.

    Immersive Installation—Word by Word, Print by Print with Ane Thon Knutsen (Oslo National Academy of the Arts)

  • Performance Double Feature: “The Party” and . . . a surprise with Ellen McLaughlin, Kathleen Chalfant, and Drew Shannon
  • Still Very Precarious: Reprising Woolf’s “Think we must” with Carrie Rohman
    (Lafayette College)

Cost

Fees range from $15 for one day to $50 for the full conference.

Get some swag

A wide variety of conference swag — from stickers to mugs to T-shirts to posters decorated with the conference graphic — is available. Get it here.

More information

If you have questions, contact the conference organizer, Benjamin Hagen, at Benjamin.Hagen@usd.edu. Follow the hashtag #vwoolf2021 on Twitter.

 

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Alice Lowe on aging quotes Dorothy Parker, Virginia Woolf

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , , on Sunday 23 May 2021| Leave a Comment »

An essay by Blogging Woolf contributor Alice Woolf published May 19 on (mac)ro(mic) discusses a dreaded topic — aging — and includes the views of Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf.

Alice Lowe

Woolf used to address her future self—old Virginia—in her diary; days before her death she reminded herself to “observe the oncome of age. — Lowe

Lowe has written about Woolf and aging before. In 2017 she connected Woolf with aging, writing, and her own decision to get a tattoo.

Besides writing for Blogging Woolf, Lowe blogs at aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com. Her flash prose has appeared this past year in Hobart, JMWW, Door Is a Jar, Sleet, Anti-Heroin Chic, and BurningWord. She’s had citations in Best American Essays and nominations for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net.

 

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Verdict as USA TODAY fact-checks Woolf quote: False

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf online, Woolf quote, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , , , on Sunday 16 May 2021| Leave a Comment »

At a time when inaccurate information spreads like wildfire via social media, it’s refreshing to learn that a major media outlet is interested in fact checking something as seemingly minor as a literary quote, particularly one attributed to Virginia Woolf.

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life” was the quote attributed to Woolf and shared more than 300 times by a Facebook group called “English literature and Linguistics.”

USA TODAY on the hunt

Then USA TODAY noticed. And reporter Rick Rouan, based in Columbus, Ohio, started checking into it. On his own, he was unable to find a record of Woolf saying or writing those words.

So he contacted a couple of folks in the Woolf community, including Blogging Woolf and Benjamin Hagen, assistant professor of English at the University of South Dakota who is heading up this year’s Woolf conference and serves as president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.

Woolfians join the search

I searched my copy of Major Authors on CD-ROM: Virginia Woolf and found no such statement in Woolf’s work. But Hagen traced it to the 2002 film “The Hours,” which is based on Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same title, inspired by Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway.

The Facebook group that posted the quote Rouan investigated has apparently removed it from its page. Fact-checking information shared online is something USA TODAY does regularly, Rouan told me.

Read more about the hunt for the quote and its origins in “Fact check: Quote attributed to Virginia Woolf was in a movie, not her primary work.”

A collection of memes found in a Google search that include the quote falsely attributed to Woolf

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A Berkeley bookstore named after Mrs. Dalloway is for sale

Posted in bookstore, bookstores, Mrs. Dalloway, tagged on Monday 3 May 2021| Leave a Comment »

Want to own a bookstore named after Virginia Woolf’s most famous character? You can. The award-wining Mrs. Dalloway bookstore in Berkeley, Calif., is up for sale.

We first heard of the shop in September 2014, when we made reference to a blurb about its Woolf connections and its book recommendations. Now, after 17 years in business, the two owners of the shop named after Woolf’s 1925 novel have listed it for sale.

About the shop

Set in the center of Berkeley’s Elmwood shopping district on College Avenue, the shop expanded in 2009, nearly doubling its space while other stores were facing challenges.

According to the shop’s website, it was then able to create “a vibrant events program with readings from leading novelists, poets, biographers and garden writers from not only the Bay Area but all over the United States and beyond, about 100 per year.”

Read more in the Berkeleyside.

Calling potential buyers

If you or someone you know might be interested in buying Mrs. Dalloway’s and carrying on its proud tradition, you can visit the shop’s website and click on the Buyers Guide for information on submitting a proposal. Owners Marion Abbott and Ann Leyhe hope to accomplish the sale by this fall. You can reach the shop at sale@mrsdalloways.com.

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