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Archive for the ‘Virginia Woolf Miscellany’ Category

One of the benefits of being a member of the International Virginia Society is receiving copies of the society’s publication, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

AnneMarie Bantzinger

The latest installment, Issue 98, is now online. It features the special topic “The First Thirty Annual (International) Conferences on Virginia Woolf,” edited by AnneMarie Bantzinger.

The collection, solicited in 2019, offers a collage of reminiscences and memories that evoke the conference experiences from multiple perspectives, those of organizers and participants.

Among them is one I wrote about the 2009 conference in New York City. I’m sharing it here.

Woolf and the City: Wow!

For a girl born in Brooklyn, transplanted to Ohio at the age of three, and engaged in a longtime love affair with both Virginia Woolf and New York, could there be anything better than a Woolf conference in New York City? I think not.

Conference organizer Anne Fernald and Megan Branch, Fordham student, at Woolf and the City

And that is why “Wow!” was my immediate reaction to Woolf and the City, the 19th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ten years later that is still my emotional response when I think of that 2009 event, which is why I chose the New York City conference as my personal hands-down favorite among the ten Woolf conferences I have attended.

Held June 4-7 at Fordham University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and organized by Anne Fernald, the conference was the second I had attended. But it was the first one I wrote about on Blogging Woolf, the site I created in July of 2007. Now, those blog posts, including one aptly titled “In the aftermath of Woolf and the City, one word — Wow!” help me recall the high points of the conference I described as “dynamite.”

Notable scholars, authors, readers

It featured 50 panels, attracted 200 Woolf scholars and common readers from around the globe, and introduced me to notable authors I never dreamed I would meet.

Ruth Gruber at Woolf and the City

One was Dr. Ruth Gruber, who died in 2016. Ninety-seven at the time of the conference, she was known as a journalist, photographer, and the author of Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman (1935).

She shared fascinating stories of her 1930s experiences as a journalist who visited the Soviet Arctic and a writer who met Virginia and Leonard Woolf in their Tavistock Square flat.

I remember chatting with this redhead curbside as she patiently waited for the cab that would take her home.

Novel writer and keynote speakers

Susan Sellers

Another was Susan Sellers, author of Vanessa and Virginia, the novel based on the relationship between sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, which was receiving rave reviews in the US at the time. I recall her graciousness as she signed books and chatted with readers.

Others I listened to, but did not meet, included keynote speaker Rebecca Solnit, a prolific author whose work is so timely and compelling today, and Tamar Katz of Brown University who spoke about the importance of “pausing and waiting” in life and in Woolf.

From a walking stick to rock music

What else struck my fancy? Here’s the list:

  • A visit to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, where we were treated to a private viewing of pieces in the Virginia Woolf collection, including the walking stick rescued from the River Ouse after her death. Being there felt more sacred than church.
  • A performance of the 2004 play Vita and Virginia, written by Dame Eileen Atkins and directed by Matthew Maguire, director of Fordham’s theatre program.
  • A performance that combined rock-out music from an L.A. band called Princeton with dance from the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre as the group performed cuts from its four-song album “Bloomsbury” based on the lives of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey.
  • And, of course, the cherished presence of Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson and their collection of Bloomsbury Heritage Series monographs, including my first, which debuted at that conference — Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Her Diaries and Three of Her Novels — making Woolf and the City extra memorable.

Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson at Woolf and the City in 2009

 

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The latest issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany is now online. Issue 93, Fall/Winter 2018 has been posted to WordPress at this link.

Guest-edited by Michael Lackey and Todd Avery, the issue focuses on the special topic of Virginia Woolf and Biofiction. In addition, the issue features a section dedicated to Jane Marcus Feminist University: The Document Record, the event honoring Jane Marcus that was organized by J. Ashley Foster, Cori L. Gabbard and Conor Tomás Reed and held at CUNY Graduate Center on Sept. 9, 2016. 

Also included in the issue are book reviews by Danielle Gilman, Steve Ferebee, Elisa Bolchi, Jeanette McVicker, and Stephen Barkway as well as the Call for Papers for the 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, organized by Drew Shannon.

Other issues of the VWM can be found on the Virginia Woolf Mischellany website.

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The deadline is extended to Sept. 30 for the call for papers for an upcoming issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany focused on “Collecting Woolf.” Get the details.

In addition to more formal academic essays, the issue will collaborate with Blogging Woolf to feature a special section called “Our Bookshelves, Ourselves.”

Our book collections tell stories about our reading lives and also about our lives in the larger community of Woolf?s readers and scholars. In fact, a history of our bookshelves might begin to tell a history of the International Virginia Woolf Society itself.

If you are a “common book collector,” and your books tell a story about your immersion in Woolf or Hogarth Press studies, tell us about it. If you have interesting strategies or stories about acquiring collectible editions of Woolf and Hogarth Press books on a budget, let us know!

Send submissions of 2,000 words for longer essays and 500 words for “Our Bookshelves” by Sept. 30, 2018, to Catherine Hollis via hollisc@berkeley.edu

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The new deadline of June 30 has been set for the upcoming  special issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany (#92, Fall 2017). It seeks essays considering Woolf’s oeuvre in dialogue with works by Native American, First Nations, Australian, and New Zealander authors, among others.

Questions to consider:

  • What kind of dialogic emerges when placing Woolf’s writings alongside those of indigenous writers?
  • How might indigenous literatures enhance interpretations of Woolf’s modernist, feminist, and pacifist poetics?
  • How might such comparisons affect or inform understandings of subjectivity in women’s lives and literature, and the interconnections between narrative innovation and socio-political activism?
  • Does Woolf’s ecological vision align with those of indigenous writers responding to threats of global destruction and mass extinctions?
  • Could such comparative and intersectional work chip away at the boundaries still often imposed upon literary studies-the “West” versus the “Rest”?

Other approaches are welcome.

How to submit: Please send submissions of no more than 2,500 words, including notes and works cited, in the latest version of Word to: Kristin Czarnecki, kristin_czarnecki@georgetowncollege.edu.

Deadline for submission: Extended to June 30.

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Here is a call for papers for a special topics issue (#92, Fall 2017) of the Virginia Woolf vw miscellany summer 15Miscellany on Woolf and Indigenous Literatures:

Virginia Woolf and Indigenous Literatures

This issue of VWM seeks essays that consider Woolf’s oeuvre in dialogue with works by Native American, First Nations, Australian, and New Zealander authors, among others.

  • What kind of dialogic emerges when placing Woolf’s writings alongside those of indigenous writers?
  • How might indigenous literatures enhance interpretations of Woolf’s modernist, feminist, and pacifist poetics?
  • How might such comparisons affect or inform understandings of subjectivity in women’s lives and literature, and the interconnections between narrative innovation and socio-political activism?
  • Does Woolf’s ecological vision align with those of indigenous writers responding to threats of global destruction and mass extinctions?
  • Could such comparative and intersectional work chip away at the boundaries still often imposed upon literary studies—the “West” versus the “Rest”?
  • Other approaches are welcome.

How to Submit: Please send submissions of no more than 2,500 words, including notes and works cited, in the latest version of Word to: Kristin Czarnecki, kristin_czarnecki@georgetowncollege.edu.

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2017.

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