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Anne Carson ponders Bloomsbury

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged Anne Caron, Mary Oliver, The New Yorker, Virginia Woolf on Friday 4 November 2016| 2 Comments »

I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I am partial to the work of Anne Carson and Mary Oliver (and often confuse the two). It’s no surprise that both have referenced Virginia Woolf in their poems, no doubt recognizing her as the poet she was even though she never wrote a line of verse as such.

Anne Carson has written very little prose, so her story in this week’s (Oct. 31) New Yorker is a lovely gift. “Back the Way You Went” is exquisite, a tiny gem, as it questions so many aspects of existence in a daughter’s reflections on her mother.

The narrator comments on a dishtowel she’s given her mother-in-law, “printed with cartoon cameos of Bloomsbury celebrities.” She’s thinking about her flawed communication with her own mother, recently deceased, their fear of breaking the silence that’s built up between them. She asks herself, “Are other families like this? I know I’m setting the bar high, but I cannot imagine it was ever the wrong time to talk in, say, Bloomsbury.” And yet Woolf may have seen it otherwise; Carson’s narrator goes on to recall a passage from “A Sketch of the Past”:

“We are sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality….”

She asks, “Was it Virginia Woolf who taught us to adore these floods of reality, without which we merely navigate a sea of convenience with other people?”

Even without Woolf, the story is stunning; with her it’s even more so, and, as always seems to be the case when Woolf is referenced in fiction, so appropriate, leading this Woolfian to think, “Well, yes, of course.”

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Virginia Woolf, Lidia Yuknavitch and gendered violence

Posted in 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, contemporary fiction, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Alice Lowe, Catherine Hollis, gendered violence, Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children, Virginia Woolf on Thursday 8 September 2016| Leave a Comment »

At the 26th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, scholar Catherine Hollis made the connection between Virginia Woolf and Lidia Yukavitch’s novel The Small Backs of Children in her paper, “Thinking Through Virginia Woolf: Woolf as Portal in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children.”

Hollis was part of a fascinating panel titled “Woolf’s Legacy to Female Writers,” along with Eva Mendez, who spoke about Alice Munro, and Amy Muse, who spoke about Sarah Ruhl.

Hollis also wrote a review of Yuknavitch’s novel for Public Books in which she connects it to Woolf’s critique of gendered violence. “The Woolf Girl” appears in the December 15 issue of the online review site devoted to interdisciplinary discussion of books and the arts.

For more on the novel’s connections with Woolf, read Alice Lowe’s blog post, “Lidia Yuknavitch novel draws on Woolf.”

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Lidia Yuknavitch novel draws on Woolf

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged Alice Lowe, contemporary fiction, Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children, Virginia Woolf on Friday 11 March 2016| 2 Comments »

The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch was accurately described in one review as disturbing and dazzling. The former made me almost close the book a number of times, but the latter kept me reading. An early and provocative Woolf sighting kept me going too.

A photographer in war-torn Eastern Europe stuns the world with an image of a girl fleeing an explosion that kills her family and destroys her home. The novel’s aura of brutality isn’t just in the war, however; it’s in the response to the photo in the lives of the photographer and her friends in the U.S.

Yuknavitch tells her story through different points of view, the “voices,” all unnamed. The Writer begins her monologue:

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. What a crock. Virginia, fuck you, old girl, old dead girl.”

She proceeds: “I am not Virginia Woolf. Do you know how many women can’t afford the room, or have no help, or scratch away at things in bars, uses, closets? I prefer a different line of yours, anyway: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Or this: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

Woolf’s words are cited again by the photographer”: “Remember what Virginia Woolf said: Give back the awards, should you be cleverly tricked into believing they mean something. Do not forget that the door you are being ushered through has a false reality on the other side. Do not forget that the door is opening only on someone else’s terms, someone else’s definition of open.”

I see echoes of Woolf as well in the reflections of Yuknavitch’s voices. “The Girl,” around whom the novel revolves, muses on an unremarkable image that comes to mind: “It is ordinary because that’s how memory replayed over and over again works—each act of remembering deteriorating the original and creating a memorized copy.”

And when the writer asks herself: “What is the story of a self? What is a chronology? The history of a life?” I flash on Woolf, while in the midst of writing Roger Fry and “A Sketch of the Past,” asking in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, “How does one write a Biography? How can one deal with facts? And what is a life?”

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Author rearranges Woolf’s words into a novella

Posted in books, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged A Room of One's Own, Kabe Wilson, Of One Woman Or So, Virginia Woolf on Monday 11 January 2016| 3 Comments »

What would happen if you took the 37,971 words that make up Woolf’s feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929) and rearranged them into a work of fiction? And what would happen if that text was then turned into a work of visual art?

Kabe Wilson rearranged Woolf’s words into his novella titled Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So. Set 80 years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, it tells the story of a young woman’s radical challenge to literary conservatism in the elitist environment of the University of Cambridge, according to The Guardian.

His work has now been turned into a piece of art, a 4 by 13-ft. sheet of paper displaying the novella’s 145 pages, with each word cut out, individually, from a copy of A Room of One’s Own, and reformed to duplicate the novella.

“[T]he real fun” of the project “was in multi-layered wordplay and finding connections between words – linking different meanings across separate historical periods,” Wilson told The Guardian.

Listen to an interview with the author, who spent four years on the project in which he used computer word lists to make sure he used every word in the original text to tell a new story.

And listen to the author’s explanation of the novella and its concept:

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Woolf sighting in Elizabeth Tallent story

Posted in books, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, Woolf sightings, tagged Alice Lowe, contemporary fiction, Elizabeth Tallent, Mendocino Fire, Virginia Woolf on Thursday 24 December 2015| Leave a Comment »

Elizabeth Tallent’s new story collection, Mendocino Fire, deserves the praise it’s received in reviews. The stories, all set along the northern California coast where she lives, are imaginative, innovative and compelling explorations into the human condition.

As it’s her first book of fiction in more than twenty years, I dove into her stories with glee and found a happy surprise in “Eros 101.” Opening with a faculty dinner, we learn that:

“The evening’s covert (and mistaken: you’ll see) premise is that the newly hired Woolf scholar will, from her angelic professional height and as homage to VW, scheme to advance all female futures….”

Written in an essay question format, the responses disclose the encounter of said Woolf scholar, Clio Mirsak, with tenure-seeking junior faculty member Nadia, whom she refers to as “the Beloved.” The attraction is immediate and consuming but not reciprocated. The story, with its challenging construction, is clever, funny and touching. Woolf pops in and out of the narrative both directly and covertly.

A phrase from Woolf: “’Reality’ … beside which nothing matters.” (Help—can someone tell me the source of this quote?)

Unwelcome thoughts of her mother interject themselves into Clio’s fantasy: “The memory stamps out several little wildfires of desire … Just try thinking back through this woman.”

In a recent interview Tallent cites Woolf as one of her influences and among the novelists she teaches in her fiction writing classes at Stanford, so it’s no surprise that she would evoke Woolf for her feminist scholar protagonist. It was a great addition (number 86) to my ongoing list of Woolf sightings in fiction and a marvelous story collection from start to finish.