Guest post by: Harrison Solow
Author of Felicity and Barbara Pym, Harrison Solow appears at the festival on October 9th from 9-10:15am for a writers workshop in room B118, and on October 9th at 11am on the OEA Stage
“You ask me again why you should read literature. I feel I should not answer you…Why ask me? I did not choose your course of study. You could have taken sociology, physics, or architecture. You have circumscribed your own world, for the coming semester at least. There is no point to the question if you yourself cannot answer it. Why should you read literature?
Perhaps you should not.
However, I suspect you feel you would like to, and that is the basis of your irritation with silly men, mousy women, tea, religion, and quotations, in the novel. Is this worthy of the august company of Dante, Proust, Dostoyevsky?
It may interest you to know that Barbara Pym felt as you do, when she was about your age – reading Aldous Huxley, and imagining herself in a more glittering, a more significant, world. And so to protect herself from an unbearable exclusion from that world, she wrote a novel, Young Men in Fancy Dress, in hope, her biographer says, of becoming part of it.
Her irritation with silly men was no different from yours, or mine, or anyone’s really, you see. The only difference is what each of us regards as ‘silly.’ Literature, or at least, books (I will not presume to add Pym to the Masters, as you call them – although surely there are degrees of literature) offer a way out – out of a time, a space, a life, a status, a level of experience that is unsatisfactory to the reader. Not by virtue of escape, but by metamorphosis, via instruction…And although you may not now want to arrive in such a place, you have chosen it as your destination. But I suppose you must. After all, it does not make sense that you should have chosen to enter a fictional world you find irritating.
Oh ― but see what Miss Pym’s Huxley had to say in Those Barren Leaves:’ If we wrote it ourselves, we might find Etruscan literature interesting.’
Does it have to be your world, Felicity, in order to be habitable, respected, interesting, relevant? ‘It’s so provincial,’ you complained to me of Some Tame Gazelle in your first letter.
But you see
…provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the chief source of his strength: only a fool or a prig would complain that Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a critic is a serious fault. A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook, or he has nothing at all…”
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Harrison Solow is a Pushcart Prize winning writer, professor of literature and writing and a writer for the professions. For more information about Harrison, please see:
http://redroom.com/author/harrison-solow
http://lamp.academia.edu/HarrisonSolow
For more information on the recently released Felicity & Barbara Pym, please see:
http://felicityandbarbarapym.wordpress.com/
BIO:
About the Author
Pushcart Prize winning American writer and one of the two best selling UC Press authors of all time (at time of publication) Harrison Solow has received many awards for her literary fiction, nonfiction, cross-genre writing, poetry and professional writing. Her most recent award is First Prize for Short Fiction in the Carpe Articulum Literary Review International Competition for 2010.
Harrison has lectured at a number of universities, colleges, arts and cultural institutions in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. A former faculty member at UC Berkeley, she accepted a lectureship in the English Department of the University of Wales in 2004 and was appointed Writer in Residence in 2008.
She is a strong proponent of the traditional Liberal Arts, the Fine Arts and the Utilitarian Arts as separate and equally respectable entities, an advocate for Wales and a patron of literary endeavours.
Harrison speaks various varieties of English as well as intermediate Welsh and rusty French. She is a member of The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The National Association of Scholars, The Women’s Faculty Club of the University of California, Berkeley, The Association of Welsh Writers in English, The Claremont Institute, The Association for Core Texts and Courses, The Red Room, The Association of Writing Programs, The Welsh Academy, and The National Coalition of Independent Scholars, where she served on the Board in 2009 and 2010.
Harrison lives in the United States and Wales with her husband, Herbert F. Solow, the former Head of MGM, Paramount and Desilu Studios in Hollywood. She has two incomparable sons.
Writing is just writing—a practice, if you like, a discipline, an art, a craft. It’s not a mystery. If you write a page a day for a year you will have a first draft of a novel or several short stories or whatever it is you want to write. We sit down with our tools of choice—pad and pencil, laptop, typewriter and become still enough to hear the story that’s ours to tell. It whispers itself to us. It’s a very quiet little voice and if you’re too busy, too loud, too distracted you might not hear it. We practice coaxing the words out by writing so often and with such regularity that we become good friends with the process. We quiet the mind and simply start regardless of how we feel about it. There is no good or bad, there is only you showing up with attention to listen to the story you need to tell. Later there will be revision of the story and time to shape and fix, but not at first. At first there is only sitting still and listening with openness.
na Maria Spagna can be seen on Saturday Oct. 9th of the festival at 5pm on the McMenamins Stage. In addition to her individual appearance, Ana Maria Spagna is teaching a Wordstock for Writers workshop, “Where Stories Converge,” Saturday 3 – 4:15pm Room B116.