Education Don’t ask me to know your trees or the green statues of famous men. Don’t ask me to assume polite silence before gray old churches or to join in your search for the meaning of proud dolmenic ruins. In me, you find a heretic from birth. Born too soon, set aside in an incubator to watch the nurses fidget and grin through tight walls of glass. I required … [Read more...]
Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure: Tradition and the Talented Individual
In 1944, Jean Stafford published her first novel, Boston Adventure, a book which became an unexpected best seller..1 From the start, it was an anomaly, "the book that Stafford wrote before one would have expected her to be able to or inclined to" (Hulbert 229). Its unusual qualities have failed to satisfy any person thoroughly, it seems. Perhaps one of Boston Adventure's … [Read more...]
Three poems by Linda E. Chown
More Than the Dying and the Wars and Our Words about Them To sit here on this roof with the Sierra Nevada mountains in my mouth and the Alhambra’s blossoming gardens up my nose and the tiled brown roofs sloping and arching below me – to sit here and be here smoking, alive, sizzling a bit in the sun. Newspapers say nothing about this. They want to make us … [Read more...]
Writers on Writers on Writers II: John Colopinto, “Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and A Case of Anxiety of Influence”
In this second piece in her "Writers on Writers on Writers" series, Linda Chown comments on John Colopinto's piece which was published in The New Yorker's Cultural Comment section, September 19, 2014: “Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and A Case of Anxiety of Influence.” On or around December 1910, human character changed. -- Virginia Woolf Modern fiction really began when … [Read more...]
for what the same ignites: poems by Linda E. Chown
For Alison Krause In her honor, she was killed at Kent State May 4, 1970 The girl who placed the stem in a gun Said I’m hit And all the world burst Into blood As the bullet burrowed And buried its cold metal Thrust in living lungs. And the world’s TVs centered The world’s eye on The rough shed minuet of death On a campus lawn. And later one said What … [Read more...]
Writers on Writers on Writers I: Linda Chown on E.L. Doctorow on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
This is the first of a series of short essays. These reviews will interpret writers interpreting each other. This first one specifically addresses what I think E.L Doctorow does with Hemingway and Faulkner in his reading of Faulkner’s tremendously interpretable novel, As I Lay Dying. All writing here is my own except where otherwise quoted. I will step in parenthesis to make my … [Read more...]
