Subject:   JCO--[long post] Success in Charleston
      Date:  Tue, 22 Apr 1997 13:08:13 -0400 (EDT)
     From:   Richard Ressmyer ressmyrr@wvlc.wvnet.edu
         To:  Discussion JCO jco@usfca.edu



Dear JCO Discussion List:

Just a few comments from me to describe the success of The Library 
Foundation's programs with Joyce Carol Oates this past weekend.

[caveat:  these comments are my recollection of JCO presentations and NOT 
DIRECT QUOTATIONS of her presentations--any errors or misapplications of 
her thoughts by my interpretations are mine, and made without malicious 
intent.  Also--as I was factotum for these presidings, I DID NOT TAKE NOTES.]

Miss Oates was the featured guest author for our 2nd Annual "We've Got 
the Fire!" event which is planned as the final celebration for National 
Library Week.  She was at our gala reception and author's presentation at 
the Charleston Library Saturday evening.  And Sunday afternoon she 
presided over a "creative writing workshop" at our Dunbar Branch Library.
The April 19th event had about 150 subscribers; Sunday, made available to 
the public free of charge by a gift from The Charleston GAZETTE, had 
about 80 participants, including some college and secondary teachers and 
students of writing.

Saturday's presentation by JCO began with a brief description of the work 
habits of a writer and teacher of writing.  JCO spoke about voice and 
vision in writing and the space for domestic life, as well.  She got 
across the point that common experiences and feeling, well observed and 
deeply considered can be the stuff of writing.  One example of this, 
which also provided some humor [more to the women than to the men of the 
audience] was the poem TENDERNESS from the collection of the same name.

JCO also touched upon the place of creativity and imagination in 
children's lives and the part memory plays in writing.  She commented 
about the mix of semi-autobiographical and contrived settings and 
characters for her writing.  With no clawing sentimentality, she shared 
the situation of her younger sister and autism as a metaphor of the 
introspection required of a writer who relays complex feelings and 
relationships in her work.

Miss Oates, at one point, contrasted the pleasure which must be possible 
for an "amateur" to achieve which is not available to the "professional" 
in the arts.  It is her view that "highly skilled" amateurs can have 
happiness not allowed the professional because the professional is 
hounded by the requirements of painting, writing, or creating music for 
the "history of culture" and is further troubled by the challenge to 
repeat earlier achievements in quality while at the same time avoiding 
repitition of content and form.

JCO was self-effacing when aluding to the weightiness of her prose and 
offered to "look hard" for some lighter verse to share with the 
audience.  [I controlled my urge to confirm if John Gardner had 
encouraged her to write happy endings to her stories--an anecdote 
presented on this list recently.]

The audience Saturday now knows quite alot about Raymond Smith's 
avocational aquatic interests from a story told about the pond he keeps 
stocked with fish and reptiles.  The story about the heron with the 
"golden bill" {really a koi from the pond} drew laughter.

When talking about the pleasures of the amateur, JCO described the 
circumstances surrounding the writing of WHITE PIANO, and joked that she 
too could each note of RACH III--if she had several days to complete the 
task.

Saturday evening ended close to 10 o'clock; a generous period of 
book-signing.

While in Charleston, JCO commented about the landscape of WV and her 
reading to Pickney Benedicts work while he was a student and his finished 
collection of stories TOWN SMOKES.  While I was with her, in my role as 
"host and chauffeur" we spoke about her visits to Shepherds College when 
her plays have been produced there, poets we both admire--Elizabeth 
Bishop and Marianne Moore, and of course Dickinson.  I reminded her of 
Sewell's two-volume work on Dickinson which she had not seen in a while, 
and reccommended two volumes on reading and writing which I have recently 
read from the KCPL collection--LOST IN A BOOK by Victor Nell; and 
GUTENBERG ELEGIES BY Sven Birkerts.  The former is more clinical, but has 
many good insights on the pschology of reading; the later is more 
personal, sometimes polemical, about the fate of reading in the 
electronic age.

On Sunday before I arrived to collect JCO to go the Dunbar Library 
program, she went jogging along the Kanawha River [I'll give hints to 
pronunciation to anyone who calls--no collect calls accepted] from 
downtown to the state Capitol Complex with its Cass Gilbert temple and dome.

The Sunday presentation consisted of a twenty minutes essay read by JCO 
in which she contrasted the stories we all possess as sensual beings in 
nature and social relationships and the stories which become written as 
art.  Miss Oates spoke of the types of stimulation she uses to encourage 
her students to begin writing and the extension to the final process of 
polishing for publication.

In addition to her prepared essay, she stood for nearly ninety minutes in 
"conversation" with the audience during Q & A.

The audience included a few academics, some college and secondary 
students, and JCO readers.

Some of the questions related to "writer's problems."  Others were more 
historical in nature.  One humanities professor asked about the influence 
of the writer on national morality citing Gunter Grass.  JCO replied by 
referring to Thomas Mann and giving some American examples Faulkner and 
other "southern" writers including Flannery O'Conner.  As to "moral 
influence" she held out for Harriet Beecher Stowe and Upton Sinclair as 
examples of writers who "influenced legislation."

The same questioner asked for her opinion of Gertrude Stein.  JCO said 
Stein would have to find another to champion her work.  She did speak 
briefly about Hemingway by way of illustrating that the writer and the 
writing are to be considered distinctly:  she quoted D.H. Lawrence to the 
effect that "Trust the writing before the writer, for often the writer is 
a bloody liar."

Miss Oates was asked the contrast the process of writing fiction and 
non-fiction.  She suggested that high-quality non-fiction requires many 
of the same qualites as fiction writing, but that the major difference 
was the presence of CHARACTERS in fiction.  On the difference between 
poetry, short fiction, the novel, and drama, she distinguished their 
selection by the scope and scale to be conveyed, the importance of 
relationships between people in the narrative and the emotional intensity 
to be represented.  The broad scope needed to tell the story of a family 
over time requires the breadth of the novel form; feelings may best be 
found drawn in poems and the short story can be used to exclaim the 
ironies and ambiguities of situations; drama can be best to show the 
interpersonal in a confined place and time, and is very social.

When one questioner suggested that the rule that "writers should write 
what they know" was contradicted by writers who led conventional lives 
but wrote about violence and deviation, JCO replied that although 
Dostoievski wrote about an axe-murderer, "few people thought he was one."

JCO shared with the audience Sunday her experience of Stephen King's 
visit to Princeton last week and his talk to her writing classes.  King 
suggested that writing was a process of "digging up what was already 
there."  [Now, would each of take that risk--rember CUJO!]

Joyce Carol Oates was a very entertaining guest for our audiences.  She 
admitted that teaching creative writing two days a week and her 
occasional trips to speak are ways in which she is rewarded for the 
intense time she spends writing.

We in Charleston shared in her reward.

Richard H. Ressmeyer
Development Director
and event initiator for
"We've Got the Fire!"
The Library Foundation of Kanawha County
Kanawha County Public Library system
123 Capitol Street
Charleston, WV  25301-2686
304 343-4646, ext. 274 (voice)
304 348-6530 (FAX)
e-mail:  ressmyrr@wvlc.wvnet.edu



Date: Tue, 22 Apr 1997 14:06:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: Richard Ressmyer ressmyrr@wvlc.wvnet.edu
Subject: "Short" Addendum to Long Post
To: Discussion JCO jco@usfca.edu


There were two sections of the Q & A from the Sunday program with JCO 
which I should also share:

When JCO was asked to reflect on the tendency in the public media to cast 
as grand dicotomies the debates between Harold Bloom and Henry Louis 
Gates over the making of canons of literature, JCO replied that while the 
Western tradition is our great inheritance from Europe, there are other 
voices to be heard from other regions of the world and other sectors of 
American culture.  She mentioned women writers, African American writers, 
Asian American writers, writers from the Gay & Lesbian movements.  JCO 
told a story of how Jamaica Kincaid got over a writing block by using a 
story telling method in her mind not unlike the oral traditions of the 
West Indies or her origin.  JCO spoke admiringly of Toni Morrison, also 
at Princeton.

JCO shared with the audience that she gets letters with requests to tell 
the story of others in her writing.  Some have been acquaintances from 
her youth, others strangers, and a number from convicted felons in 
"mostly mid-western prisons."  She has been advised that she should not 
answer these--"I think I could have figured that out myself."  While some 
of these were from obsessive people with delusions of relationships to 
her, she also recognizes the tendency in writers and would-be writers to 
memorialize the past and ones personal history.  She does not think this 
is bad, but advises that each person with a story needs to find their own 
voice to tell that story.

RHR



Subject:  rare books
      Date:  Sat, 26 Apr 1997 17:58:46 -0800
     From: Randy Souther 
Reply-To: jco@usfca.edu
         To: jco jco@usfca.edu


If anyone is looking for rare or out-of-print JCO books, I have found an
excellent site for locating them:

http://www.bibliofind.com/


Randy Souther



Subject:   Re: JCO--[long post] Success in Charleston
         Date:  Sat, 26 Apr 1997 18:07:07 -0800
        From:  Randy Souther Randy Souther
   Reply-To: jco@usfca.edu
           To:  jco@usfca.edu


Richard, thanks for posting your comments about the JCO visit to
Charleston--I'm sure everyone enjoyed them as much as I did.

If anyone else on the list was there, we would love to hear from you,
too.

Randy Souther



Subject:    Re: JCO--[long post] Success in Charleston
         Date:   Sat, 26 Apr 1997 19:42:06 -0700
        From:  Tom & Sandy Fasano tomchat@gte.net
   Reply-To:  jco@usfca.edu
           To:  jco@usfca.edu


Richard--

Your post was beyond the call of duty. I'll be posting my response posthaste

Thanks
...Tom



From: Annedyer@aol.com
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 20:45:10 -0400 (EDT)
To: jco@usfca.edu
Subject: Re: JCO--[long post] Success in Charleston

I also went to see JCO read in West Virginia April 19 and 20th and it was an
incredible experience.  JCO has been one of my heroes for the longest time
and to actually talk with her was unbelievable.  I asked her to recommend
some graduate schools for creative writing--she was very down-to-earth and
extremely real.  Often, before the reading, she would be browsing alone by
herself among the bookshelves, lost in wonder--and when she talks to you, she
is genuinely interested in what you have to say and you can just see the
wheels turning at unfathomable rates in her mind--taking pieces of you into
her stories.  It was an amazing experience.

Anne-Dyer

Maintained by Randy Souther
Last updated 4-29-97
Send comments and suggestions to Randy Souther