Sunday, January 04, 2009

Coover - Didion - Gordon

Kelly Writers House Fellows 2009 is both a seminar and a public program featuring three eminent writers. This spring we'll be visited by Robert Coover, Joan Didion, and Mary Gordon. I've put up the beginnings of the seminar site. Choosing four or five works by Coover and Didion each was very difficult, and I only hope I made good choices. Are my Coover selections too basic/easy? I just re-read The Universal Baseball Association of J. Henry Waugh, Esq. and realized once again what a fine introduction to experimental narrative it is. And Didion's The Book of Common Prayer! What sentences! And Miami, with its watery paragraphs. Florida itself! We'll read both of Mary Gordon's recent memoirs - her early '90s grappling with her father, he who wasn't really anything he had told her he was, a turn that threatens her own writing, the very writing we are reading. And, instead of reaching back to the well-known early novels (e.g. The Company of Women) I've decided that we should read Pearl, the novel that comes between the memoir of the father and the very recent memoir of the mother, Circling My Mother. The programs are free and open to the public. Check out the schedule and let us know if you want to attend: 215 573-9749.