Over her desk are these words by Henry James: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

She went to grade school in a one-room schoolhouse. She’s said her early years involved “a daily scramble for existence.” She’s a boxing fan who once interviewed Mike Tyson. One of her novels, “Black Water,” became an opera for which she wrote the libretto that follows a path of love and tragic, violent death.

One of the nation’s pre-eminent literary figures, Joyce Carol Oates will deliver the 2007 Betsy K. McCreight Lecture in the Humanities, 7:30 p.m., October 18, at the University of Charleston.

An award-winning novelist, story writer, poet, essayist, critic, playwright, editor and book publisher, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Her eight collections of poetry — and one forthcoming called “The Coming Storm” — represent a small part of her extraordinarily complex and prolific output.

She is a winner of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. Her new book, “The Gravedigger’s Daughter,” was published in May 2007 by Harper Collins.

Check with the West Virginia Humanities Council for more details. The speaker will sign copies of her books after the lecture. The program is free and open to the public.

Link of interest:
Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page 

***
Excerpt from “The Time Traveler: Poems”
by Joyce Carol Oates

I SAW A WOMAN WALKING INTO A PLATE GLASS WINDOW 

I saw a woman walking into a plate glass window
as if walking into the sky.

I saw her death striding forward to meet her,
shadowed in flawless glass.

Dogwood blossoms drew her, a lilac-drugged air,
it was beauty’s old facade,
blinding,
blind: the transparency
that, touched, turns opaque.

The frieze into which she stepped buckled in anger
and dissolved in puzzle parts about her head.
 *          *          *
I saw a woman walking into sunshine confident and composed
and tranquil to the last.

I saw a woman walking into something that had seemed nothing.
As we commonly tell ourselves.

The trick to beauty is its being unassimilable,
a galaxy of glittering reflections,
each puzzle part in place.
Not this raining of glass and blood
about the amazed head.

The unfathomable depths into which she stepped became
the merest surface,
Pain and noise.
 *          *          *
I saw a woman walking into her broken body
as if she were a bride.

I saw her soul struck to the ground because mere space
could not bear it aloft.

I saw how the window at last framed only what was there,
beyond the frame,
that could not fall.

My throat filled with blood:
you would not have believed how swiftly.

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