EVENT: Joyce Carol Oates lecture Oct. 18
Joyce Carol Oates is visiting Charleston on Thursday, Oct. 18, to deliver the Betsy K. McCreight Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Charleston.
The 7:30 p.m. event is free and open to the public.
Musings:
What brilliance! She writes masterpiece after masterpiece.
Click here for my previous blog about Joyce Carol Oates’s visit. Enjoy a taste of her poetry. I know she isn’t visiting necessarily to talk about poetry, but my appreciation of “I Saw a Woman Walking into a Plate Glass Window” grows with each reading. I want to savor more of her poems like I have savored this one.
Click here for a story by Gazette reporter Bill Lynch about his e-mail interview with Oates.
Read a 2006 Oates story, “Landfill,” published in the New Yorker, available for free.
Before you go, feast on these five random Joyce Carol Oates quotes, for sustenance, for the road:
“Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.”
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“Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.”
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“All the desks of my life have faced windows and except for an overwrought two-year period in the late 1980s when I worked on a word processor, I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming or brooding. Most of the so-called imaginative life is encompassed by these three activities that blend so seamlessly together, not unlike reading the dictionary, as I often do as well, entire mornings can slip by, in a blissful daze of preoccupation. It’s bizarre to me that people think that I am “prolific” and that I must use every spare minute of my time when in fact, as my intimates have always known, I spend most of my time looking out the window.”
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“We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone — its value is incontestable.”
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“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”
