Interview on Writing. Life.
Monday, May 16th, 2011
The thoughtful and insightful Julija Sukys interviews me today on her blog. Thanks, Julija, for the opportunity to chat with you.
Proved on the Pulses: On the Essay and its Literary Cousins
Archive for the ‘Women and Writing’ Category
On the 70th Anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s Death
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Thanks to Shawna Lemay for the link to this article, “Literary Haunts,” in The Independent, written by Woolf’s great-niece, Emma Woolf:
“In the end, perhaps it’s best to let the writer’s words speak for them. A century after she went “street-haunting” in London, you can still find Virginia out there. If I choose, I can put down my pen right now and walk to the Cock Tavern on Fleet Street. As newlyweds in 1912, Leonard and Virginia rented rooms at nearby Clifford’s Inn and took their daily meals at the Cock Tavern. The ideal place, then, for a 70th anniversary toast to Virginia Woolf.”
My essay, “Library Haunting,” is an homage of sorts to Woolf’s “Street Haunting.”
Famous Female Essayists
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
Thanks to Jill Margo and Andris Taskans for this list of women essayists. You can add names to the list.
Nathalie Foy’s Books on Books
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
A lovely and unexpected commendation from Nathalie Foy at Books on Books. (Unexpected because it occurs in the midst of her review of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company.)
“One of my favourite books of the past year is Susan Olding’s Pathologies: A Life in Essays. She takes the personal essay to new places, puts it to interesting uses, gives it a fresh shape. It is Olding’s form that is so often the reward of reading her essays. They are fresh and startling and often biting. I like that.”
Thank you, Nathalie. And thank you also for the inspired decision to focus on books about books in your blog.
Memorable Lines: Virginia Woolf
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally, and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light—windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars—lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which—She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?
—from “Street Haunting”
