Monday Nov. 23 @ 7.30pm
Greenlight Bookstore
Fort Greene, Brooklyn
718 246-0200
Elizabeth Benedict, Alexander Chee, Mary Gordon, Martha Southgate, and Lily Tuck
From Alexander Chee's essay on Annie Dillard:
“If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next ten years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourself to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton.”
From Mary Gordon's essay on Elizabeth Hardwick & Janice Thaddeus:
“This is how I think of them: the tiger and the pelican: Lizzie the tiger, brilliant, careless, destructive, and exciting, crashing through the underbrush heedless of the damage in her wake. And Jan the pelican. In medieval iconography and legend, the pelican plucks her own breast and feeds her young with her own life’s blood. My gratitude to them both is complex and contradictory…”
From Martha Southgate's essay on Harriet the Spy:
“When I first read Louise Fitzhugh’s novel [Harriet the Spy], I had no interest in being a writer. I wanted to be a psychologist – or failing that, Jermaine Jackson’s wife. But now I know that there are only a few books that have influenced me as much as this one did, that have, in a sense, mentored me into being the writer I am…. My mentors have been the books I’ve obsessed over and had crushes on.”
Lily Tuck's essay on Gordon Lish:
“’Tuck, Tuck’ – for some reason, Gordon [Lish] calls us all by our last names, he also is in the habit of repeating it – “don’t strain for a trope. Keep the object term as close to the subject term as you can manage without producing a tautology. Listen to this,’ he says, giving an example from a story he likes, ‘Quiet as a church.’
“I, too, am quiet.”
Elizabeth Benedict is the editor and moderator. It will not be a quiet night. Please join us.
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