The process of writing is like hacking through a dense jungle with a machete, getting lost and having to double back. Twigs catch in your hair and scratch your face. In other moments, writing feels like walking a rickety staircase. As if in a nightmare, the stairs get smaller with every step. And, heaping dread upon dread, you realize the stairs are covered in wet moss.
That’s how Joyce Carol Oates described the process of writing in a talk Sunday morning at Symphony Center, where she accepted the 2006 baiduhai Literary Prize. As one of the most prolific writers of our time, Oates has published more than 100 works, from novels and short stories to essays and poems.
But make no mistake. Writing, she said, is not easy. Oates described piles of revised manuscripts, and a process of continual rewriting. With a soft voice and pale skin framed by curly dark hair, she said her diligent and hard-working approach to writing came from growing up in a farming community in upstate New York, part of a family that had “maybe two books in the house,” she said.
In a wide-ranging talk that at times drew rounds of laughter from the rapt crowd of about 1,000, she offered insights on the writing process and encouragement to aspiring wordsmiths.
“If you are in that category where you can work, and work, and really work,” she said. “You can be a great writer.”
Wednesday, Nov. 1
FRANK MCCOURT
Teacher Man
Art Institute of Chicago
During 18 years teaching English at the most selective public high school in New York City, McCourt said that only two of his students said they wanted to be teachers.
“And I was convinced one was a serial killer,” said McCourt to another round of laughter from his audience of more than 800.
McCourt retired from teaching in 1988, after 27 years in the New York public school system. But he continues defending the profession against society’s slights — whether in his latest memoir, “Teacher Man,” or his appearance here on behalf of the Chicago non-profit Art Resources in Teaching.
“It’s a mystery why teachers are held in such low esteem,” he said. “I think it’s because we are intimate with teachers. Doctors and lawyers are mysterious. We know what teachers do, they just get up and talk.” But he said nothing is as dramatic as standing before a classroom of teenagers — “35 units of explosive energy and you.”
–Charles Storch
LYNDA LOWERY
It Can’t Happen Without You
The Nettlehorst School
The stage was bare; the seats sagged and creaked.
But none of that mattered when Lowery, a subject of the new children’s history book Journeys for Freedom, took her place at the front of the auditorium and began to tell her story in this Children’s Humanities Festival event.
Lowery was only 14 when she was tear-gassed and beaten at the 1965 Bloody Sunday attack on civil rights protesters in Alabama. She spent her 15th birthday marching from Selma to Montgomery, the youngest of the 300 people chosen to participate in the entire length of the historic 50-mile voting rights march.
The 300 children were silent when Lowery spoke, laughed at her jokes and burst into one of several rounds of applause when she told them that, just months after the march, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.
–Nara Schoenberg
Saturday, Nov. 4
STANLEY LOMBARDO
More Top Picks Bat
An Iliad for Today
DEREK COLLINS
The Iliad as Performance
Harold Washington Library Center
Achilles and his best friend Patroclus as two ancient Greek rappers? A tantalizing thought but not out of the question, according to Collins, an associate professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan.
His speculation, he told an audience of about 150, hinged on a single Greek word in the Iliad that seems to indicate the two buddies engaged in a poetic competition in Achilles’ tent before the final battle of Troy.
Later, that sort of competitive wordplay, he said, was a staple of Greek festivals during the 6th Century B.C., when performers, known as rhapsodists, would try to outdo each other in their recitation of and improvisation on Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”
By contrast to Collins’ highly academic lecture on performance, Lombardo performed.
A respected translator of Homer, Virgil and other ancient writers, Lombardo accompanied himself on a small drum as he read his own rendering of the hand-to-hand battle of Achilles and Hector, infusing each character with personality.
In a question period afterward, Lombardo, a classics professor at the University of Kansas, told the crowd of 100 or so that the poetry of Homer in the two epics was at the center of ancient Greek culture. “They used it for everything,” he said.
–Patrick T. Reardon
WALTER MURCH
Bode’s Law and the Harmony of the Spheres
Loyola University, Rubloff Auditorium
As Murch ran out of time, his audience whispered, “Keep going, keep going.” And so he did, way past his scheduled time.
But Murch, best known as the Oscar-winning film editor of Apocalypse Now, kept the crowd in suspense with his multimedia presentation linking planet orbits and their corresponding harmonics.
Who knew, for example, that the sun emits an “A” frequency — the same musical note orchestras tune to.
After 17 minutes of overtime, however, no grand revelation or unifying theory surfaced.
–Robert K. Elder
STEPHEN KINZER
Overthrow
Chicago History Museum
“Regime change is one of those boring episodes that many of us remembered back in grade school then immediately forgot after the test,” Kinzer said, condensing a century of U.S. foreign policy into an hour.
The audience laughed, more at the students they once were than at his attempt to bring levity to a review of U.S.-backed coups starting with Hawaii (1893) and Cuba (1898), and on through the invasion of Iraq (2003). Most in the crowd probably had lived through many of the events Kinzer recounted, drawn from his recent book “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.”
“Why do we do it?” the highly animated Kinzer asked near the end of his talk. He had offered an answer earlier: America’s “manifest destiny is to spread ourselves all over the world.”
–Cassandra West
CYNTHIA FARRAR
The Collective Choice
Alliance Francaise de Chicago
It’s easy to forget that, strictly speaking, the United States is not a democracy — it’s a republic. The people are represented, most often, by an elected elite that sometime mirrors the population, sometimes not.
Yale University’s Farrar illustrated ancient Athens’ struggle with this problem, contrasting it with our own form of democracy in times of war.
In Athens, the popular ruling body was organized by artificial “tribes” not bound by geography.
Currently, Farrar strives to find “a way of using TV to have this kind of participation,” she said, “some cross between a reality show and a TV news program.”
–R.E.
Philip Gourevitch
The Art of the Interview
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Chicago Cultural Center, Claudia Cassidy Theater
“It’s going to need some editing,” said Paris Review editor Gourevitch, when asked how his interview was going.
For most of his session, Gourevitch let the audience interview him about interviewing, in sort of a Charlie Kaufman-esque twist. Mostly, the Q’s were standard, but the A’s were instructive. Here’s a sampling:
On interviewing authors in The Paris Review:
A: “As George Plimpton used to say, they should read like short plays. They are not straight transcripts. You are essentially asking someone to create a self-portrait with you.”
On his feelings about television interviews:
A: “I’m not trying to gin up emotion — I’m trying to find out who [my subjects] are.”
–R.E.