Literary presentations can and have included: Some members regularly present several times in each semester. One literary presentation is required to become a member of our society, but regular members are encouraged to present as often as they would like. This is a chance to be creative and share your interests, talents, and ideas with the Wash community. A lot more glamorous that Katie Couric’s.Literary presentations serve as an opportunity to contribute to the Society’s meetings. That is, if you think about it, a glamorous life indeed. I get to answer directly to Mother Night. Moth and Hyacinth are saying to one another, quietly over the files spread on a mahogany desk, determining fates. I get to see the red valleys of Mars, hear the poems of Elah Gal, make my curtsy to the Child-Empress. I get to walk down the streets of Cimmeria, hearing the calls of the pecan roasters, the sellers of candied dates and carpets woven by hill tribes. I get to meet all my characters before I send them into the world. I get to live in the stories I create, as they are being created. Miss Emily Gray, the sorrow that blankets Budapest like snowfall, the rediscovery of Cimmeria in modern Ukraine (I haven’t written that one yet either), all have to exist inside my head before they can exist outside it, on a computer screen or sheet of paper. It just happens to be the one inside my head. But now that I’ve gotten to this point, I realize that I do, after all, live a glamorous life. When I started this post, I was going to write about the supposedly glamorous life of a writer, how it is always a life of work, often a life of solitude. ![]() And then I mix them all up, so those girls marry bears and the guys on the motorcycles are aliens although they don’t know it. I bring all sorts of things from the outside world into it: the streets of Charlottesville, the halls of Harvard, girls riding motorcycles behind guys in leather jackets. It’s as though I have a life inside me that is so rich and strange, it makes what is on the outside seem pedestrian. When the writing is going well, when I’m completely engaged in the story I’m telling, there’s nothing better. And I have to admit, many of my happiest moments have tended to be just that: sitting and writing. There has been a great deal of that in my life. Unless it consists of sitting in front of a notebook and writing. The glamorous life of a writer consists of sitting in front of a computer and writing. And then becoming a writer, the workshops, the conventions, the readings and signings, the dancing boys. Free tickets to the Museum of Fine Arts, where I spent afternoons writing beneath the John Singer Sargents. Leaving it all to go back to graduate school, the graduate student life (second hand bookshops and azuki creams at the Café Japonaise). Cocktail party with Katie Couric, and the strange day when a billionaire threw a pen at me. Working as a corporate lawyer on the 42nd floor of the MetLife building, wearing a suit and heels. Harvard Law School, cutting classes to read in Schlesinger Library. Riding through the streets of Charlottesville on a motorcyle behind a guy in a leather jacket (wearing an evening dress and, of course, pearls). Where preppy was not a fashion trend but simply what one wore. The Washington Literary Society and Debating Union (being president, and I still remember the motto: quam fluctus diversi, quam mare conjuncti). ![]() Going to the University of Virginia, wearing pearls (even to the gym). First loves: the guy from reform school, the guy who thought he was Jim Morrison. Growing up near Washington, going every weekend to the café in the National Gallery. Coming to America, seeing the lights of New York through the airplane window. Memories of taking trains through tunnels under the Alps. The moving around Europe, catching frogs in Italian marshes, seeing parrots and parrot tulips in the marketplace in Belgium. Of course, I could tell you the story of my life in a way that doesn’t sound pedestrian at all. We are the story tellers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, but our own lives tend to be rather pedestrian. I wonder if Margaret Atwood’s or Joyce Carol Oates’ looks any different. This is what that looks like (spectacles, hair everywhere, surrounded by papers):Īfter a break for dinner (organic hot dog and steamed broccoli, while writing this blog post), I’m planning to work on a column that is due in early January. Today, I spent about five hours going through the second chapter of my dissertation.
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