DOCSLIB.ORG

Worldview Breakfast

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Worldview Breakfast 1 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture A CONVERSATION WITH MARY KARR The Conscience of a Writer: Telling the Truth in Poetry and Memoir Fordham Center on Religion and Culture March 20, 2007 6 pm-7:30pm Fordham University 140 W. 62nd Street, New York, New York PETER STEINFELS: Good evening and welcome to “The Conscience of a Writer,” a conversation with Mary Karr about truth in the writing of memoir and poetry, two areas where her work has won both prestigious prizes and a wide audience. I am Peter Steinfels, Co-Director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, which is the sponsor of tonight’s forum and of other forums, conferences, and discussions on important developments in our culture that cannot be fully examined without serious attention to matters of faith and morality. … We are delighted that Mary Karr is our guest and to have Brennan O’Donnell, Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill in the Bronx, to introduce her fully, to engage her in conversation for about an hour, and then to preside over questions from the audience. Besides his position as Dean, Brennan is a professor of English at Fordham, a position he held for seventeen years at Loyola College in Maryland, where he also directed the Honors Program. With a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he has specialized in English poetry of the Romantic period and more recently in American Catholic writers. He has published two books on William Wordsworth, edited a collection of essays on Andre Debus, and is working on a book on contemporary American Catholic literature. Besides writing scholarly articles and reviews on a range of British and American authors, from 1994–2000 Dean O’Donnell also edited the important quarterly magazine Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education. We are happy to put this evening’s forum in the capable hands of Brennan O’Donnell. BRENNAN O’DONNELL: Thank you, Peter. It is my pleasure and honor to introduce Mary Karr, who is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, who will talk to us this evening about telling the truth in contemporary nonfiction memoir and poetry. 2 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture One of my favorite of the many admiring blurbs that adorn paperback editions of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club is by the recently departed Molly Ivins, who said of this first of her fellow Texan’s two best-selling memoirs: “This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a backup opinion. It’s like finding Beethoven in Hoboken.” She continues: “To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, and ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.” The Liars’ Club, which appeared in 1995 and was recently reissued in a tenth-anniversary edition, traces Mary Karr’s childhood in the oil-refinery town of Leechfield, Texas, with a brief sojourn in Colorado in the 1960s. Beginning with the harrowing act of thankfully averted family violence, the book proceeds to explore with fierce honesty, compassion, and wickedly sharp humor a family struggling to survive a volatile mix of inner demons, extraordinary desires, and hard times in an unforgiving place. In calling it “the essential American story and a beauty,” Jonathan Yardley captured the book’s uncanny power to extract something larger than life and almost mythic from this intensely personal story of a single idiosyncratic family. The book, published to rave reviews, spent more than a year on the New York Times’ best-seller list, was listed as a “best book of the year” by periodicals throughout the country, and won numerous awards, including the Martha Albrand Award given by PEN to the Best First Book of Nonfiction published that year. In 2000, Mary Karr continued the story of Pete and Charlie Karr, a refinery worker married to a bohemian artist, and their two daughters, Lecia and Mary Marlene, in Cherry, which takes Mary’s story from the end of elementary school up to 1972, when she left home for good, setting out for California in a truck full of surfer friends and their pharmaceutical cornucopia. Few people, I think, would have the courage to shine this clear a light on their adolescence, that period of life that John Keats famously identified as “a hiatus of disease between the imaginative health of childhood and of adulthood.” Karr’s commitment to telling the truth is evident from beginning to end, even — or especially — in retelling those moments of lacerating shame and embarrassment that most of us would, as she would put it, rather eat a bug than reveal. Reviewers once again marveled at the accomplishment, noting the author’s ability to combine compassion and judgment, laughter, and deep insight into the dark places of the human heart. The book ended up, like Liars’ Club, on just about everyone’s best-book list, including the New York Times’ Best Books of 2000. 3 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture She is currently at work, so many of us will be happy to know, on the next installment of the story, titled Lit, in which she intends to continue the story through her college years at McAllister, graduate school at Goddard, the birth of her son in 1986, and up to her baptism in the Roman Catholic Church in 1996. As Molly Ivins noted, “The key to Mary Karr’s accomplishment as a memoirist is her poet’s sensibility.” Before she broke into the world as a memoirist, Mary Karr was already known in the world of poetry, having published in most of the best journals and magazines — Parnassus, Paris Review, and Ploughshares — and having her work collected in two books, Abacus in 1987 and the Milton-haunted The Devil’s Tour in 1993. Since 1995, she has published in increasingly prestigious and selective periodicals — The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, for example — and has published two more books of poetry, Viper Rum, which appeared in 1998, and Sinners Welcome in 2006. The last books have included powerful poems emerging from her long journey from agnosticism to belief, and eventually to Catholicism. Another notable feature of each of the last two books has been a major essay on poetry — or maybe I should say a major controversial essay on poetry. If you have read the memoirs and if you remember scenes — such as the one in which the seven-year-old Mary, perched in a chinaberry tree picking off enemies with a BB gun, upon discovery yelling a phrase that “easily was the worst thing anybody in Leechfield ever heard a kid say” – you won’t be surprised at the controversial part. Viper Run included the essay “Against Decoration,” in which Karr went after what she saw as “a debilitating tendency towards the vague, emotionally inert, and prissily difficult in contemporary poetry” — kicking butt, as they might say in Texas — and the greatest offense in the poetry world, naming names, including bigwigs, such as James Merrill and (gasp!) John Ashbery. In Sinners Welcome, she included as an afterword an essay commissioned by Poetry Magazine on the relation of her religious conversion to her poetry, “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer,” which recounts her coming to prayer initially as a desperate grasp for a life preserver and finding that the practice of prayer gradually had become the foundation of her life and art. Within a community in which poetry so often is valued as a secular answer to, and decidedly not a manifestation of, the religious impulse, “Facing Altars” is a controversial and courageous essay. Readers of Mary Karr’s life, however, who have seen the courage with which she has faced much more existentially profound issues than acceptance in the world of poetic publishing, may be excused if they do not 4 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture see her resistance to the easy secularism of the literary establishment as her most courageous stance to date. As her father might say as he watched her roll up her sleeves for this fight, “I feel sorry for them boys, Pokey.” Witness Mary’s January 15th New York Times op-ed piece on the controversy emanating from the revelation that James Frey had fabricated large portions of his supposed memoir, A Million Little Pieces. At a time when Frey, Oprah, and lots of other folks were hemming and hawing about whether or not what Frey did in presenting as fact things that were demonstrably not fact, fudging this way and that about poetic license and the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction, Mary Karr wrote Mr. Frey is “a skunk.” I have heard her in other interviews use rather more colorful language for him, including in an interview at Calvin College I heard her call him “a lying sack of doo-doo.” MARY KARR: Not my most Christian moment. BRENNAN O’DONNELL: She continues in the op-ed piece: “Distinguishing between fiction and non- isn’t nearly the taxing endeavor some would have us believe. Sexing a chicken is way harder. The nitty- gritty of it is that a novelist creates events for truthful interpretation, whereas the memoirist tries to honestly interpret events plagiarized from reality. And here’s how readers know the difference: the label slapped on the jacket of the book.” Which brings us to the topic of this evening’s conversation, “The Conscience of a Writer: Telling the Truth in Poetry and Memoir,” featuring Mary Karr.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Harpercollins Books for the First-Year Student
    S t u d e n t Featured Titles • American History and Society • Food, Health, and the Environment • World Issues • Memoir/World Views • Memoir/ American Voices • World Fiction • Fiction • Classic Fiction • Religion • Orientation Resources • Inspiration/Self-Help • Study Resources www.HarperAcademic.com Index View Print Exit Books for t H e f i r s t - Y e A r s t u d e n t • • 1 FEATURED TITLES The Boy Who Harnessed A Pearl In the Storm the Wind How i found My Heart in tHe Middle of tHe Ocean Creating Currents of eleCtriCity and Hope tori Murden McClure William kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer During June 1998, Tori Murden McClure set out to William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, Africa, a row across the Atlantic Ocean by herself in a twenty- country plagued by AIDS and poverty. When, in three-foot plywood boat with no motor or sail. 2002, Malawi experienced their worst famine in 50 Within days she lost all communication with shore, years, fourteen-year-old William was forced to drop ultimately losing updates on the location of the Gulf out of school because his family could not afford the Stream and on the weather. In deep solitude and $80-a-year-tuition. However, he continued to think, perilous conditions, she was nonetheless learn, and dream. Armed with curiosity, determined to prove what one person with a mission determination, and a few old science textbooks he could do. When she was finally brought to her knees discovered in a nearby library, he embarked on a by a series of violent storms that nearly killed her, daring plan to build a windmill that could bring his she had to signal for help and go home in what felt family the electricity only two percent of Malawians like complete disgrace.
    [Show full text]
  • Reenchanting Catholic Literature
    Trying to Say ‘God’: Reenchanting Catholic Literature Welcome writers, artists, and lovers of literature to the 2017 “Trying to Say ‘God’ Literary Gathering”. We’ve added “2017” to the title because we plan to convene this gathering biennially as a way of featuring the art and writing of established, emerging, and aspiring artists of faith. The 2019 event will take place at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, and will return to Notre Dame in 2021. We are delighted to welcome over 200 guests to this first gathering. If anyone suggests that there are no excellent Catholic writers today, just show them the variety of sessions at this gathering and the varied backgrounds of our many presenters. They’ll find that Catholic literature is healthy and vigorous, with a promising future. Thank you for joining us! Planning and Organizing Committee: Kenneth Garcia, University of Notre Dame Dave Griffith, Interlochen Center for the Arts Jessica Mesman Griffith, Sick Pilgrim Sam Rocha, University of British Columbia Jonathan Ryan, Sick Pilgrim Trying to Say God Introduction In a time when traditional religion is viewed as suspect, passé, or offensive, many authors and artists are uncomfortable talking about their personal religion or spirituality, while others grope for new ways to say “God.” They attempt to articulate an amorphous truth in an “elsewhere beyond language,” in the words of Fanny Howe, but use language to explore their way toward it. The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame—together with Sick Pilgrim, Patheos, Image Journal, and St.
    [Show full text]
  • George Saunders' CV
    George Saunders 214 Scott Avenue Syracuse, New York 13224 (315) 449-0290 [email protected] Education 1988 M.A., English, Emphasis in Creative Writing (Fiction), Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Workshop Instructors: Douglas Unger, Tobias Wolff 1981 B.S. Geophysical Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado Publications Books: The Braindead Megaphone (Essays), Riverhead Books, September, 2007. This book contains travel pieces on Dubai, Nepal, and the Mexican border, as well as a number of humorous essays and pieces on Twain and Esther Forbes. In Persuasion Nation (stories). Riverhead Books, April 2006. (Also appeared in U.K. as “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil,” bundled with the novella of that name.) Paperback released by Riverhead in Spring, 2007. A Bee Stung Me So I Killed All the Fish Riverhead Books, April 2006. This chapbook of non-fiction essays and humor pieces was published in a limited edition alongside the In Persuasion Nation collection. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Novella-Length Fable). Riverhead Books, September 2005. (In U.K., was packaged with In Persuasion Nation.) Pastoralia (Stories). Riverhead Books, May 2000. International rights sold in UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Russia, and other countries. Selected stories also published in Sweden. Paperback redesign released by Riverhead, April 2006. The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip A children’s book, illustrated by Lane Smith. Random House/Villard, August 2000. International rights sold in U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, France, China, and other countries. Re-released in hardcover, April 2006, by McSweeney’s Books. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline Six stories and a novella.
    [Show full text]
  • Mary Karr, the Art of Memoir No. 1 Interviewed by Amanda Fortini For
    Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1 Interviewed by Amanda Fortini For a writer who has shared herself with the public in three memoirs, Mary Karr is an extraordinarily elusive interview subject. Nearly two years passed between our initial contact, in July of 2007, and our first session. There were numerous reasons for this—she was traveling; she was teaching; she lives across the country from me—but perhaps the main reason was that Karr is surprisingly diffident when it comes to talking about herself. “Are you sure I have that much to say?” she wrote in one preinterview e- mail. She was finishing her third memoir, Lit, which was published in November of 2009. She had started the book over twice, throwing away nearly a thousand pages, and had been working long hours to meet her deadline. “Who knows about the memoir,” she wrote, when I asked if I could read it, “It circles me like a gnat. I circle it like a dog staked to a pole. Years it’s gone on that way.” Finally, this spring, I flew to meet Karr in upstate New York, where she has taught at Syracuse University since 1991. She had not yet warmed to the idea of a formal interview, so we toured her life in Syracuse instead. I observed two graduate seminars: The Perfect Poem, and Dead White Guys, in which she discussed the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Karr is an energetic, engaged, and wry teacher, and her students are fond of her. That night, she introduced a reading by the poet Charles Simic, a longtime friend.
    [Show full text]
  • Believing Mary Karr
    Illinois State University ISU ReD: Research and eData Theses and Dissertations 4-27-2017 Believing Mary Karr Stephanie Rae Guedet Illinois State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Religion Commons, and the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Guedet, Stephanie Rae, "Believing Mary Karr" (2017). Theses and Dissertations. 733. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/733 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ISU ReD: Research and eData. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ISU ReD: Research and eData. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BELIEVING MARY KARR Stephanie R. Guedet 224 Pages Believing Mary Karr examines how belief, represented in the memoirs of Mary Karr, works in our contemporary moment. This examination is supported by the argument that our identities and the stories we tell about them are always constructions of belief, and that these beliefs are ultimately relational, enacted in the intersubjective relationship between writers and readers of autobiography. This dissertation provides the fields of both rhetoric and life writing studies not only an awareness of how ideas about belief—how beliefs about belief—have already shaped our scholarly imagination but also the possibilities a rhetoric of belief can offer to future conversations about what it means to read and write autobiography in America today. Engaging theorists such as Graham Ward, Paul Ricoeur, Jessica Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, this dissertation examines various beliefs, both sacred and secular, represented in Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Cherry, Lit, and The Art of Memoir.
    [Show full text]
  • Negative Feelings and the Memoir In
    INARTICULATE AND UNSHAREABLE: NEGATIVE FEELINGS AND THE MEMOIR IN DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S POST-INFINITE JEST FICTION by Kisuk Noh B.A., The University of Waterloo, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2015 © Kisuk Noh, 2015 Abstract This thesis reads David Foster Wallace’s post-Infinite Jest fiction against forms of confession found in the American “memoir boom,” a period marked by a surge in interest (both commercial and aesthetic) in nonfictional autobiography. More specifically, this thesis traces the way Wallace’s fiction between 1997 and 2008 registers diffuse and non-intentional affective states that typically do not appear in conventional memoirs. Problems attending the representation of such feelings first appear in Infinite Jest, intensify in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and become an explicit point of concern with respect to the memoir-genre in The Pale King. Taking the memoir boom as defining a rhetorical milieu of confession, candor, and sincerity in which Wallace’s later fiction should be situated, this thesis examines the short stories “Octet” and “The Depressed Person” with respect to Wallace’s growing concern about the seeming disjunction between extant literary forms and the “nameless interhuman sameness” of contemporary experience. This thesis then discusses The Pale King – a long novel that self-consciously situates itself within the memoir boom, and which continues Wallace’s interest in “inarticulate” and “unshareable” feelings. The Chris Fogle novella that makes up the twenty-second section of Wallace’s final novel will be read as enacting a critique of the ways in which “inarticulate” feelings were passed over in literary representations of emotional experiences during the memoir boom.
    [Show full text]