Joyce Carol Oates is visiting Charleston on Thursday, Oct. 18, to deliver the Betsy K. McCreight Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Charleston.
The 7:30 p.m. event is free and open to the public.
Musings:
What brilliance! She writes masterpiece after masterpiece.
Click here for my previous blog about Joyce Carol Oates’s visit. Enjoy a taste of her poetry. I know she isn’t visiting necessarily to talk about poetry, but my appreciation of “I Saw a Woman Walking into a Plate Glass Window” grows with each reading. I want to savor more of her poems like I have savored this one.
Click here for a story by Gazette reporter Bill Lynch about his e-mail interview with Oates.
Read a 2006 Oates story, “Landfill,” published in the New Yorker, available for free.
Before you go, feast on these five random Joyce Carol Oates quotes, for sustenance, for the road:
“Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.”
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“Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.”
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“All the desks of my life have faced windows and except for an overwrought two-year period in the late 1980s when I worked on a word processor, I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming or brooding. Most of the so-called imaginative life is encompassed by these three activities that blend so seamlessly together, not unlike reading the dictionary, as I often do as well, entire mornings can slip by, in a blissful daze of preoccupation. It’s bizarre to me that people think that I am “prolific” and that I must use every spare minute of my time when in fact, as my intimates have always known, I spend most of my time looking out the window.”
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“We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone — its value is incontestable.”
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“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”
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