This coming Thursday, November 19th, the Women Writers at Barnard series will host readings by Mary Gordon, Saskia Hamilton and Timea Szell, three highly acclaimed writers and Barnard professors. The event will be an engaging and diverse evening of poetry, narrative and memoirs, and will take place in Sulzberger Parlor at the Barnard College campus at 7pm.
Mary Gordon has produced an impressive body of work in novels, short stories, novellas, poetry and essays. An alumna of Barnard College herself, she is a professor of English. Recently, she has taught The Modern Novel and a Story Writing course, for which she is particularly popular. Throughout much of her writing, Gordon has grappled with family dynamics, the complications and rewards in religion, and the prejudices and challenges that go along with being a woman.
Gordon avidly participated in the feminist movement during her undergraduate studies at Barnard, and in her work, one detects a powerful sense of female individuality. As she said in a past interview, “What is terribly important to me…is to write about issues that are central to women’s lives, to write about them beautifully and in high style.”
And in order to write in this “beautiful” and “high style,” Gordon has a specific and delightful recipe. In a piece she wrote for The New York Times, “Putting Pen to Paper, But Not Just Any Pen or Just Any Paper,” she expresses the need to write by hand – a “labor [that] has virtue.” She describes the process of watching ink bleed through paper and curve in their letters is described as intimate and self-grounding.
Timea Szell, currently the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Barnard, likewise contemplates the laborious nature of writing: “I know that writing for me is a fraught and slow activity. Deeply unpleasant.” Yet she, like Gordon, finds virtue in this process. As she continued, “Though when I write, it also the way to feeling most fully challenged.”
Szell is Hungarian, having immigrated to the United States at the age of 17. The varied subject of her writing is in dialogue with the numerous departments in which she teaches– Creative Writing, Medieval Literature and Women’s Studies – and with her interest in animal studies.
Szell already has plans for her next project. It will be “a disciplinary mix of memoir writing and academic inquiry centering on animal presences and absences in [her] own life” – a testimony to her mélange of interests and practices in academic, historical and creative fields. She is currently translating her father’s memoirs, an experience of which she will be sharing with her audience on Thursday evening.
Saskia Hamilton, the Director of the Women Writers series, is a poet and a professor in the English department. She has recently been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and has written two books of poetry, “As for Dream” (2001) and “Divide These” (2005).
Hamilton’s writing is clear and simple, but intricate in imagery and elaborate in thought. In one of her poems, “The Song in the Dream,” she offers a powerful description of a book that “[sighs] and [expands].” This is precisely how her words flow off the page – they are light and open, and spill before us, making complicated thoughts poignant and accessible.
Tomorrow evening, this group of notable women will deliver their words in an event marked by evenings of powerful, female language. Saskia Hamilton once said in a past interview with the Columbia Spectator that the series aims to present a “balance of aesthetics.” Given the dynamic background of all three writers, this balance is exactly what tomorrow’s reading will provide.