Posts Tagged: Virginia Woolf

Michael Cunningham’s Elegant Usurpations

November 15, 2014, by

MC podium RM3_5254It’s another Monday night at the Wortham Center in Houston, and this time I didn’t mess around getting the tickets for the Inprint Reading featuring Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of one of the most important books written in a long time, The Hours. Good thing: it is crowded already when I blow in at 7:25, and you can tell people are excited. You can’t blame them: The Hours didn’t just help us figure out how to read Virginia Woolf’s masterful Mrs. Dalloway, and it didn’t just give us another great film with Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, who won an Academy Award for her unadorned portrayal of Woolf. Cunningham is speaking tonight on his new novel, The Snow Queen, but, at least for me, there is no getting away from The Hours and lines like these:

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond’s edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; his tongue (exciting and utterly familiar, she’d never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met it with her own. They’d kissed and walked around the pond together….

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book…. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

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In Which I Break My Foot and Am Saved By Students (Twice)

July 25, 2014, by

Inprint is proud of the work we do to support emerging writers, including giving more than $2.8 million since 1983 in fellowships, prizes, and other support awarded to graduate students at the highly ranked University of Houston Creative Writing Program (UH CWP). This support attracts the best emerging writers to Houston who go on to publish books, win nationally competitive literary awards, enhance our city, and serve as educators throughout the community.

Being a creative writing graduate student, however, isn’t always an easy thing. No high-paying summer internships or corporate recruiters come these students way! And in addition to pursuing their craft, many generously give back to the community, like the great pool of writers at the UH CWP who teach our Writers Workshops, Teachers-As-Writers Workshops, and Senior Memoir Workshops. Without them, Inprint workshops would not be ranked among the best in the city.

Jameelah Lang, a PhD candidate in fiction at the UH CWP, taught a fiction workshop for Inprint this summer. We asked Jameelah to share her experience as an instructor with us. We were blown away by what she said.

BrokenFootI had a bad go of it last year. I took comprehensive exams, moved into another apartment, and rescued a puppy; my puppy cried without end, the windows in my new apartment wouldn’t open, and Virginia Woolf stalked me in dreams. My students were all too young or too old or too tired to care who Marguerite Duras or the New Kids on the Block were; they wrote about murderers even when I explicitly told them to write about anything but murderers.
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