Yeats Scholar to Lecture at O'Neill Literary House

Georgie and William Butler Yeats in 1923.

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Scholar Meg Harper will lecture on the poet W.B. Yeats and his wife, Georgie, when she visits the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College on Monday, November 19. Her talk, “Spiritual Committee Work: The Yeatses and A Vision,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public as part of the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series.

            Dr. Harper is a specialist in Irish literature, literary modernism and twentieth-century poetry who has studied the life and work of W.B. Yeats extensively. Her book Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual Collaboration of George and W.B. Yeats (Oxford 2006) discusses the often marginalized role of Yeats’s wife in his life and the couple’s shared fascination with the occult.
            Harper, who co-edited Yeats’ series of “Vision” papers for Macmillan (1992 and 2001), holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently the Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick, in Ireland. 

            The Literary House is located at 407 Washington Avenue. 

Novelist Solomon and Songwriter Burson Collaborate for Special "Jewish Voices" Event

Singer/songwriter Clare Burson. 

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Novelist Anna Solomon and singer-songwriter Clare Burson will perform together at Washington College on Tuesday, November 13 as part of the “Jewish Voices” series sponsored by the Rose O’Neill Literary House. The event will take place in the Egg, Hodson Hall Commons, at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. A book and CD signing will follow.

Anna Solomon is the author of The Little Bride (Riverhead Books, 2011), as well as many short stories and essays. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Harvard Review, and many other publications. She has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and was awarded two Pushcart Prizes and an Editor’s Prize from The Missouri Review.

Writer Anna Solomon.

 A former journalist for National Public Radio, she reported and produced award-winning environmental stories for the program Living On Earth. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Her novel, The Little Bride, tells the story of a teenaged mail-order bride from Russia who is sent to the South Dakota prairie in the late 1800s to wed an older Orthodox man and share his sod hut.

A Tennessee-born musician now living in New York, Clare Burson has won praise for her fresh version of contemporary folk music, often tinged with melancholy. Her latest album, Silver and Ash, released in 2010 by Rounder Records, is a collection of songs inspired by her ancestors’ experiences in the Holocaust. 

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus observed, “In Silver and Ash, 28 years of questioning, studying and mourning have been channeled into song, yielding an unusual cultural hybrid: an American album of popular music devoted to the theme of the Holocaust. … Tunes that could accompany hard-knock American love stories are laced, instead, with references to trunks and train platforms, a piano at a picture window, candles burning down — European worlds and the ways they were lost or saved, details she gleaned from her grandmother and in her research.”

Solomon contacted Burson, a fellow Brown University alumna, to collaborate on a project that would feature songs based on The Little Bride. In an interview with music blog largehearted boy, both women said working together allowed them to reach new levels of emotional depth in their work. After hearing one of Burson’s musical takes on her work, Solomon recalls, “I felt my character’s sorrow – her deep, primal missing of her mother – more than I ever had while I was writing the book.” Burson, in turn, says that in reading Solomon’s work, “I was able to experience it, be moved by it, and then let the songs grow out of that.” The two artists’ collaboration results in a moving performance that is part reading, part music.

The third and final event of the “Jewish Voices” series will be a poetry reading by Idra Novey on December 4. For more information on the series and other Literary House programming, visit http://lithouse.washcoll.edu.

Novelist Ron Hansen to Read Nov. 1 in Tawes

 ** Due to Hurricane Sandy, this event has been moved to November 29th, same location and time. **

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Novelist Ron Hansen will give a reading Thursday, November 1 at 4 p.m. in Tawes Theatre, Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts at Washington College, 300 Washington Avenue. The reading, part of the Sophie Kerr Living Writers Series, is free and open to the public.

            Hansen has published eight novels, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays. His novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and became a 2007 movie starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. His work has also been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

            After graduating from Creighton University in Omaha, Hansen went on to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and then to Stanford University to complete his studies.  He currently serves as the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and the Humanities at Santa Clara University. His next book, She Loves Me Not: New and Selected Stories, is scheduled for release next month.  

Tim O'Brien, Acclaimed Author of "The Things They Carried," to Read at the College Oct.18

CHESTERTOWN, MD—National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien will read from his acclaimed works of fiction on Thursday, October 18 at Washington College. The reading will be held at 4 p.m. in Decker Theatre, the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts,  and is free and open to the public.

         O’Brien’s successful literary career spans decades; in 1979 his novel Going After Cacciato was named the National Book Award winner in fiction, and in 1994 his In the Lake of the Woods was Time magazine’s pick for best novel of the year.

         Perhaps his most celebrated work is The Things They Carried (1990), a mélange of fiction and memoir on the Vietnam War. It was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was the winner of one of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. In a Washington Times review of the 20th anniversary reissue of the book, John Greenya wrote, “Many people think [The Things They Carried] is the best work of fiction ever written about Vietnam. Some even think it is the best work of fiction ever written about war. Both are right.”

         The American Academy of Arts and Letters presented O’Brien the Katherine Anne Porter Award for a distinguished lifetime body of work in 2010. His short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Esquire, and many editions of The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He currently lives, teaches, and writes in central Texas.

         The October 18 reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series and the Douglas Cater Society of Junior Fellows. This will be a second visit to Washington College for O’Brien, who in 2003 was the featured speaker for Sophie Kerr Weekend.

         The Gibson Center for the Arts is located on the main College campus, 300 Washington Avenue, Chestertown.