News and Events
Allan Gurganus reads at Sophie Kerr Weekend
March 2001
Introductory remarks by Interim Lit House Director Melora Wolff
President Toll, Dean Scholz, students, staff and faculty of Washington College, it's with great pleasure I welcome you to the annual Sophie Kerr Festival Reading, and I want to extend, for all of us, a special welcome to our student guests and their families. They've made an effort to be here today for this celebration of stories, of poetry, of language and its special music, of all the voices that visit writers, whispering inspiration and ideas.
I can think of no writer more blessed by voices than Mr. Allan Gurganus. His fiction—I'll call it fiction, although documented supernatural visitations might be a more fitting description—releases for us an incredible chorus of morally driven, historically charged, exuberantly and sometimes comically outraged voices. His characters are fighters, whether they're 99 years old or 9 years old; they're observers, accusers and defenders of their cultures, their families and their legacies; they reveal themselves in whirlwinds of speech, in flamboyant decisions and in political acts and gestures.
Through Allan Gurganus, we can hear the voice of Lucy Marsden, the tenacious confederate widow with a fifth grade education, who recounts for us her life story in Gurganus's best selling novel "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All;" (that novel won the Sue Kaufmann Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and became a t.v. movie, with actress Cicely Tyson, that won four Emmy Awards) In Allan's collection of short stories, "White People," he created the voices of teenaged, cynical aspiring writer Bryan; of Mrs. Willard Gracie, housewife, tourist and witness to racial killings in Africa; of Mirabelle, lady author of "Jenny The Wren, the Eskimo Twins and the Yukon Dog Sledding Disaster", (and also a needy stalker of judges for The National Fundament of the Arts) ; and of Jerry "Assurance", a southern funeral insurance sales boy who dares to step awkwardly across his town's clear line between whites and blacks.
And these are only a few of the voices that wisely chose Allan Gurganus to represent them on the page. How does he do it? How does he hear and capture the wildly diverse range of beings that live in his fiction? His process sounds simple enough. He says he draws on memories of his boyhood in Rocky Mount, North Carolina; on what he calls "his emotional currents," and on research.
And then, he says, "the voice of another person becomes your beloved Noah's Ark. It will float you safely when all else drowns. You contain and support all those voices. They become your flotation device, the invented voices that come to your rescue." But when we read the fiction of Allan Gurganus, we get the distinct feeling that he is coming to our rescue. He "finds and follows the undulations of us all", travelling across ages, across gender, across racial, sensual and political boundaries. In truth, Allan Gurganus, through his writing, is our Noah's Ark, carrying all our floundering characters determinedly, mercifully, and lovingly.
It is no surprise that Allan's writing has earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for his novel "Plays Well With Others," and The National Magazine Prize for his novella "The Practical Heart", which will appear in his new collection of novellas, by the same name, due for publication by Knopf in September, 2001; it's no surprise that his work is represented in The Best American Stories, and The O'Henry Prize Collection; it's no surprise that Allan is a famously attentive and responsive teacher who has held positions at Standford, Duke, Iowa University and Sarah Lawrence College. He is, after all, a writer who proves to us, time after time, book after book, the truth that writing at its very best is a moral, communicative, sacred event.
"If literature is not an enormous, inviting question" Gurganus has said, "then it's nothing. The question is, and has to be, What is your life like for you? How is your pain related to mine, and how does what pleases you please me? and is it not true that we are really more similar than different? That's why, in our own balkanized age, literature becomes increasingly holy to me."
As a writer, Allan Gurganus seems not unlike the woman in his short story, "It Had Wings." She finds, in her own ordinary backyard, a displaced angel, struggling, and fallen far out of its own element. But she soothes it and listens to it and finds within herself a renewed energy for living, and for waiting for the next visitation. "Why should both her shoulders, usually quite bent, brace so square just now?" Gurganus writes. The answer? "She is guarding the world."
It is my honor to be able to introduce to all of you gathered here today, acclaimed author, distinguished teacher, and truly, a prolific guardian of the world, Mr. Allan Gurganus.
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