Thank you, and thank you everyone for coming tonight.
And bear with me because this is only the second introduction
I've ever done for a writer.
And the first one, for some of you who know, it was Ander.
But I'm also doing it for a personal hero, which is
a little strange and humbling.
But I hope you'll bear with me.
I hope that tonight's guest, Joan Silber,
doesn't mind if I bring up the 2004 National Book
awards in the context of the controversy it inspired.
For those of you who don't know, the 2004 slate
was the first, and so far the only time
that all five finalists were women.
Saying bad things about prize-winning books
is nothing new, of course, but that year, the venom
was particularly potent, and it came from all corners, book
critics and writers both.
I was living in New York at the time,
and I spent a lot of Saturday mornings browsing
through bookstores looking for new things to read.
What struck me about the vitriol was
that it came from people who had clearly not read the books,
or if they had, read them in such a rush
that their judgment was suspect.
That all five finalists were women
did not escape my attention.
This was the year that I began to respect book prizes,
actually.
If only for the clear message I was getting about who
is read with respect and open-mindedness.
The controversy made me a better reader insofar
as it pointed out how essential it
was to be fair before casting judgment.
In order to not be like those critics,
I had to read those books.
And this is how I was lucky enough to encounter Joan Silber
and how many more readers came to understand
the prize nomination was a confirmation that she
was indeed an American master.
In my undergraduate workshops, I urge
students to be very cautious in saying
that a work doesn't agree with them
because they can't relate to it.
Our experiences are so individual that to look
for mirrors of our true selves in fiction
is a foolhardy thing to do.
Or as I put it to my students, please tell me
if you know a book about a 39-year-old gay man in Tucson
because I need something to relate to.
And yet in ideas of heaven, I ran across the story, The High
Road, about a middle-aged gay dance instructor
in New York whose bitterness about life
is broken by his infatuation with a young singer.
I'll say nothing here about identifying
with middle-aged gay dance instructors,
and saying more about how someone like Joan Silber
knows so much about them.
Or how she knows so much about a strong willed and intelligent
Italian woman in 15th century Italy,
or a doubtful missionary in early 1900s China.
In each of these characters and in many others,
so it brings to the fore not identities but complexities.
The excavation of desires, longings,
wants, urges, ambitions, ideas, directions, and misdirection.
In short, all the frustrations of being alive.
This is the key to her work, I think.
Her willingness to approach her characters with questions
and an open-mindedness about the potential answers,
not what you are--
gay, man, heart broken poet, or rebellious teenage daughter--
but who you are--
Duncan, Gaspara Stampa, Suzanne.
Anyone who has read Silber knows already
that she's handy with an adjective,
often pairing or tripling them in ways that instantly give us
a picture of the person we're about to meet the preparation
for the story about to unfold.
We see them not only as the world
sees them, but also how they see themselves, sometimes
with an acute and piercing honesty.
That's a generous writer.
A writer who is willing to see and hear and render
the world in a way that may not even be close to her own,
but in doing so, issues the open invitation
to experience what we wish of the very best in fiction.
We live in an era in which history will not leave us
alone, says Joan Silber on the back cover
flap of The Size of the World.
And that too should give us an indication
of the care by which she places her characters in both time
and place.
Her character seemed to nearly always arrive
at a point and understanding that they
are small specks in the overwhelming march of time,
and yet the dignity of their small dramas always,
always remains intact.
But back to that American master label,
you tell me, her first book, Household Words
won the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award.
And Ideas of Heaven was a finalist
for the National Book Award and the prestigious story prize.
And I have cracked open this book so many times,
the binding is gone.
I can't open it anymore.
Her latest book, The Size of the World
was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
And her contribution to the Graywolf Craft series,
The Art Of Time in Fiction, which
is an amazing little book.
It's becoming a favorite tool to both professional writers
and everyday readers alike.
She has received a Guggenheim Grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts in the New York
Foundation for the Arts and Academy Award
in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
And she's twice received recognition
from the PEN/O. Henry Awards.
How grateful we are then to welcome
to our stage, Joan Silber.