A terrific time

Spring has already sprung on the beautiful campus of Vanderbilt University, where the symposium "Beyond Our Beginnings:  Women Writers from Working and Lower Class Backgrounds" took place last week.  All the magnolias were blossoming, and everything's green.

Meeting Dorothy Allison and serving on a panel with her was a personal highlight for me, as a long-time admirer, but I have to say that hanging out with the lovely Karen McElmurray, the inimitably hilarious Heather Sellers (who has a great blog, by the way), and our fabulous host Lorraine López for the rest of the week turned out to be great fun.  We ate at great restaurants, drank lots of wine, and got to know each other better over stories of surprising things we have in common.  I learned so much from them all and really had a blast.  

Getting to hear Dorothy, Heather, and Karen read was wonderful.  Dorothy read my favorite section from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, the painful part about beauty (32-38) that always tears me up, and a section from her forthcoming novel.  Heather and Karen gave beautiful readings, too, and I had fun reading sections from The Truth Book, the short story "A Notion I Took," and an excerpt from my new essay "Refusing to Pass," which I'm revising for the University of Michigan collection that Lorraine is editing on the symposium's topic.  (A shout-out to Tayari Jones, who helped me revise it in its original incarnation as a conference paper for the 2007 AWP.)

Serendipitously, my old roommate from Bread Loaf, Bryn Chancellor (whom I thanked in the back of The Truth Book for being such a pal during those grueling days in the Green Mountains), is now in the MFA program at Vanderbilt, so we also got to catch up.  She has a new story in Yalobusha Review, "Wrestling Night," that's so solid.  It has all these lovely, dazzling little moments.  Congratulations, Bryn!

The knockout highlight of the symposium, for me, was the performance on the last night by spoken-word poet Minton Sparks.  Funny, touching, and savage by turns, she was a terrific performer.  (Her accompanist was pretty awesome, too--she said he played w/Dylan for seven years.)  It was a knockout performance, and Minton blew the room away.  You can check out her stuff at her website, and if you have five minutes, you can even watch a little video sampler of some of the numbers we got to see.   They're just snatches, though; you won't get the full effect, b/c the big power often comes in the turn in her last line. 

I was so excited to learn about Minton's work--she's "about brilliant," as we used to say.  I want to go back to Nashville soon to see her perform again.

Many thanks to Lorraine López for the months of planning that went into designing the symposium and her writing course on working-class women writers, and many thanks to her graduate assistants Bryn Chancellor, Meredith Gray, and Wade Ostrowski, for all the behind-the-scenes labor that made the symposium run so smoothly.  I've put conferences together before, and it is a lot of work.  These folks did a gorgeous job.