Authors Electric

Recently my inamorata and I took a train from Chicago down to Springfield, the Illinois state capital (not the Simpsons' Springfield). It's about four hours each way through harvested, stubbled Midwest cornfields, clusters of giant wind turbines and riparian woods splendid with fall colors. We traveled downstate overnight to attend the grand opening of the Illinois State Museum 's Oct 26- Feb 16 show honouring her artwork over the past four decades -  " Daphne's Sister ," an Eleanor Spiess-Ferris retrospective displaying scores of her surreal, post-imagist, narrative paintings, drawings, and other works. On the train to Springfield The well-attended opening more than lived up to expectations, with works displayed dramatically by noted collagist Doug Stapleton , the state museum's Associate Curator, tracing a forty-year evolution of her other-worldly creations exploring nature, emotions and the feminine form. The show's introduction notes: ...

Me typing wistfully at the   American Writers Museum I featured here last September Raise your hand if you've ever used a typewriter. Wiggle your fingers if you made a living with one. Thumbs up if you still own one. Our numbers diminish. It's safe to say that most people alive today never as much as pecked at a mechanical keyboard. Despite this, a die hard few collect and still write with them, and some even dream of a typewriter comeback, though it's debatable whether typewriters ever really left us in the way of quills to become antiques. This isn't about technology or trends, however. It's about first love, and bonding with a writing machine in a way that one never could with a computer, even with an hypothetical, pretty robot. I got my first typewriter at the callous and tender age of 15 - a voluptuous -deco, 1950s, manual Smith Corona "Silent" portable (meaning it weighed about as much as seven or eight Powerbooks.) I inherited it when ...

Marjorie Steele in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, c. 1957 Writing "about what you know" isn't for the faint of heart. Things I know often pain me. It's hard to work the keys with shoulders hunched up cringing, or eyes teary. I'd rather make up stories long ago in a galaxy far away. Such perverse thoughts washed up last week with melancholy at news of the death of someone I knew a seemingly short time, but with-profound effect. Marjorie Fitzgibbon - nee Steele - died on January 19 of this year. She was the last surviving aunt and immediate maternal family relation of my two eldest daughters, Alicia and Kara. Her passing should have been no shock. Marjorie was 87 and had suffered a stroke, but death  always seems a surprise, even when it's not. To the end she had been a vibrant force. Through the latter decades of her life she was beloved and honoured for her sculptures in Ireland, the most famous of which is the marvelously whimsical larger-than-life-sized James...

Me, far left, failing to look inconspicuous onstage  with fellow  Chicago Quarterly Review readers Dinner with friends is my limit when it comes to social gatherings. Parties bore me. Conferences terrify me. I turn my name tag around and try for invisibility. Sooner or later, however, somebody asks the question I like least: "What do you do?" "I'm a writer," I respond, my mouth dry, unwillingly, but I can't deny my calling after all. As a 20-something smart-ass, I used to answer: "I sell health insurance for pets." That's a real thing now that veterinaries charge as much as brain surgeons. Then comes the follow-up: "What have you written?" I know it's just making conversation. Nature hates a vacuum. Nonetheless, I break into a neurotic sweat. I imagine the questioner thinking: If you're a writer how come I haven't heard of you? I need a warm-up act. I name some titles, not that any will strike up the band:...

Gilgamesh, the Babylonian king, back from the underworld,  on the wall of an eponymous Indian-chic eatery in London. "For the record," used to mean on paper. Now, not so much. I mused on this while going over one of my favorite books on writing, Negotiating With the Dead , by the grand dame of dark irony and literary feminism, Margaret Atwood . I'm wary of the hidden traps awaiting all writers - the beguiling allure of presumed permanence, the fantasy of fame, the chimeras of book covers, notices, prizes, and reviews, of writing for posterity, of measuring oneself against what's gone before, of wondering if I have anything to say. Comes with the territory, says Ms. Atwood. Towards the end of her memoirist exploration, she makes her hypothesis plain: " all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring s...