Essay by Kerstin W. Shands A whirlwind story of news-chasing and publishing seen through the eyes of a young heroine, Gail Godwin’s Queen of the Underworld (Ballantine 2007) recalls the dynamic newspaper offices sparkling with collegial competition and smart repartee in American movies from the 1940s. During her first week as a staff reporter at […]
MAKING THE ROAD AS YOU GO: GAIL GODWIN’S “QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD”
August 15, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Memory and the Music of Time: “Evenings at Five” by Gail Godwin
July 4, 2023 by Leave a Comment
ESSAY BY KERSTIN W. SHANDS If love and work, as Freud proposed, are the key components of human happiness, the novelist-composer couple in Gail Godwin’s Evenings at Five have been supremely blessed. For close to three decades, Rudy and Christina have been living and working together in superb synchronicity and creative resonance. When their passionate […]
“Published Prosperity: Gail Godwin’s Writer’s Memoir,” by Kerstin W. Shands
October 28, 2021 by Leave a Comment
Essay by Kerstin W. Shands Journals and memoirs are both self-narratives, but they are written from different viewpoints and for different reasons. Gail Godwin’s journals from the 1960s, The Making of a Writer, take us back to a present when no one could know how things would turn out and before Godwin herself could be […]
“Unpublished Prosperity: Gail Godwin’s Journals of Apprenticeship,” by Kerstin W. Shands
October 26, 2021 by Leave a Comment
Essay by Kerstin W. Shands We may think of great writers as fully fledged—born with astonishing powers of perception and creation. Surprisingly, however, research suggests that creativity can be learned and developed, in which case great writers might not be so different from the rest of us after all. Before any kind of breakthrough, they […]
“Craft and Conviction: Gail Godwin’s History of the Heart,” by Kerstin W. Shands
September 1, 2021 by Leave a Comment
Essay by Kerstin W. Shands Gail Godwin’s Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life stems from a moment in time when Godwin had just re-read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She had been thinking about a new novel regarding “a woman’s journey into a heart of darkness where she would have to confront her shadow” […]
“Friends in Writing: Bloomian Jealousies in Gail Godwin’s Old Lovegood Girls,” Essay by Kerstin W. Shands
December 15, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Essay by Kerstin W. Shands A new novel by Gail Godwin is a treat. To enter the literary world created by Godwin is like stepping into a pleasant townhouse where spacious, sun-dappled rooms open up on the first floor. Then you notice that there are stairs, too, that may lead to other, more complex, secret, […]