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“Unpublished Prosperity: Gail Godwin’s Journals of Apprenticeship,” by Kerstin W. Shands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 […]
“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, […]
Facing and Writing Trauma: Suffering and Survival in Post-traumatic America,” Essay by Kerstin W. Shands
December 1, 2020 by 1 Comment
Essay by Kerstin W. Shands When she was writing her book on trauma in American literature, Laura Castor could hardly have known that another traumatic time in American history would be just around the corner. The corona pandemic could be seen as a trauma on individual, national, and global levels, one that may well lead […]