Joyce Carol Oates Visits Thursday!

WAMC's Joe Donahue will join her on stage in conversation. William Kennedy will introduce!

Joyce Carol Oates, fiction writer, essayist, poet, and playwright
September 15 (Thursday)Conversation — 7:30 p.m., Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center


For more details:  http://readme.readmedia.com/Major-author-Joyce-Carol-Oates-and-legendary-dancer-Savion-Glover-open-new-arts-conversation-series-at-UAlbany/13976552/print

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The Creative Life!

The Writers Institute Fall 2016 schedule begins with an exciting new program collaboration "The Creative Life: A Conversation Series at UAlbany." Created and produced by the Writers Institute, University Art Museum, and UAlbany's Performing Arts Center, in collaboration with WAMC Public Radio, this new series features leading figures from a variety of artistic disciplines in conversation about their creative inspiration, their craft, and their careers. Joyce Carol Oates, prolific author of more than 160 books, will lead off the series on September 15 followed by Savion Glover, tap dancing legend and Tony award-winning choreographer on October 15.

For more information: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#joyce

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The Literary Life Where You Find

An article in the TU in association with tomorrow's event:

THE LITERARY LIFE WHERE YOU FIND IT: an evening with WILLIAM KENNEDY and ELISA ALBERT
Thursday, November 7th, at 6 pm, at the Stair Gallery, 549 Warren Street, Hudson. For more information, contact the Hudson Library at 518.828.1792.

The TU's Amy Griffin writes:

In 2010, Patti Smith gave some advice to young artists: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."

These sentiments were echoed more recently when David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, wrote for Creative Time Reports that New York City is becoming increasingly inhospitable to creativity and that "the cultural part of the city — the mind — has been usurped by the top 1 percent."

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Toni Morrison Talking to Google

Our former office mate Toni Morrison teaches Google Inc. about creativity.....

NEW YORK (AP) — Novelist Toni Morrison, speaking Wednesday to dozens of Google employees holding laptops and smartphones, shared her vision for how she would turn the search engine leader into a literary character.

"It's like a big, metal, claw-y machine in 'Transformers,'" she said, to much laughter, during a lunchtime gathering at Google's Manhattan offices. "When they're threatened, they turn into a little radio, they turn into a little car. And then after you pass them by they come up again.

"They can be anything and everything."

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/toni-morrison-talks-google-about-creativity

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Alison Lurie, on being "too clever for her own good"

Alison Lurie, our new official New York State Author who speaks tonight at Page Hall, writes about being "too clever" as a little girl, and about coping with a birth injury that left her with facial atrophy and deafness in one ear.

"All young children, we know, are imaginative and creative; and while they remain young these qualities are usually fostered. The grubby but delightful paintings and naïve verses are extravagantly admired, shown to visitors, tacked to the kitchen walls. But as children grow older, encouragement of imaginative creation is often quietly replaced by encouragement of what have begun to seem more important traits: good manners, good marks, good looks; athletic and social success; and a willingness to earn money mowing lawns and baby-sitting - traits that are believed to predict adult success. Children who seem unlikely to do well along these lines sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the usual age because I didn't have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, 'too clever for her own good,' but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team."

More in the New York Times.

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Photography vs. Writing

Teju Cole, who visits 2/10, talks with India Realtime about why photography beats literature:

"I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it’s because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph – luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

In the case of literature, so much of what’s on the page is you really making an effort to put it there. So people can give you the credit for what you’ve written down and praise you for writing that sentence.

But in the case of photography, although it also takes a lot of preparation and work, it can give the illusion of chance, of magic: How did you make it happen? How did you happen to be there? And maybe that’s a reaction I’m much more at home with."

More.

Featured photo is from Teju Cole's website. See more of his work on Flickr.

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