Alison Lurie on the Magic of Knitting in the New Yorker

Alison Lurie, New York State Author (2012-14) by appointment of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, under the auspices of the NYS Writers Institute, contributes a piece on knitting to the New Yorker blog:

"As a child, I thought of knitting as a kind of magic, in which a one-dimensional object became two-dimensional or even three-dimensional. While you watched, a very long piece of string somehow turned into a hat or a sock or a mitten, something with shape and weight, an inside and an outside. Appropriately, this transformation was accomplished with long shiny sticks, like the magic wands in fairy tales. "

"It wasn’t only the materials that, for me, were transformed. The people who could perform this magic seemed, in everyday life, to be everyday humans. But when they picked up their wands they turned into sorceresses or fairy godmothers, mistresses of a secret art."

More in the New Yorker:   http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/history-of-knitting-in-literature-sweater-curse.html

More on Alison Lurie:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison12.html

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"Knitting Saved My Life"-- Ann Hood

Ann Hood, author of the major bestseller, The Knitting Circle, will share the stage with UAlbany Professor Emeritus Eugene Mirabelli this afternoon and tonight.

Ann Hood speaking about The Knitting Circle: "A few years ago I was afraid I would never be able to write again.... During that time when I wasn't reading or writing, I learned how to knit. Knitting, I believe, saved my life. But it also introduced me to a new world of yarn and colors and textures and of people. Sitting in various knitting circles, I slowly learned that knitting had rescued other women too. Bad marriages, illness, addiction-knitting gave comfort and even hope through life's trials."

More:  http://www.annhood.us/books/knitting

More about the visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mirabelli_hood13.html

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Alison Lurie offers comic relief in yesterday's Times Union

State Author Offers Comic Relief

by Paul Grondahl

ALBANY — If novelist Alison Lurie takes out her needles and yarn during the speechifying at the state author and state poet awards on Thursday at a Writers Institute program, take it as a sign that even the honoree is bored.

Knitting was Lurie's silent protest against the gasbags who droned on during English department faculty meetings at Cornell University, where she taught writing and children's literature for nearly 40 years.

More in the TU:  http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/State-author-offers-comic-relief-3878975.php

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