New Event! Local Journalists On Stage at His Girl Friday Screening

Rosemary Armao, Marion Roach Smith and Casey Seiler will engage the audience in conversation about women in journalism at our free upcoming screening of His Girl Friday (this coming Friday, March 3rd).
March 3 (Friday): HIS GIRL FRIDAY
Pre-screening talk with Rosemary Armao, Marion Roach Smith and Casey Seiler about the challenges facing women in journalism — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus, 1400 Washington Ave.
Film screening to follow— 8:00 p.m.
Directed by Howard Hawks (United States, 1940, 92 minutes, b/w)
Starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy
A newspaper editor uses every trick he can think of to stop his top reporter—and ex-wife—from quitting journalism and hopping a train to Albany to marry another man with the intention of settling into a new life as a housewife. This fast-paced comedy with overlapping dialogue was adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from their  Broadway hit The Front Page. Chicago Reader reviewer Dave Kehr described Cary Grant’s performance as “…truly virtuoso— stunning technique applied to the most challenging material.” The American Film Institute ranked His Girl Friday at #19 in its list of the best American comedies of all time. Quentin Tarantino credits the film with teaching him to write dialogue.
A new high-definition digital restoration of His Girl Friday will be shown.

Rosemary Armao, a star of WAMC’s “The Roundtable,” is the Director of the Journalism Program at the University at Albany. She is a former Executive Director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and former President of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

Marion Roach Smith is the author of four mass-market books. A former staffer at The New York Times, she has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and a talk show host on Sirius Satellite Radio. She currently teaches writing online and serves as a working member of the Friends of The New York State Writers Institute.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union state editor and columnist, and previously served as the paper’s entertainment editor.

For more information contact the New York State Writers Institute at 518 442 5620 or visit us online at www.writers.edu/inst.

A newspaper editor uses every trick he can think of to stop his top reporter—and ex-wife—from quitting journalism and hopping a train to Albany to marry another man, with the intention of settling into a new life as a housewife. This fast-paced comedy with overlapping dialogue was adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from their Broadway hit The Front Page. Chicago Reader reviewer Dave Kehr described Cary Grant’s performance as “…truly virtuoso— stunning technique applied to the most challenging material.” The American Film Institute ranked His Girl Friday at #19 in its list of the best American comedies of all time. Quentin Tarantino credits the film with teaching him to write

A new high-definition digital restoration of His Girl Friday will be shown.

Rosemary Armao, a star of WAMC’s “The Roundtable,” is the Director of the Journalism Program at the University at Albany. She is a former Executive Director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and former President of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

Marion Roach Smith is the author of four mass-market books. A former staffer at The New York Times, she has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and a talk show host on Sirius Satellite Radio. She currently teaches writing online and serves as a working member of the Friends of The New York State Writers Institute.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union state editor and columnist, and previously served as the paper’s entertainment editor.

For more information contact the New York State Writers Institute at 518 442 5620 or visit us online at www.writers.edu/inst.

 

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Helen Czerski on Hyenas and Their Sense of Smell

Helen Czerski, the BBC's female face of science TV, talks about hyenas and their sense of smell, and what engineers can learn from them. Czerski visits Albany from London this coming Thursday.

Video courtesy of University College London's UCLTV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY-OCWK3Ulc

More about her upcoming visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/czerski_helen17.html#.WJngmU3FDs0

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Book Trailer for Storm in A Teacup

Watch Helen Czerski's book trailer for Storm in a Teacup on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMsv9E_QtZQ

You can also make a lava lamp with lemonade and raisins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm3oOEbwgyQ

Czerski visits Albany this Thursday: http://www.albany.edu/…/webp…/archives/czerski_helen17.html…

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Treasures from the Archive: Barbara Kingsolver

Major American novelist Barbara Kingsolver visited the Writers Institute in the spring of 1992, and was also interviewed by the late Tom Smith, Institute Director, for the WAMC Book Show, April 16, 1992.

Here's an excerpt from that interview:

Kingsolver: People also have asked the question if I write women’s books or to put it in the way a student asked me, “Is The Bean Trees a chick book?” I guess it is because most of the characters seem to be women but the thing is I’ve read so many white guy books in my life and it had never even occurred to me that those people in the books were white men. Lawrence of Arabia, the film, comes to my mind. I remember after I saw the film, a friend said, “Did you notice that there were no women in that movie?” We get accustomed to what literature is and literature is about a man and a great white whale. But it seems to me that what happened between two women in a kitchen can be just as interesting and just as heroic in its way as what happens between a man and a great white whale. It just happens that I know much more about what happens between two women in a kitchen than I do about whales. I think I’m on safer territory writing about the people I know.

Picture:  Kingsolver posing with locally grown leeks and asparagus in the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 2, 2008, in an article on the locavore movement.

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Stories About Women in Science

Janet Maslin reviews Andrea Barrett's Archangel, a new collection of short pieces of historical fiction about the struggles of women scientists.

"This is a book full of strong women..... [Barrett's] stories work as both fiction and as philosophy of science. And she need do no grandstanding to advance her belief in unstoppable progress. But this book does offer a powerfully human sense of the struggle it takes for new ideas to dislodge old ones.

Barrett visited the Writers Institute in 2007: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/barrett.html

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Angry, female and refreshingly believable-- Claire Messud

Claire Messud, who talks with you about her work tomorrow, July 11, in Saratoga, is the author most recently of The Woman Upstairs (2013).

 

Elizabeth Day, writing in the London Observer, says "Claire Messud's latest narrator is angry, female and refreshingly believable.... It's difficult to think of any great novel by a woman that has at its heart an unapologetically furious female narrator who is not insane, thwarted or clinically depressed.... the real achievement of this novel is to imbue every chapter with thought-provoking questions surrounding the place of women in literature, society and – most importantly – their own minds. Female anger has never been so readable."

More of the review:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/25/woman-upstairs-claire-messud-review

Full schedule of free readings:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html

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The Feminine Mystique at 50

 

Gail Collins (who visits Tuesday) wrote the Introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (pictured above), published February 2013.

Here's a bit of the introduction:  "Every writer yearns to create a book that will seize the moment — to perfectly encapsulate the problem of an era before other people even notice the problem exists. Of course, that almost never happens. Mostly we’re happy if we can manage to explain, in an interesting way, something people already know is going on. But Betty Friedan won the gold ring. When “The Feminine Mystique” emerged in 1963, it created a reaction so intense that Friedan could later write another book about the things women said to her about the first one (“It Changed My Life”). If there’s a list of the most important books of the 20th century, “The Feminine Mystique” is on it. It also made one conservative magazine’s exclusive roundup of the “10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries,” which if not flattering is at least a testimony to the wallop it packed."

More in the New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/the-feminine-mystique-at-50.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

More about Gail Collins' visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/collins_gail13.html

Picture: Betty Friedan (UPI).

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Why He Prefers Women Protagonists in His Novels

Elizabeth Floyd Mair of the Times Union talks with Chris Bohjalian (who visits Thursday) about Sandcastles Girls, his novel of the Armenian genocide, based partly on stories from his own family.

In the interview, Bohjalian talks about why he prefers women protagonists in his novels:

I find your gender a lot more interesting than mine — more willing to take emotional risks and more communicative. I think the only reason golf was invented was so that men would talk to each other.

When I write across gender, I begin with the universals — what unites us as human beings, not what makes us different as women and men. Then, as my characters develop, they find their own behavioral idiosyncrasies and quirks. Sometimes they're gender-specific, but not always.

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Sandcastle-Girls-is-a-personal-tale-4445861.php#ixzz2RIfgEYmU

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Valentine's Day Cocktails from Women Authors

Bestselling novelist Ann Hood (The Knitting Circle) who visits the Institute 2/26, offers her favorite Valentine's Day cocktail:

“A lime mint Rickey: I recently returned from Cartagena Colombia and fell hard for their local concoction of fresh lime juice, mint and simple syrup over crushed ice. Also very tasty with dark rum in it!”

Cowboys Are My Weakness author Pam Houston, who visited in 2005, offers this: “Pretty in Pink: San Pellegrino (2 parts), pomegranate-cherry juice (1 part), slice of Meyer lemon, and lots of ice in a tall tumbler. It’s pretty, pink, and comforting (in case Valentine’s Day sucks).”

For more cocktails, go to http://www.prweb.com/releases/DrinkingDiaries/02/prweb10426112.htm

More on Hood's upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mirabelli_hood13.html

More on Houston's 2005 visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/houston_pam.html

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Against the Sci-Fi Boys' Club

Fantasy author Damien Walter writes about why the male culture of science fiction needs to open its doors to women.

He highlights a number of female masters of the genre including Margaret Atwood (who visited the Writers Institute in November 2005), Alice Sheldon, Madeline Ashby and Tricia Sullivan.

"There's a logical fallacy in this club's claims that it welcomes women members, which is rather like the rhetoric of the well-schooled military officer. Of course they want women in the army. It's just, well, a soldier must be physically strong, naturally violent and preferably have a todger so you can pee standing up. Any woman who fulfils those criteria is more than welcome to take the king's shilling!"  More in The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/07/hard-sf-women-writers

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Anne Enright Shortlisted for Orange Prize

It was announced today that The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (who visits RPI tomorrow) was shortlisted for the United Kingdom's Orange Prize for Fiction, which comes with an award of 30,000 British pounds (approximately 48,000 U.S. dollars).

The novel is a tale of adultery and its consequences.

The prize is awarded for "excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world."

Other authors on the shortlist include Cynthia Ozick, now 84 years old, who visited the Writers Institute in March 2005, as well as Ann Patchett, Madeline Miller, Georgina Harding and Esi Edugyan.

Read more in the Irish Independent.

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Two Soviet Jewish Grandmothers

Katha Pollitt reviews Ester and Ruzya, a dual biography of two Soviet Jewish women and their harrowing stories, told by their granddaughter, Masha Gessen (who visits Thursday) in 2005 in the New York Times:

"Reviewers sometimes call a work of nonfiction ''as exciting as a novel,'' but that would be an understatement applied to this extraordinary family memoir. Masha Gessen, a gifted Russian-American journalist, narrates the intertwined lives of her two Soviet Jewish grandmothers, best friends for over 50 years, as they confront some of the 20th century's worst ordeals: Stalin's terror, Hitler's mass murder of the Jews, World War II, the bewildering twists and turns of the post-Stalin era. If your idea of a memoir runs to family dysfunction and authorial disgruntlement, or to people going on about their houses and travels, ''Ester and Ruzya'' will remind you how much life, history and emotional and moral complexity the genre can convey in the hands of a wonderful writer. " More.

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Margaret Fuller: Too Fierce to Fit In

"Fuller was the recipient of her father Timothy's ambition. A brooding thinker who was disappointed that his first child was female, Timothy gave his daughter an incredibly rigorous education that left her with nightmares and robbed her of her childhood. And though she was lauded as a prodigy, she was keenly aware as she matured that her father rued his role in developing her mind. She suffered from spinal curvature and migraines and was plain-featured, nearsighted, an unmarried mother at age 38, in love with an Italian man a decade younger and regularly criticized in private and public for her inability to be deferential in the slightest degree. Fuller was, quite simply, too fierce to fit in."

So writes Laura Skandera Trombley in a review of John Matteson's The Lives of Margaret Fuller. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer visits on 3/22.

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Woman of the World

"Margaret Fuller, a woman of great talent and promise, had the misfortune to be born in Massachusetts in 1810, at a time and place in which the characteristics of what historians have termed 'true womanhood' were becoming ever more rigidly defined. Well brought-up women like herself were to be cultured, pious, submissive and genteel. Fuller, by contrast, was assertive and freethinking. She was also — and to some extent, still is — a difficult person to like. "

The Lives of Margaret Fuller by Pulitzer winner John Matteson (who visits on March 22nd) is reviewed by Mary Beth Norton in the New York Times.

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The Woman Behind FDR, Friday, Nov. 18

Kirstin Downey, Washington Post reporter, will talk about her biography of Frances Perkins, the female architect of FDR's New Deal, a major historical figure now largely unknown to the public.

November 18 (Friday)Discussion — 4:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

Kirstin Downey, Award-winning journalist for the Washington Post, will make an appearance at the 2011 Researching New York Conference to discuss her 2009 biography of Frances Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.

The nation’s first female cabinet secretary, Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was one of FDR’s chief advisors, and the principal architect of the most important social welfare legislation in U.S. history. Named one of the best nonfiction books of 2009 by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association, the book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Downey provides not only a superb rendering of history but also a large dose of inspiration drawn from Perkins’s clearheaded, decisive work with FDR to solve urgent problems and to succeed in the face of insurmountable odds.”

Sponsored by UAlbany’s Department of History and the NYS Writers Institute.

For additional information on the Researching New York Conference click here.

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