 Okay, I aspire to be Paula because she said all of that, just, you know, no notes. But anyhow, as we get started, memoir is one of the most popular genres right now, and it's a genre in which women writers have been both prolific and commercially successful. There's also an argument around memoir that if we don't have narrative, which is to say stories, we don't have stories, we don't have identity. The narrative is the way, stories are the way into understanding our identity. If this is true, then who is able to tell stories and how those stories are told becomes very, very important. Some of these women stories were going to be reading for you tonight. Now, in terms of organization, we're not going strictly chronologically, although in general, we're starting with classic writers moving into contemporary writers and we're also starting with those writers that are just writing childhood and moving into concerns of women facing the later parts of their lives. Again, still focused around identity. And issues about how does identity develop, what sort of constraints affect identity. Those are the kinds of things that I will try to be sort of alerting you to between the speakers. I'll be introducing the speakers and the authors between every reading, trying to give you a couple points to listen for in those cases. But I'll ask you to fold your questions in discussion until we finish all of the reading so that we have the fullness of voices when we're done. We'll have readings for about an hour and a half. Now, if anybody wants to leave during that time, you are absolutely welcome to leave. I hate being trapped in a room, so please feel free. I'm also a teacher, so I'm used to the students just like getting up and walking the hell out. So don't worry about that. But we'll also give you a break between the reading and the discussion so that if you need to get on to something else in your evening, you're free to do that. So with that, let's begin. And we're going to begin with Virginia Wolf, famous, classic, feminist, modernist writers of all the writers tonight. She's probably the one who is most subconsciously grappling with the difficulty of writing autobiography, of the challenge of describing the surface and telling some truth about what lies beneath that surface. This key question of who is this I being described? Is going to come back again and again over the evening. Ben Luebner, who is a visiting assistant professor in the English department at MSU, is going to read from Wolf's a sketch of the past. This is something that Virginia Wolf wrote in 1939. She would have been about 57 or so at the time, just a couple of years before her death, although in this sketch she's looking back to the earliest memories of her childhood. Two days ago, Sunday, April 16, 1939 to be precise, Nessa, that's Wolf's sister, said that if I did not start writing my memoirs, I should soon be too old. I should be 85, I should have forgotten, because it's the unhappy case of ladies. As it happens that I'm sick of writing Roger's Life, that's Roger Fry, a painter and friend of Wolf's, whom she was writing a biography of at the time. As it happens that I'm sick of writing Roger's Life, perhaps I'll spend two or three mornings making a sketch. There are several difficulties. In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember. In the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written. As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But if I begin to go through them to analyze them and their merits and faults, the mornings I cannot take more than two or three at most will be gone. So without stopping to choose my way, and assuring a certain knowledge that it will find itself, or if not, it will not matter. I begin in the first manner. This was a thread in purple flowers on a black ground, my mother's dress. She was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close. You can still see purple and red and blue, I think, against the black. They must have been anemones, I suppose. Perhaps we were going to St. Ives. More probably, though, for from the light must have been evening. We were coming back from London, but it's more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St. Ives. For that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory. In fact, it is the most important of all my memories. If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills, then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. There's a flying half asleep, half awake. In bed and nursery at St. Ives, it is of hearing waves breaking and sending a splash of water over the beach and then breaking behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of hearing this splash and seeing this light and feeling it is almost impossible that I should be here. Feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive. I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written or give the feeling, which is even at this moment very strong in me, but I should fail unless I had some wonderful luck. I dare say I should only succeed in having the luck if I had begun by describing Virginia herself. Here I come to one of the memoir writers' difficulties. One of the reasons why though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happen. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say, this is what happened. They do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. The events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened, who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, second daughter of Leslie and Julia, Princess Stephen, born on January 25, 1882. Sended from great many people, some famous, others obscure. Born into a large connection, born of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents. Born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting articulate late 19th century world. So that I could, if I liked, take the trouble. Right a great deal here, not only about my mother and father, but about uncles and aunts, cousins and friends. I do not know how much of this or what part of this made me feel what I felt in the nursery I'd say knives. I do not know how far I differ from other people. That is another memoir writer's difficulty. Yet to describe oneself truly, one must have some standard of comparison. Was I clever, stupid, good-looking, ugly, passionate, cold? Are we part of the fact that I was never at school, never completed in any way, never competed in any way with children of my own age? I'd never been able to pair my gifts and defects with other peoples. Of course, there was one external reason for the intensity of this first impression, the impression of the waves and the acorn on the blind. The feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grave and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow. It was due partly to the many months we spent in London. The change of nursery was a great change. And there was the long train journey, and the excitement. I remember the dark, the lights, the stir of the going up to then. But to fix my mind upon the nursery. It had a balcony. There was a partition. But a joined balcony of my mother's and father's bedroom, my mother would come out on her balcony in a white dressing gown. There were passion flowers growing on the wall. Great starry blossoms with purple streaks and large green buds. Hard empty, parkful. If I were a painter, I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver and green. There was the pale yellow blind, the sea green and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture that was globular, semi-transparent. I should make a picture of curved petals, of shells, of things that were semi-transparent. I should make curved shapes showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim. And what would seem would at the same time be heard. Sounds would come through this petal or leaf. Sounds indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. And I think of the early morning in that I also hear the caw of rocks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air. Tolls it up, which prevents it from being sharp and distinct. Quality of the air above talent how seemed to suspend sound to let it sink down slowly as if it were caught in a blue, gummy veil. The rocks calling as part of the wave is breaking. And the splash as the wave drew back and then gathered again. And I lay there half awake, half asleep, drawing in such ecstasy as I cannot describe.