Q&A: An Ear for Women

Growing up, professor and biographer Megan Marshall practiced the piano or the harpsichord every day, a discipline that prepared her well for life as a writer. Marshall listens for rhythm and melody in language, her own and that in the letters and diaries of the women whose lives she explores. “A biographer,” she has written, “is like a good accompanist.”

In her most recent book, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, she literally accompanies her subject, integrating her experience as Bishop’s poetry student at Harvard in 1976. Meanwhile, Marshall’s two previous prize-winning biographies innovate in other ways, expanding our framework for reading history and women’s experience. In The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, Marshall deftly blends the stories of the brilliant sisters who helped shape American education, the arts, and the Transcendentalist movement. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her next book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, which chronicles the story of this towering intellectual and social reformer.

• WCW Online

Read more: WCW Online

Diving Deep: An Interview With Ted Conover

Ted Conover has spent his entire career delving into different cultural worlds. “Why not?” he asks. “It’s a big universe to explore.” Conover’s empathy runs as deep as his curiosity. He is a writer, as William T. Vollmann observed in a review of The Routes of Man, who cares about “not merely that convenient abstraction, humanity, but people in particular.” Indeed, people—everyone from hoboes riding freight trains to Mexican immigrants to prison guards—animate the pages of Conover’s books. Living with them, sharing the indignities they suffer and the pleasures they enjoy, is the foundation of his immersion journalism—a beat he shares with Barbara Ehrenreich, Lauren Kessler, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, among others, each of whom opens up the experiences of frequently ignored people and communities.

• Creative Nonfiction, Spring 2017

Read more: Creative Nonfiction

How Women Helped Revolutionize the Art of Printmaking

The artist Boris Margo once confronted Louise Nevelson about the messiness of her printmaking. “You leave so much black on the plate; you can wipe it cleaner.” “I don’t want it clean,” she retorted. At the innovative print collective Atelier 17, women “got dirty” in ways that resisted gender norms. Home and hearth were the midcentury feminine ideal, so being an artist was challenge enough. Add to that assumptions about women as weak — surely they couldn’t operate a heavy printing press or use “manly” tools like the burin in copper plate engraving. But at Atelier 17, women displayed more than mastery. They helped revolutionize printmaking, and along the way redefined beliefs about gender identity and artistic achievement in the 1940s and ’50s.

• Hyperallergic, May 2020

Read more: Hyperallergic

‘Joan of Arc’ review: France’s virgin saint comes alive in Kathryn Harrison’s biography

If you aren’t already in thrall to the “Maid of Orleans,” you might be by the end of Kathryn Harrison’s “Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured.” You can’t help but cheer on the 19-year-old who armored herself with virginity and men’s clothing as she disrupted 15th-century social norms, led the French army to victory over the English, and ushered the Dauphin to coronation as Charles VII. She paid for her brief glory with “the first great witch trial,” a tortuous imprisonment, and a brutal death before earning the immortal life of sainthood.

Harrison creates the interior life of a singular young woman against a backdrop equal parts myth and history. She mines the extensive records of Joan’s trial and its nullification to create a complex figure unbending to any but divine authority, and possessed of a verbal acumen that “a chorus of scheming pedants couldn’t dismantle.” When asked during her third interrogation, “Do you know whether or not you are in God’s grace?” Joan responded, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace.” Her savvy astounded her interrogators.

• Oregon Live, January 2015

Read more: Oregon Live

Nonfiction Review: ‘Cleopatra’ by Stacy Schiff

To appreciate Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra: A Life,” begin by banishing the myths, the “kudzu of history” that grows in the absence of facts. Forget the thick bangs and pageboy, the dazzling beauty and sexual predations, the fabled asp that delivered her death, even the perception that she was Egyptian.

Cleopatra was a Greek Macedonian descended from the Ptolemy dynasty — “about as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.” She was not likely beautiful; most sources report on her large nose, confirmed by the only images we have — her face on the coins issued during her rule with Mark Anthony. Rather, she was “bewitching” due to her education, fluency in eight languages, command of finance and governance, quick wit and beguiling presence. Imagine: a woman rising to the top without trading on beauty.

• Oregon Live, October 2010

Read more: Oregon Live

Nonfiction Review: ‘The Pain Chronicles’ by Melanie Thernstrom

In “The Pain Chronicles,” Melanie Thernstrom tells the story of a former train conductor who lost both legs and an arm in an accident caused by his multiple sclerosis. One day, his doctor finds him propped up in his hospital bed holding “Kitchen Table Wisdom,” a book of medical stories, with his one remaining limb. “Hey Doc,” he says, “Some of these people … the way they cope — it’s incredible.”

Why do some people stay resilient in the face of intractable pain while others despair? What is pain, Thernstrom asks, “sensation, emotion, or idea?” How does the body’s alarm system turn into a “state of being unlike any other, a magic mountain as far removed from the familiar world as a dreamscape”?

“The Pain Chronicles” follows Thernstrom’s personal and intellectual journey through these vexing questions. Her lengthy subtitle — “Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering” — is apt. She covers vast swaths of history, culture, religion and science in short, accessible and beautifully sequenced chapters. If you’re one of the 70 million Americans who suffers from chronic pain or has witnessed others’ suffering, this book offers an illuminating journey toward new vision and possible relief.

• Oregon Live, August 2010

Read more: Oregon Live

How Printmaking Became Popular After The Great Depression

 The Portland Art Museum’s exhibit on the innovative business enterprise Associated American Artists (AAA) displays one of its 1946 catalogues. On the cover, a slim, blonde woman sits reading on her couch — the very embodiment of middle-class leisure. Six signed, original prints by the group’s “Leading American Artists” fill the wall behind her — a visual statement of the AAA’s goal of bringing art to every home.

Prior to the Depression, owning fine art was beyond the reach of most Americans. In 1934 Reeves Lewenthal changed that through a unique marriage of art and commerce. According to The Reporter magazine, Lewenthal was “an enthusiastic, restless, practically sleepless businessman” as well as a former art dealer. Chyna Bounds, who curated the exhibit, quotes Lewenthal’s belief that “the gallery system was doomed.” Instead of catering to elites like most dealers, he focused on the huge middle-class market of art consumers that remained untapped. Even in those lean years, many people could afford five dollars for one of a limited edition of signed prints. And artists, “leading” or otherwise, were desperate for ways to sell their work during the Depression.

• Hyperallergic, August 2019

Read more: Hyperallergic

Q&A: An Ear for Women

Growing up, professor and biographer Megan Marshall practiced the piano or the harpsichord every day, a discipline that prepared her well for life as a writer. Marshall listens for rhythm and melody in language, her own and that in the letters and diaries of the women whose lives she explores. “A biographer,” she has written, “is like a good accompanist.”

In her most recent book, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, she literally accompanies her subject, integrating her experience as Bishop’s poetry student at Harvard in 1976. Meanwhile, Marshall’s two previous prize-winning biographies innovate in other ways, expanding our framework for reading history and women’s experience. In The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, Marshall deftly blends the stories of the brilliant sisters who helped shape American education, the arts, and the Transcendentalist movement. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her next book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, which chronicles the story of this towering intellectual and social reformer.

• WCW Online

Read more: WCW Online

Diving Deep: An Interview With Ted Conover

Ted Conover has spent his entire career delving into different cultural worlds. “Why not?” he asks. “It’s a big universe to explore.” Conover’s empathy runs as deep as his curiosity. He is a writer, as William T. Vollmann observed in a review of The Routes of Man, who cares about “not merely that convenient abstraction, humanity, but people in particular.” Indeed, people—everyone from hoboes riding freight trains to Mexican immigrants to prison guards—animate the pages of Conover’s books. Living with them, sharing the indignities they suffer and the pleasures they enjoy, is the foundation of his immersion journalism—a beat he shares with Barbara Ehrenreich, Lauren Kessler, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, among others, each of whom opens up the experiences of frequently ignored people and communities.

• Creative Nonfiction, Spring 2017

Read more: Creative Nonfiction