Ron Charles’ Blog Post on An Evening with Julia Alvarez
Posted in Announcements
American book critic Ron Charles reflects on an Evening with Julia Alvarez at the Lannan Literary Festival on Tuesday, March 24th.
“‘I was trained before women’s studies,’ she explained to the Georgetown students. ‘We read the canon, and the canon was mostly British male writers. I love the work. I am not going to renege on it. It taught me craft, but I was trying to sound like them … because I thought real writers sounded like that.'”
She recalled feeling completely shut down by writer’s block during a retreat at Yaddo. ‘I don’t know how they let me in,’ she said. In rooms all around her, artists were loudly pounding away on their typewriters. But her efforts to sound like Yeats, Milton, and Blake weren’t going anywhere.”