[Vwoolf] Paris Press reissue of On Being Ill with Notes from Sick Rooms

[Mark Hussey]

Thank you for sending this. It was indeed a very enjoyable and interesting
event.  I should point out, though, that VW kept up the fiction in her
letters to Violet D that Thoby was getting better only for about 4 weeks,
not 6 months!!

 

mh

 

From: Linda Camarasana [mailto:camarasana at mindspring.com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 1:21 PM
To: 'Mark Hussey'; vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Cc: Kerin McElhenny
Subject: RE: [Vwoolf] Paris Press reissue of On Being Ill with Notes from
Sick Rooms

 

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend last night's event, but I wanted share
comments by one of my graduate students at SUNY Old Westbury (with her
permission) who did attend:

 

I am so glad that I made the effort to attend this presentation. This was a
mixed medical and literary panel. Jan Freeman is the founder and director or
Paris Press which specializes in publishing women writers.

 

The panel provided touching insights and hilarious observations of a
sometimes somber subject. They read from the texts of VW and Julia Stephen,
from the mother-nurse and her daughter-patient dual perspectives and the
point was made that VW gained an added sensitivity about life from her
illness. Mark Hussey supplied interesting discussion of how VW maintained
the fiction that her brother Thoby lived about 6 months beyond his death in
her correspondence to Violet Dickinson. She was sensitive to the fact that
Violet also had typhoid and VW did not want her to be alarmed at Thoby's
fate she provided elaborate details of Thoby's life after death. (I know
that you know this, I found it fascinating and an indicator of Virginia's
heart.) There was also a woman on the panel, Judith Kelman, who runs a
workshop at Memorial Sloan Kettering were patients and professional writers
get together to write their stories from the patients' unique perspective of
leaving the shores of health and venturing into the waters of illness.

 

I would be remiss not to mention the comments of Dr. Elizabeth
Lorde-Rollins. She is a poet and a physician and a professor of OB/GYN at
Columbia. She told wonderful, heartwarming stories of the patients she
encountered early in her clinical practice. I was moved by these stories and
they resonated with me because of my dear mother's recent difficulties
facing old age. She was not a Woolf scholar, as she pointed out, but she
brought a great humanity to the medical practice that Julia Stephen
reflected in her Notes From Sick Rooms.

 

Loved this panel, thank you so much for passing on the email because it is
because of you I understood all VW references TTLH, MD, BTA, and The Waves.
This was a very interesting evening.

 

Kerin McElhenny

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

Linda Camarasana
Assistant Professor, English Department
Coordinator, M.A.T./M.S. Programs in English 
New Academic Building 3017
SUNY College at Old Westbury 
Old Westbury, NY 11568
 <mailto:camarasana at mindspring.com> camarasana at mindspring.com 

 

From: vwoolf-bounces+camarasana=mindspring.com at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
[mailto:vwoolf-bounces+camarasana=mindspring.com at lists.service.ohio-state.ed
u] On Behalf Of Mark Hussey
Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2012 2:24 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Subject: [Vwoolf] Paris Press reissue of On Being Ill with Notes from Sick
Rooms

 

To anyone near enough to come (& in hopes you are recovered from the effects
of Hurricane Sandy),  I attach an announcement of an open event this coming
Weds. at Columbia Law School celebrating the reissue of On Being Ill.

 

Best wishes, Mark

  _____  

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