[Vwoolf] Encountering Virginia Woolf

[J. Wilson]

Thanks, Karen and Vara, but if I am going to ³get credit² I should have some
skin in the game (gee, am I mixing metaphors here?) and tell my little (but
of course earthshaking to me) story:  growing up in the horrible l950s, I
had never heard of V. Woolf until, seeking relief from my secretarial job at
the Bank of America by taking a creative writing course at night, I got a
note on the bottom of one of my leaden Dickensian short stories from
Professor Foff:  ³You might want to read some Virginia Woolf so that you can
see that prose can be winged too.²  (Alas, he committed suicide so I could
never thank him for his advice.)

It was difficult in those benighted days even to find her books, but at the
Discovery Bookstore in North Beach I did find a used copy of the paperback
containing both Jacob¹s Room and The Waves, a perfect pairing for me.  As
one consequence, I left the secretarial position (paying ³pin money² of $350
a month!) and entered graduate school in literature (my undergraduate degree
had been in political science).  As another, I never tried to write another
short story!

J.J. Wilson, the lucky




On 8/28/13 2:392:25, "kllevenback at att.net" <kllevenback at att.net> wrote:

> Hi, Catherine.
> To give credit where credit's due--the thread began with J.J. Wilson, one of
> the founding members of the Virginia Woolf Society who is represented on the
> oral history preserved at the IVWS Collection at the University of
> Toronto--and was picked up and generalized by Vara Neverow, former president
> of the IVWS and current editor of the VWM, which began with J.J.
> (Don't you all love acronyms and abbreviations  It's oh-so Bloomsbury, in a
> 21st-century way.)
> Cheers--
> Karen Levenback
> 
> From: Catherine Hollis <hollisc at berkeley.edu>
> To: Kristin Czarnecki <Kristin_Czarnecki at georgetowncollege.edu>
> Cc: "Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu"
> <Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 1:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Encountering Virginia Woolf
> 
> Finally reading these! What a wonderful thread... thanks to whoever started
> it. 
> 
> Mrs. Dalloway was my first. I found her at St. Mark's Books in NYC during the
> fall of 1985. Who was she? Why was she buying flowers? I began to buy myself
> flowers at the local Korean grocery to keep in my dorm room. I wrote a mash
> note to an indie rock guy making him guess who wrote "Mrs. Dalloway said she
> would buy the flowers herself." He couldn't. Then I wrote on the walls of my
> room in magic marker: "Pity, for the loss of roses." I walked down 10th street
> in Greenwich Village looking up at the French windows, wishing I could burst
> them open and take the plunge myself into the early morning air (I had an 8:30
> class). I was so disappointed to learn that Clarissa wasn't me. But what a
> lark to read her as a girl of 18!
> 
> 
> Catherine
> 


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