Conversation with Books 2009

In this wonderful annual literary event, our panel of experts commented on their book picks for 2009. Event Founder Catherine Luporit, CSC Professor Emeritus in English noted that the goal of the evening was "to give you enough information about each book to know if you want to read it. We like to be encouragers, not reviewers." This is the first time the panelists have discussed the books together, and they often surprise each other with their comments. Interwoven in the event is time for attendees to chat, buy books, and have some refreshments.

You may scan the book list, or look at their comments per book. The panelists were: Mary Jo Ryan Richardson (Social Studies) '52; Catherine Lupori, Professor Emerita of English; Ruth Brombach (French, German) '60, Executive Director, Alumnae Association; Judie Martens Flahavan (English, French) '60.
For the Book List, click here.
For the Panelists' Comments on the Books, click here.
For the Faces of some of those who attended, click here.
Looking for a Book Club, click here.

Marjorie Mathison Hance, Vice President of External Relations, welcomed the crowd and announced that though we are "catapulting forward into being a university," she assured the audience that "we will always be about women, Catholic, and the liberal arts. These are our distinguishing features, at the heart of everything we do." This book event is an example of that ongoing legacy and heritage.


Catherine Lupori, Professor Emerita in English, launched Conversation with Books 44 years ago. She noted that she is "getting more ancient and legendary with each year." She then asked how many people had been coming more than once over these years and many hands went up. Even more were the numerous hands that went up of individuals who were coming to the event for the first time, telling of the ever growing popularity of this event.

Book List

(in the order presented at the evening event)

• The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

• The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, HarperCollins, 2008.

• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, Ballantine Books, 2007.

• Life Class: A Novel by Pat Barker, Doubleday, 2008.

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Anne Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer, Random House, 2008.

• Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, Knopf, 2008.

• Creating Minnesota: A History from the Inside Out by Annette Atkins. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007.

• Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Knopf, 2007.

• Ladies of Liberty : The Women Who Shaped Our Nation by Cokie Roberts, William Morrow, 2008.

• White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple. Knopf, 2008.

• The World Within: Poems by Ellen Murphy, CSJ, edited by Catherine Litecky, CSJ, and Eleanor Lincoln, CSJ, North Star Press, 2008.

• Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin -- this inspiring and readable memoir is a MUST READ -- about the spiritual and physical journey of mountain climber Greg Mortenson as he unexpectedly comes to build schools in villages of Pakistan, especially for GIRLS!

• Finding Nouf by Zoe Farraris, Houghton Mifflin, 2008 -- this is our mystery pick, fascinating because it is set in Saudia Arabia

• The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day edited by Robert Ellsberg, Marquette University Press, 2008. Finally a peek into the letters and diaries that have been sealed for 25 years, showing not only the inner life of Dorothy Day but the lives of her coworkers, friends, and those who opposed but never stopped this incredible woman.

• Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering by Wendy Lesser, Mariner Books, division of Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Only the fact that we already had a long list kept this memorable memoir on the addition list. Lesser explores what she learns about herself in rereading books she first read when she was younger. Beg, borrow, or steal it, especially for the first chapter.

• The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson by Paola Kaufmann, Rookery Press, 2006. Told mostly from the Emily's sister Lavinia's point of view, this story explores her from other angles. A nice companion to White Heat. This edition was translated from the original Spanish (the author is from Argentina) by William Rolandson.

Our Panelists' Comments

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Publisher Comments:
A deliciously funny novella that celebrates the pleasure of reading. When the present Queen, in pursuit of her wandering corgis, stumbles upon a mobile library she feels duty-bound to borrow a book. Aided by Norman, a young man from the palace kitchen who frequents the library, Bennett describes the Queen's transformation as she discovers the liberating pleasures of the written word. England's best-loved author revels in the power of literature to change even the most uncommon reader's life.



Panelists' Comments:
Catherine described this slender volume as a "witty little book" and "a perfectly delightful fable" about how Queen Elizabeth is lured into a life of reading by a chance enounter. The story offers a very humanizing look at a person dedicated to her duties, and it has caught the imagination of many, since librarians have said that "waves of people are going after it." Catherine suggested "Give it to someone low. It will cheer one up absolutely!"

Mary Jo like how "one book led to another," and this led to changes in Queen Elizabeth. Judie enjoyed how these changes made the Queen's handlers very uncomfortable.

The group chose to start with The Uncommon Reader because it provides an interesting window through which to view the other books on the list.



The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

Publisher Comments:
Louise Erdrich's mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery: the unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. . . . Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina's grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich's narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities' collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel's final pages.

Panelists' Comments:
Ruth admitted that the panel often returns to best-loved authors, and Erdrich is one of these. She appreciated how in this story, time moves back and forth as the characters stories are intertwined and revolve around the grandfather and his brother. Ruth particularly enjoyed these two characters, who are definitely characters, teasing their friend the Catholic priest and one time even tricking him as to which of them had died. "The stories are outrageously romantic and adventurous" said Ruth, picking up themes in the book. Some are violent, some are sorrowful, all are colorful. But at one point the granddaughter narrating the novel says that her family had always used stories to guide them but she had come to the point where there were no stories that fit her situation, and this searching for the right story is part of the reason for this relooking into the past which launches them all into the future.

Judie found that the circular form of the novel and interplay of the stories with and against each other emphasized the theme "we are all connected, and if we would all remember this, we would be better neighbors, citizens, and friends."

Mary Jo added that five chapters of "The Plague of Doves" had won short story prizes individually, and Erdrich showed her extreme craftsmanship and her artistic method in "sewing them together like a patchwork quilt."

Catherine summed things up:"Erdrich always benefits from a second and third reading. She is not a linear writer and when you come back to her works, you get a better sense of the experience of the past, present, and future working together. I always find I am more open to the characters on the second reading, and I learn something about myself, not always pleasant."



Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Publisher Comments:
"I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current." So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America's greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney's profound influence on Wright.

Panelists' Comments:
Catherine stated that at first she was reluctant to pick up this book because she didn't like Frank Lloyd Wright. He was known to have treated women and his workers poorly and have an enormous, indefatigable ego. And she knew little of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, but she felt Horan did an amazing job in making you want to know Mamah and try to see things from what may have been her perspective. "The author tries to answer the question why would Mamah risk so much, leaving her young children. Some readers will think she answered this question, and others not. But it is definitely a very discussable book because there is so much to talk about."

Mary Jo liked how the author "saved Mamah from the dustbins of history, since American history has tried to hide her. Even Frank Lloyd Wright's house in Spring Green had been entitled 'the house he built for himself,' suppressing the idea that Mamah ever existed." Particularly impressive for Mary Jo was that the author had uncovered the 10 letters of Mamah to Swedish Feminist Ellen Keyes and highlighted Mamah's intellectual work in translating them for an American audience, demonstrating Mamah's personal scholastic and creative prowess and independent profession.

This book succeeded in spotlighting Mamah to the extent that she is now talked about even at Taliesen East.

Ruth, though, pointed out that she still had difficulty as a reader resolving the fact that Mamah was never really "happy" for all that she continued to give up, though the ambiguity may be an accurate portrait for the situation. Others thought that perhaps she was happy in Tuscany with Frank though she was still missing her children.

Judie felt this was the crux of the integral tension of the time in which Mamah lived where intellectual women had difficulty in marrying and having children and still being able to pursue their professional talents and interests. What the book alludes to but does not examine, because they'd been overly covered and dramatized by the news media of the time, were the costs to the other spouses and children.

Catherine reiterated: "This book DEMANDS discussion!" One reviewer observed that in society's view, Wright was merely misbehaving in the love affair, while Cheney was a bad mother. This book chronicles the story of an "enigmatic every woman yearning for freedom".



Life Class by Pat Barker

Publisher Comments:
It is the spring of 1914 and a group of young students have gathered in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two parts of an intriguing love triangle and, in the first days of war, they turn to each other. As spring turns to summer, Paul volunteers for the Belgian Red Cross and tends to wounded, dying soldiers from the front line. By the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life and love will never be the same for him again.

Panelists' Comments:
Catherine stated that his book, written by a Booker Prize Winner, is another excellent mix of fact and fiction, created with Barker's "elegant style and psychological acuity." Paul and Elinor are students at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and Kit Neville is a graduate and promising painter. They discuss art and life, and their opinions change as the war invades their world. Kit and Paul both enlist, are turned down, and return to volunteer in medical capacities. Elinor chooses to ignore the war, stay at Slade painting, and refuse to let the conflict influence her.

Catherine said that "from this point on the novel is stunning." It is fascinating to watch how the war affects the characters' aesthetics, with Elinor rejecting the war as being unworthy of artistic view because it is imposed from outside rather than evoked from within. In contrast Paul feels that the war has finally provided material that matters -- "it's not right that their suffering should be swept out of sight." This becomes a friction point between the lovers in the end, and there is an ambiguous ending, as in life.

Mary Jo enjoyed the fact that the real-life painter Augustus John, one of the most popular artists in England at the time, appeared in the novel and gave it a kind of grounding and "a reimagining of the history of the time."

Ruth liked when they were discussing the places that they inhabited in their youth, and Elinor said, "I painted what made him, not what destroyed him." Some say that Elinor is loosely based on the youthful painter Dora Carrington, who attended the Slade School and with whom many fell in love.



The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows


Publisher Comments:
January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she's never met, a native of the island of Guernsey? ... As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends — and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society — born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island — boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.

Panelists' Comments:
Ruth: "I absolutely loved this book!" Someone mentioned to her in a bookstore "don't you think it would sell better if it had a different title?" and Ruth responded, "I don't care what the title is, it's great." This is another tale of people falling into reading by accident and having it change everything. The incidents that lead the people of the Channel Islands to form this book club during the German Occupation is very funny -- as a cover-up for a party -- and everything that ensues from this subterfuge is "extremely entertaining."

"The narrating character Juliette is fun to read, enjoyable, with a great outlook," observed Judie, "while Mamah is NOT... This book proves that a book can be fun to read and yet you can still learn a lot." One of the elements of particular interest to Mary Jo was the history of the Channel Islands during WWI, where Britain was so preoccupied with other areas that it abandoned the islands to the Nazis because there was nothing of great worth to the nation there to defend.

Mary Jo liked how the writer, Mary Ann Shaffer had fallen into the writing of the book as accidentally as the writer Juliette. Librarian Mary Ann's book club had been bugging her for years to write a novel, and when visiting the Guernsey's and being delayed by fog, she picked up a local history book about the wartime to pass the time. This led to the writing of the novel, and Mary Ann died of illness shortly after she learning that her first and only book was to be published in many languages.

Catherine agreed with the rest of the panel that it was "an easily readable book, and I enjoyed it. I have grown beyond thinking a popular book can't be worth reading. That kind of intellectual snobbery can cost you a really good book like this!"




Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri 

Publisher Comments:
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories . . . that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he's harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he's keeping all to himself. In A Choice of Accommodations, a husband's attempt to turn an old friend's wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In Only Goodness, a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in Hema and Kaushik, a trio of linked stories — a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate — we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Panelists' Comments:
Judie likes how Lahiri is interested in the immigrant experience, producing a poignant examination of exile that leads to a depiction of universal moments and themes. One of Judie's favorite stories is "Only Goodness," about an immigrant daughter who so wants to her brother to become "American" that she buys him proto-typical clothes and toys at garage sales, insists that he get to run through a sprinkler, and urges him into activities she thinks will make him a part of this country. "But she discovers that she and her brother are walking a tightrope to be the typical Americans when they face the ravages of alcoholism." The daughter then reflects guiltily on what might be the connection between her brother's illness and all the things about America which she had thrust upon him.

Mary Jo agreed that this was one of the most arresting stories, and she felt that Lahiri was a master at using the last lines of the stories to symbolically exemplify the meaning or mood of the story. This one ends with a deflating balloon, oozing out air as the family's original hopes and expectations do the same.

Ruth particularly enjoyed funny element of the story of Sang, who gets repeated phone calls from men she doesn't know who ask to marry her.

Catherine pronounced that "Lahiri is an unusually good short story writer," who begins the book with a Nathaniel Hawthorne quotation about how a potato that is repeatedly planted and replanted in worn-out soil will fail and thus he has to have his children strike out in "unaccustomed earth." The story thus titled finishes in an uncertain ending with a hint of hope -- like the others -- "so you always end up wondering what happens to the characters."



Creating Minnesota: A History from the Inside Out by Annette Atkins

Publisher Comments:
Each chapter of this innovative state history focuses on a telling detail, a revealing incident, or a meaningful issue that illuminates a larger event, social trends, or politics during a period in our past. A three-act play about Minnesota’s statehood vividly depicts the competing interests of Natives, traders, and politicians who lived in the same territory but moved in different worlds. Oranges are the focal point of a chapter about railroads and transportation: how did a St. Paul family manage to celebrate their 1898 Christmas with fruit that grew no closer than 1,500 miles from their home? A photo essay brings to life three communities of the 1920s, seen through the lenses of local and itinerant photographers. The much-sought state fish helps to explain the new Minnesota, where pan-fried walleye and walleye quesadillas coexist on the same north woods menu. In Creating Minnesota Atkins invites readers to experience the texture of people’s lives through the decades, offering a fascinating and unparalleled approach to the history of our state. 
 
Panelists' Comments:
Mary Jo: "I started to read this book because a friend who hates history told me she loved it because it is such a story book. The subtitle 'A History from the Inside Out' really captures it.'" Creating Minnesota,whose goal was to "widen our views and sharpen our vision", claimed a Minnesota Book Award. "It makes you want to write your own family story and put it into the context of Minnesota. ... She shows there are so many ways to tell a story -- photographs, a play, diary..."

And even when the original storytellers would like to avoid parts of their own histories, as in the case of the Scott Campbell family, the long view of history often brings those parts out of hiding. Scott Campbell, of Dakota-white heritage, had greeted Lewis and Clark on their journeys and Lewis decided to take him with him. After Lewis's death, Campbell returned to the Minnesota Territory and married a Dakota woman, had nine children, and served as interpreter of Dakota, French, and English. One of his granddaughters liked to claim she was "almost white" and neglected to mention that she was related to Little Crow and one of her relatives had been hanged at Mankato.

The panelists and author noted that this leads to the question, if we talk about Minnesota as "we", who are we talking about? What are were putting in or leaving out? We all are creating Minnesota history as we know, tell, and remember elements of the past. "History is never a given, it is always a creation."

The panelists particularly enjoyed the musings on the "New Minnesota" of the walleye quesadillas, a mix of cultures, foods and stories that is becoming Minnesota.




Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

This is a collection of historic essays about the hidden women in history, including Shakespeare's daughters; the Harriets (Tubman, Jacobs, Powell, and Beecher Stowe); medieval women's labor, etc. Publisher's Weekly wrote: "Several chapters of this accessible and beautifully written study are brilliant. ..a work that is so often sharp and insightful. "

Panelists' Comments:
This potpourri of historical essays on everything female from "women warriors" to "t-shirt entrepreneurs" ranked high on everyone's list. Of specific interest for today, with our economic times, is Chapter 12: "Hanging on for Dear Life" about women in the Great Depression. "The book makes you ask what patterns we are following today."

Catherine remarked that the "flaming feminist in me was attracted to the title" and she found it exceedingly satisfactory. She needs a strong "voice" in nonfiction, one in which "you feel like you are sitting down with someone over a cup of coffee, and they tell you what they know without a self-congratulatory tone." Thatcher Ulrich achieved this. So Catherine stated that if you want to "improve your feminist IQ and meet a very good historian," this book is it. The author is on the faculty of Harvard, yet you wouldn't know it from her tone. "One can pick this book up and put it down when you feel like it to get more later."

Catherine also took great pleasure in the author's deflating of the myths about the "traditional family," myths which "demonstrate the limits of historical memory," states Thatcher Ulrich. The word family comes in Latin from the word meaning "a band of slaves" and it was meant that the father was in a master-slave authority over all other members.

Ruth luxuriated in the essay on Virginia Woolf and the "room of one's own" where the author examines the theme that there is no mark on the wall to measure the height of a woman." Once again, as in Creating Minnesota, the art of writing, recording, memory keeping, scrapbooking, and photography are all seen as having significance and power needed for societal health. "We make history not only in the streets but in the library"... we make history through action and record keeping."



Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation by Cokie Roberts

Publisher Comments:
In Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts paid homage to the heroic women whose patriotism and sacrifice helped create a new nation. Now the number one New York Times best-selling author and renowned political commentator—praised in USA Today as a "custodian of time-honored values"—continues the story of early America's influential women with Ladies of Liberty. In her "delightfully intimate and confiding" style (Publishers Weekly), Roberts presents a colorful blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities.

Recounted with the insight and humor of an expert storyteller and drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources—many of them previously unpublished—Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Almost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. From first ladies to freethinkers, educators to explorers, this exceptional group includes Abigail Adams, Margaret Bayard Smith, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Catherine Adams, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Rebecca Gratz, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Sacajawea, and others. In a much-needed addition to the shelves of Founding Father literature, Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation, giving these ladies of liberty the recognition they so greatly deserve.

Panelists' Comments:
This book is a hard one to get at the library since the request line is so long, said Mary Jo. "If you love gossipy history with lively quotes, this is for you! It has the inside stories on the wives of famous men in American history."

What surprised her most was how angry Abigail Adams came off. She seemed "in constant fury", whether it was in her letters to Jefferson or editorial writers or to her husband complaining about others.

On the other hand, Louisa Adams, the wife of her son John Quincy, is unflappably driven, not wasting her time in anger but in courageous action. When her husband is ambassador to Russia, she accompanies him for a seven-month stay in St. Petersburg, most of the time by herself because he is called away to Paris. Eventually, she packs up and takes her maid and presses a fourteen-year-old boy into a perilous travel extravaganza that goes on and on, with one mishap and struggle after the other. When she finally does arrive, her husband is not there, having commenced on a new journey himself. All this traveling was done on an amazingly low salary.

Ruth found Dolly Madison fascinating because of her incongruities and extravagant gestures and parties. Not only was she known for her extreme fashion statements and for saving the portrait of George Washington from the British in the War of 1812, but also for forming the Washington Female Orphan Society and enormous political soirees. For one gathering in which 800 people were invited, an extra room had to be built on the White House to accommodate the crowd.

The history of the Ursuline Nuns in French New Orleans was also of worthy note to Ruth. Their perseverance, service, and determination echoed similar stories of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul. The Ursuline Sisters were so essential to New Orleans that though the French Bonaparts were persecuting religious, they wanted to do what they could "to stop these highly useful women from deserting."




White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple


Publisher Comments:
This is the first book to portray one of the most remarkable friendships in American letters, that of Emily Dickinson—recluse, poet—and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister, literary figure, active abolitionist.

Their friendship began in 1862. The Civil War was raging. Dickinson was thirty-one; Higginson, thirty-eight. A former pastor at the Free Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, he wrote often for the cultural magazine of the day, The Atlantic Monthly—on gymnastics, women’s rights, and slavery. His article “Letter to a Young Contributor” gave advice to readers who wanted to write for the magazine and offered tips on how to submit one’s work (“use black ink, good pens, white paper”). Among the letters Higginson received in response was one scrawled in looping, difficult handwriting. Four poems were enclosed in a smaller envelope. He deciphered the scribble: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

...The writing was unique, uncategorizable. It was clear to him that this was “a wholly new and original poetic genius,” and the memory of that moment stayed with him when he wrote about it thirty years later. Emily Dickinson’s question inaugurated one of the least likely correspondences in American letters—between a man who ran guns to Kansas, backed John Brown, and would soon command the first Union regiment of black soldiers, and the eremitic, elusive poet who cannily told him she did not cross her “Father’s ground to any House or town.” . . .

In this shimmering, revelatory work, Brenda Wineapple re-creates the extraordinary, delicate friendship that led to the publication of Dickinson’s poetry. And though she and Higginson met face-to-face only twice (he had never met anyone “who drained my nerve power so much,” he said), their friendship reveals much about Dickinson, throwing light onto both the darkened door of the poet’s imagination and a corner of the noisy century that she and Colonel Higginson shared.

Panelists' Comments:
Thomas Wentworth Higginson has retained over the years a reputation as the editor who "ruined" many of Dickinson's best poems, trying to make them rhyme. This revealing new book, impressively researched and highly readable, sets the record straight, laying the blame for these notorious literary crimes finally at the right door of Emily Dickinson's sister-in-law. Catherine delighted in this book, which "revises our views of both of them Higginson and Dickinson and restores Higginson's reputation. ... Higgison was an absolutely fascinating person!" The two served as a kind of balance for the other. He was a man of activity who longed for solitude, while she was a recluse musing on activity. The letters of Thomas to Emily were mostly lost, but hers to him were saved and serve as the basis for the book.

For Ruth, the complimentary natures of the two letter writers fascinated her, how the characteristics of the one called out unrevealed and fascinating elements of the other. "Emily wrote for the relief of her own mind," while Thomas seemed to write with an eye on society and its concerns, which consumed him.

Mary Jo loved the comeuppance of history to the bumbling sister-in-law, and Judie gloried in the tribute to words and writing that these letters and tome entail. This is a friendship where the only link is the words which crackle with the passion of their shared love for poetry and writing.

The World Within: Poems by Ellen Murphy, CSJ. edited by Catherine Litecky, CSJ, and Eleanor Lincoln, CSJ



Publisher Comments:
This book of poetry reveals a profound sense of what it means to belong, to be loved, to have a permanent place in the universe.

Ellen Murphy was born in 1916 into a literary family that lived on a farm several miles north of Grand Forks, North Dakota. She went to a one-room country school and to a boarding school for her early education. Ellen wrote poetry from a very early age, and her gift of poetry grew with her life experiences. In 1935, she entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet and received an undergraduate degree from the College of St. Catherine and, later, a graduate degree from the University of Notre Dame. Sister Ellen taught school in the Twin Cities and, in the final years of her career, served as professor of early childhood education at the College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota. Sister Ellen died in 2004 in St. Paul. Her deep spirituality allowed a distillation of her thoughts into poetry, while her North Dakota heritage influenced her praise of the natural world.

“Sister Ellen is a very gifted writer. I find in her verse a fascinating blend of a vivid imagination along with a metaphysical bent (especially in the poem ‘Is’, which is one of my favorites.) Her reverence for nature and her sense of awe are deep; her metaphors are forceful and most appropriate” – Poet, Writer, and Editor Auxiliary Bishop Robert Morneau, Diocese of Green Bay Wisconsin

Panelists' Comments:
Mary Jo praised the introduction by Sister Ellen's niece, who dubbed her beloved aunt "Ellen of the Prairie." A common theme in the poems revolve around a line by Yeats:" All things fall and are built again." Each of the panelists had favorite poems, some of which were read, among which was "For the Returning Ones."

Pictures of Attendees

We are starting our own Twin Cities KATIE Alumnae/i Association Book Club. Please join us on Monday, June 22, 2009, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Derham 409. We'll be discussing:

• The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
• Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

If you are out of the area or can't come, organize an alumnae/i book club of your own -- you can start with these book lists or tailor your choices to your group's tastes -- perhaps mystery, memoir, nonfiction, or professional picks. Or a mix of all genres ... only the library's the limit!

For tips on starting your own KATIE Book Club...

The National Women's Book Association sponsors the National Reading Group Month every October. For a list of their book choices...