Current Groups

book group 32: September 15-25, 2008 (ten days)

: John Carroll and Jamie-Lee Josselyn

James Alan McPherson won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1978 collection of short stories, Elbow Room. He was the first African American to receive the award. Called “a writer of insight, sympathy, and humor” by Ralph Ellison, McPherson has a reputation for subtle, fluid prose that makes precise, unapologetic observations about race and poverty. McPherson was a 2004 Writers House Fellow.

The two stories our group will discuss are from McPherson’s 1968 debut collection, Hue and Cry. “Gold Coast” was selected by John Updike for the Best American Short Stories of the Century. It is the story of Robert, a writer who takes a job as a janitor in Cambridge, Massachusetts during a time when he “had a great deal of potential and no money at all.” In the bitingly ironic “Private Domain,” McPherson explores racial identity through language and the way people relate to themselves and one another.

In this ten-day discussion group, we will talk about how McPherson – via these stories – fits (or doesn’t fit) into his generation of black writers and about the nature of the short story in general.

John Carroll is the Assistant Director for Development at the Kelly Writers House, and was the 2006-2007 Kelly Writers House Junior Fellow. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 with a degree in English, concentrating on 20th Century Literature. John is the former Arts and Culture Editor for The Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia. He will have a short story published in the forthcoming issue of Philly Fiction, Volume 2.

Jamie-Lee Josselyn is the Assistant to the Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. She coordinates the Kelly Writers House Fellows Program and Writers House Online Book Groups, among other projects. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 with a degree in creative writing and French. Her work has appeared in LOST Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Pennsylvania Gazette. She is currently writing a memoir about her mother.

book group 33: October 1-31, 2008 (one month)

: Dan and Barbara Traister

One of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale re-examines many of the themes and subjects treated in the playwright’s earlier works: sexual jealousy, marriage, the relationships of parents and their children, the meaning of loyalty and service, and the effect on a nation when its leader’s private life interferes with good governance. Mix in a pastoral idyll, a time gap of sixteen years, meditations on breeding (plants; people), and a little magic, and you have a play that begs for discussion.

During a month-long discussion, we’ll talk about all of the play’s features mentioned above, as well as about its genre (romance) and the most famous stage direction in Shakespearean drama: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

Guessing also about what most of us may be most heavily engaged in reading and thinking about by October (in case we have not been thinking about it already), it should be noticed that -- although The Winter’s Tale doesn’t discuss war and its references to kingship, political power, and the uses or abuses of authority (“sovereignty”) are filtered through the vagaries of action on the personal rather than the national level - the play’s examination of the irrational is unlikely to be entirely inapposite to the likely “national conversation” in October. The Winter’s Tale is, of course, a play, a work of literature. But Shakespeare was not walled off from the world of his own day. Surely some of what gives his work its ongoing vitality is its ability to speak to our world, too? Indeed, whether old literature can be thought of as (or made to seem) “relevant,” and whether to try to think of it in such ways inappropriately “politicizes” it, are topics that might themselves come in for some discussion.

Daniel Traister is an Adjunct in Penn’s Department of English and Curator, Research Services, Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He publishes on topics in the history of the book and special collections librarianship as well as in renaissance literature, particularly poetry.

Barbara Traister is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at Lehigh University. Her research interests are in renaissance drama, magic, and medicine, and her most recent books include an annotated bibliography of Shakespeare’s problem plays and a study of a self-taught London physician, a contemporary of Shakespeare, who practiced alchemy, astrology, and magic, as well as medicine.

book group 34: November 10 - December 10, 2008 (one month)

: Al Filreis

The novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon will be one of our Kelly Writers House Fellows during the spring of 2009 (she will be visiting 3805 Locust for two days in late March.)

Gordon is well known for her novels (The Company of Women, Pearl, etc.) and more recently for nonfiction books about her father and her mother and another on Joan of Arc. Our book, The Shadow Man, is subtitled "A Daughter's Search for Her Father." David Gordon died when his daughter, who revered him, was seven. Years later she learned that nearly everything he told her about himself had been a lie.

Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and Faculty Director of the Writers House, has led many online book groups and has taught several all-online semester-long courses. He has won many teaching awards (Lindback, Ira Abrams) and was named the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. He produced and hosts several podcasts, writes several blogs, and maintains vast web sites on modern poetry, the cold-war culture of the 1950s, and the Holocaust. He has published four books including, most recently, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry. Here is Al's web site.

book group 35: January 11-21, 2009 (ten days)

: Jessica Lowenthal

: Julia Bloch

In a recent interview, poet and scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis says that for women poets writing in the late 1960s and 1970s "everything was up for question: imagery, narratives, publics, subject matter, decorum." With the proliferation of online communities like How2, new anthologies like Women Poets on Mentorship, and the recently inaugurated Barnard Women Poets series, more and more readers are discovering the ways in which women poets have radically altered poetic practice to respond to and extend notions about changing gender roles.

In this ten-day book group, we will read the work of three contemporary women poets and ask where their styles vary and what commonalities might underpin their work. Bernadette Mayer's playful attention to the everyday, Harryette Mullen's uses of voice and song, and Adrienne Rich's political investments make them a dynamic, perhaps even complex trio.

Jessica Lowenthal is the Director of the Writers House and has been a member of the Writers House community for more than seven years, as a student, teacher, and poet. Before moving to Philadelphia to attend Penn's doctoral program in English, Jessica received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a BA in English from Brown University.

Julia Bloch is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she co-curates the Emergency poetry series and is working on a dissertation about gender and postwar American poetry. She received an MFA in poetry from Mills College and has published work recently in The Odyssey (Pocket Myths) and in the journals How2, Cab/Net, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Sidebrow.

book group 36: February 1-28, 2009 (one month)

: Val Ross

Filmmakers regard the study of Alfred Hitchcock as “Filmmaking 101.” From his earliest, silent British films at the turn of the 20th century, to the great body of work made in the US thereafter, Hitchcock has had a profound, global influence on cinema. Most filmmakers, even today, remain under his spell. One of the greatest cinematic innovators, Hitchcock helped to shape the development of silent cinema, talkies, and Technicolor films. He created a spate of new genres that we now take for granted, including the action-suspense films such as North by Northwest that launched the James Bond movies, to the natural disaster movies launched by The Birds and the psychological thrillers and slasher films launched by Psycho and Frenzy. Equally brilliant as a marketer and promoter, Hitchcock was the first filmmaker to make himself, and his movies, a brand—before such a concept or strategy existed.

Along with being a terrific commercial success, Hitchcock was also the first to be regarded in international cinema arts circles as an auteur – an artist in his own right, not unlike a poet or painter – whose films had a recognizable philosophical depth and artistic signature. U.S. audiences, who enjoy his films as masterpieces of suspense and fright, typically resist the idea that Hitchcock was an artist.

In this month-long discussion group, we will discuss how Hitchcock negotiated his dual citizenship in the worlds of popular and international art cinema. Focusing on the brilliant quartet of his late masterpieces – Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie – we will explore Hitchcock’s cinematic techniques as well as plots; we will look at his selection and directing of actors and crew. As we identify the signs of his deep commitment to the arts, including expressionism, we will consider how successfully he managed to fuse this knowledge and commitment with his equally strong desire to make popular, accessible films. Along the way, we will explore his weird sense of humor, bound up with his recurrent motifs, most particularly the catastrophe of love.

In addition to our usual email listserv, there will also be an optional website with some film clips, stills, and articles that participants may draw upon.

Valerie Ross received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in English and Modern Studies. She has published and presented in the fields of biography, critical theory, cultural studies, and nineteenth-century American literature. Graduate seminars have included, "Theorizing the Emotions: Affecting and Disaffecting American Literary Culture," "Nineteenth-Century American Litrature and Modernity," "Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Popular Culture." Before joining Penn, Dr. Ross was an Assistant Professor of English at Miami University, as well as a literary editor at Esquire, editor-in-chief of Cream City Review, a journalist, a management consultant, and co-founder of Jazz School.

book group 37: March 6-16, 2009 (ten days)

: Al Filreis

John Cheever is the master of the 20th Century American short story. The first few sentences of a Cheever story can create a world, set it in motion, and enchant a reader forever. Our Cheever story, “Goodbye My Brother” is one of his best regarded and best known, particularly since it appears first in the “big red book” of his collected stories. Readers tend to react strongly to this story and its characters. There’s a big house slowly falling in to the sea, there’s a WASP family who drinks too much, and, finally, some violence and a pair of naked women. In our discussion, we will pick apart the story’s heroes and villains, and we will debate how the story handles class and money, marriage and sex, and parents and children.

David Roberts is a member of the Kelly Writers House Advisory Board, a denizen of the KWH book groups and when he is not reading, works in Manhattan in the investment business. He is a 1983 graduate of the University Of Pennsylvania.

book group 38: May 11-21, 2008 (ten days)

: Jacob Cytryn

: Al Filreis

The second-half of Primo Levi's narrative memoir of the Holocaust is called The Reawakening, and was made into a movie called The Truce, directed by Francisco Rosi and starring John Turturro. Depicting Levi's memory of his Odyssean journey from Auschwitz to Italy, the book and the movie are testimonials to humanity's survival in the darkest of circumstances. Levi himself, undoubtedly the center of our month-long discussion, is a towering example of how an individual can at once be irrevocably scarred and undeniably enhanced - as a philosopher, a human being, and an artist - by the worst humanity can provide.

Jacob Cytryn is a poet, student of modernism, and informal educator. A 2004 graduate of Penn, where he majored in Classics but spent most of his time reading, discussing, and writing about the ways that the literature of the 20th century attempted to respond to that eras profound tragedies (especially the Holocaust), Jacob is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Jewish Studies and Education at Brandeis University and a Wexner Graduate Fellow. He is spending this academic year as a visiting student at the Hebrew University's Melton Centre for Jewish Education. He also holds an M.A. in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and continues to serve the most supportive, nurturing, and home-like community he has ever known - Camp Ramah in Wisconsin - as its Program Director. He led a 2007-2008 Writers House Online Book Group on Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.