The distinguished teaching career of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie will be honored this month with a tribute, simply called "Readings for Alison Lurie."
The event, sponsored by the Cornell Department of English and the Program of Creative Writing, will be held Friday, Sept. 17, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall. It is free and open to the public.
Four of Lurie's former writing students at Cornell will read for 15 minutes each from a selection of their published works. Guest readers include: Ithacan Paul Cody, M.F.A. '87, author of So Far Gone and Eyes Like Mine (Picador USA); Beth Lordan, M.F.A. '87, author of And Both Shall Row (St. Martin's Press); Jason Brown, M.F.A. '95, author of Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton); and Micah Perks '90, author of We Are Gathered Here (St. Martin's Press).
For more information about the reading, contact Michael Koch, editor of Epoch magazine, Cornell's literary journal, at 255-3385.
A widely celebrated novelist in America as well as Europe, Lurie has written 10 books of fiction and she won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Foreign Affairs. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she joined the Cornell faculty in 1968 and is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature. In addition to her novels, Lurie has written several popular nonfiction books, including The Language of Clothes and a collection of essays on children's literature titled Don't Tell the Grownups; she also edited The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales.
Lurie has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations and, along with the English department's A.R. Ammons, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She is modest about her own accomplishments but swift to bestow praise on her students, past and present. In her office in Rockefeller Hall, she gestures to a shelf lined with books written by previous M.F.A.s who passed through her workshop. But Lurie's pride in her students encompasses published writers as well as students whose works never went beyond the classroom.
"I've been very fortunate to have had so many good, intelligent and interesting students, graduate and undergraduate," she said. "Many of them were excellent writers who never published, and it was a pleasure to work with them."
Some of her former students and her colleague James McConkey shared observations recently on the influence Lurie has had on their personal as well as literary lives.
McConkey, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus, has been a close peer of Lurie's throughout her career at Cornell. Occasionally they shared responsibilities for the same students within the writing program.
"She teaches with integrity and is very much concerned with helping the talented students achieve the most from their talents," said McConkey. "But she also goes beyond teaching to actually helping them with practical matters, helping to find agents for them and to get published. She can be a sharp social critic, but there's another side of her that makes that sharpness work, and it is a compassionate concern for other human beings."
Lorrie Moore, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and noted author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Birds of America, remembers Lurie as "an elegant, muse-like presence."
"She was wise, patient and astute," said Moore. "I found myself writing for her, towards her, because of her. She also was supportive and appreciative in a manner that could send you off feeling high as a kite. I would not have become a writer without her."
For Beth Lordan, Lurie was more than an inspirational teacher; she was a true friend.
"Alison Lurie was not only one of the most remarkably accurate readers I've ever known, but was also generous in so many practical ways that I seriously doubt I'd have finished that degree without her," said Lordan, now a professor of English and director of the MFA program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. "That generosity continues, and I try to emulate her with my own students -- that is, I try to see beyond the classroom and discover what the real practical problems my own non-traditional students have that I can help with."
Jason Brown expressed abiding gratitude to Lurie for her practical and professional assistance.
"She was enormously helpful," said Brown. "As a teacher she worked with understated wisdom; she was never overbearing, but she also did not hold back in terms of what she thought. She shared bits from her experience, how she wrote and what she brought to her writing (and) I learned that her tastes were in no way limited to her own work ... she seemed to be an expert on every kind of writing."
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