I was reading in the newspaper this morning that Joyce Carol Oates is here for a year and teaching at Cal. She is on sabbatical from Princeton. I've always enjoyed her work, and once did a week workshop with her in New York. I was surprised to find she has remarried, to a neuroscientist she met after her longtime husband Raymond Smith died. Several years ago I read her account of being a widow, and her grief was of a magnatude of Joan Didion's writing on the deaths of her husband and then daughter. Things change, new beginnings happen even to us oldies. I feel really happy for her. She is quite the survivor. I guess she's working on a gothic tale right now, which is not my favorite work of hers. But I love some of her novels and I think her short stories are where you find her greatness. She often illuminatess the lives of people nobody "sees" - the underclass, and uneducated, the ignored and badly parented. She's very Dickensonian that way.
If she has public readings, I'm going to try to attend one. It's been many years since I've seen her, but she's a compelling presence.
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