Ellen Gilchrist (1935–2024)

Fourteen years went by and the Wilsons' luck held. Fourteen years is a long time to stay lucky even for rich people who don't cause trouble for anyone.

I went through it with this short story collection written by Ellen Gilchrist and first published in 1981. I began the collection and was quickly enamored of the voice; it's like Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Parker were collaborating to have the most terrible things happen to cruel and thoughtless people. And slowly, sometime around the fourth or fifth use of the n-word, I felt qualms. 'Maybe Gilchrist is just really committed to using the words her characters, white people living in the South in the 1970s, would have used?' I rationalized, and maybe? It shows up as a descriptive term used by the omniscient narrator as well, so I will say that perhaps some short stories age better than others and there's a reason she isn't much read nowadays. And about the fourth or fifth short story I started to get tired of bad things happening to bad and careless people.

Then, two-thirds through this book about mean people the author clearly disliked, something extraordinary happened. I reached Revenge, a longer short story in which a girl is sent to spend the summer of 1942 in the South with her grandparents and her cousins, all boys, who exclude her from their project of becoming Olympic athletes. She is enraged by their behavior.

I prayed they would get polio, would be consigned forever to iron lungs. I put myself to sleep at night imagining their labored breathing, their five little wheelchairs lined up by the store as I drove by in my father's Packard, my arm around the jacket of his blue uniform, on my way to Hollywood for my screen test.

Rhoda is not exactly a sympathetic character, but Gilchrist here takes the time to inhabit her life so that I understood her frustration with being stuck inside when she really needed to run around outside. It's a great story with a fantastic ending, one that fully respects who Rhoda is. A perfect story and one I don't think I will soon forget. And, in the stories that follow, Gilchrist continues to excel, each story centering a girl unable to conform to what's expected, while still fully inhabiting the prejudices and expectations of her time and place. It's superbly well done.

How to reconcile a book of stories that have aged badly, but that include some brilliant stories? I have no idea.… (mais)

Ellen Gilchrist, now 87, has never written that one book that might have made her a big name in literary circles. Just the same, novels such as “The Annunciation” and “The Anna Papers” and short story collections such as “In the Land of Dreamy Dreams” and “Victory Over Japan” have been satisfying discerning readers since the 1980s. Her 2005 book “The Writing Life” gives us a look at the woman reflected in her fiction.

The book's brief essays, often repetitive, are divided into three overlapping categories: her life, her writing and her teaching. The latter — she had been teaching creative writing at the University of Arkansas for four years at the time this book was published — seems to have been its trigger. It was inspired by young people, she says, another way for her to help young writers become better writers.

So devoted has she become to teaching writing that she confesses her own writing has suffered as a result. Although "Writing Is Rewriting" is a slogan she impresses on her students again and again, she admits she has lost patience with rewriting. She insists she prefers her original drafts, and if they don't please her editor, so be it. She has come to the point in her career where she takes more pleasure in her students' successes than her own.

Gilchrist herself was taught by Eudora Welty, whose work she adores. She also has high praise for such writers as William Faulkner and Larry McMurtry, and the collected advice of Ernest Hemingway, “On Writing,” is something she always recommends to her students. Her favorite Sunday afternoon pursuit has for years been reading Shakespeare's plays aloud with a group of friends.

Well short of being an autobiography, “On Writing” nevertheless shows us a great deal about Gilchrist's eccentric life, her many marriages, her devotion to her sons and her grandchildren and her almost parental love for her students. The book was written over a period of years, which helps explain why she repeats herself so much. Only a few of the essays have been published elsewhere. The essays, rarely more than three or four pages each, never fail to entertain and, if the reader is another writer, inform.… (mais)