From the Executive Director

Since 1988, Seattle Arts & Lectures has presented writers whose work has altered our views of the world. Three writers, starting with John Updike, who inaugurated the Literary Lecture Series, entered my life at key junctures; each has been an escort through tumultuous territory, their presence sometimes comforting, sometimes inflammatory, always resonant.

Reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike in 1966 at twenty years old was wrenching. Sexual encounters in a car’s back seat, a baby drowned in a bathtub, a couple lost and blind together, tore me out of a sheltered place of dreamy imagining about what it meant to be an adult. I was addicted to reading by age twelve. As an only child growing up in geographic isolation and raised by three adults, the characters in books had extended my family, my vocabulary, and my imagination. Even so, Updike’s writing forced me much further into a contemplation of dark and dangerous places that heightened anxieties about truly leaving childhood.

John Updike has been upbraided for his vantage point, including an ingrained sexism. I was unfamiliar with this concept in 1966. Uprooted from Seattle to Washington, D.C. by marriage, I felt trapped yet afloat. While my husband and I were evolving into political radicals, our marriage followed a conservative model. I was ripe for the real revolution in my life: the women’s movement.

By 1970, I was single and back in Seattle, a founder of a women’s collective, The Red Mountain. I was also in graduate school, and reading new work by feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, who balanced the academy with the streets. Many years later, in 1988, she published Writing a Woman’s Life, in which she advocated for the possibility—the necessity—of a woman having her own, independent story; of being the center of her own life. In the book’s introduction she writes: “In 1984, I rather arbitrarily identified 1970 as the beginning of a new period in women’s biography because Zelda by Nancy Milford had been published that year. Its significance lay above all in the way it revealed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assumption that he had a right to the life of his wife, Zelda, as an artistic property…. Only in 1970 were we ready to read not that Zelda had destroyed Fitzgerald, but Fitzgerald her: he had usurped her narrative.”  I spent an afternoon with Heilbrun in May 1992, when she came to speak at SAL, and was moved by her warmth and wholeness. Like many women for whom she was a guide and an eloquent spokeswoman, it was with both deep regret and yet understanding that we learned she had ended her life at age seventy-seven (seven years later than she’d planned when in her 50s).

Now I find myself accompanying Louise Glück, who spoke as part of the Poetry Series in 2003, as she explores, again and again, a future of mysteries and endings. Averno, published last year, is a collection of linked poems based on the Greek myth of Persephone (a story that is the metaphorical core of my thinking about psychological shadowlands), that recounts the overnight transformation of the young maiden Kore into Persephone, queen of the underworld. “Persephone,” writes Glück, “is having sex in hell.” This troubling, transcendent, and poetic journey sidles up to death, a place that fascinates Glück. “October” 3. ends:

            death cannot harm me

            more than you have harmed me,

            my beloved life.

And from “A Village Life,” published this August in The New Yorker:

            I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,

as though I were already a factor in it.

All of these writers—and hundreds more—extend what it means to observe, think, and feel. We embrace many more this year, starting with Orhan Pamuk, last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, followed by acclaimed author Diane Ackerman, MacArthur genius award winner Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet Mary Oliver, National Book Award winner Richard Powers, and 2005 Man Booker Prize winner John Banville, all part of the 2007-08 Literary Lecture Series.

This 20th-anniversary season is an ideal time to subscribe—the lineup, as you can see, is extraordinary. Many thanks to the members of Seattle Arts & Lectures’ board of trustees, to the many foundations, corporations, and individuals whose support help make our programs possible.

I look forward to seeing you this fall at these or other Seattle Arts & Lectures’ programs.

Best regards,
Linda Bowers
Executive Director