Transcript of “Inspired by Woolf” A special panel at the 2009 Virginia Woolf Conference

AF:

Thank you so much for coming to our final panel, “Inspired by Woolf”. … I’m just going to briefly introduce our host Katherine Lanpher, so you know why it is that she’s here.… I first met Katherine on a night that left many traces on this conference: a benefit for Girls Write Now, which began with a brief, brief paired reading at Bluestockings, and moved on to readings for grown-ups, cocktails, and burlesque dancing at The Slipper Room. (I can assure you I failed to incorporate burlesque dancing in this Conference.) But you can hear Katherine online at Time magazine, where she hosts the Time Financial Tool-Kit Podcast, and also at Barnes and Noble.com, that’s bn.com, as you know, where she hosts Upstairs At the Square—a fantastic live show with authors and musicians taped at the flagship Barnes & Noble in Union Square. She is a substitute host for The Takeaway, a new National Public Radio show that is a collaboration of WNYC, the BBC, and the New York Times. And she is a contributing editor for More magazine. If you open up this month’s issue, you’ll see her travel piece on tracking jaguars in Belize, and she tells me that in her suitcase with her was a Rebecca Solnit book, so it’s all coming together. She’s also the author of a wonderful memoir, about her move from St. Paul to New York, called Leap Days. I’m very proud also to call her my friend, and delighted to introduce you to her as your host tonight. Thank you.

KL:

You’re very kind. I am so conscious that I am all that’s standing between you and cocktails, but I also know that we have an incredible panel, and I have been looking forward to this very much. Rebecca Solnit, at the keynote yesterday, talked about the fact that there are many, many, many “Woolfs,” and that hers, in particular, had been a Virgil … Well, we have three different incarnations, if you will, of Virginia Woolf up here today. We have Susan Sellers, a scholar and novelist. We have Kris Lundberg, an actress who has founded a theatre company. And we have journalist and author, Dr. Ruth Gruber. And, rather than me going through a very long bio for each of them, I thought that I would introduce you to them by way of what they do. And we’re going to start with Kris.

She has founded a theatre company called Shakespeare’s Sister—The Shakespeare’s Sister Company. It’s a company devoted to women playwrights, actresses, and directors and, of course, it’s in honor of Virginia Woolf. You probably remember that phrase when she was talking about Judy Shakespeare. Now, among Kris’s other talents, I just thought you should know this. I always like to find one interesting thing about someone I’m going to interview. Along with being an actress, an artistic director, and also a director onstage, she’s a fight choreographer. Isn’t that great? I thought, “What a great way to make your way in a Woolfian world, once you know how to stage a fight.” Recently, to honor the 127th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s birth, Shakespeare’s Sister held a reading of the Edna O’Brien play, Virginia.

Susan Sellers is a professor of English at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. She is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf. She’s also just finished a revised edition of the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. And I also feel compelled to add a little bit more to her biography. If you go on her website, you will discover that, at a key age, she ran away to a room of her own—in Paris. It was a shop [she] lived above; it was a maid’s room. And while she was in Paris, she worked as a tour guide, a barmaid, a screenwriter, and that was before she went on to hook up with famous French feminist writers, translating their work. And then she went to Swaziland and Peru. (to audience) What have you done lately? Honestly, these women up here!

Now, I tell you all of this biography because it won’t surprise you then to discover that, along with being a scholar, she is also a novelist, and that her work on Virginia Woolf led her to this particular novel you’re going to hear an excerpt from. It is written from the experience of Vanessa Bell. It is the story of Virginia and Vanessa, told through a viewpoint we don’t often hear. (Sellers reads an excerpt from Vanessa and Virginia.)

Now, if someone could go ahead and switch the lights for us before I introduce Dr. Gruber. She said she wanted to make sure she could see everybody. She is a journalist whose amazing career includes such scoops as being the first foreign correspondent to travel into the Soviet Arctic. In 1944, she went on a secret government mission to escort one thousand refugees from Italy to America. We could go on. But she’s here with us today for a different sort of “first.” She made news, not as a reporter, but as the youngest person, then, in the world to get a PhD. She was barely out of her teens when she won a fellowship to Cologne University in Germany. And, while there, a professor convinced her to go for a PhD, to see if she could do it in a year. No one had ever done that, and he even helped her select the topic: Virginia Woolf.

I went online and found this, from the New York Times archives. Lots of other newspapers from New York met her at the gangplank when she came home, but I just have to share this, because it’s so great: