We are assembled here
this May evening of 2006
to celebrate our own
Leading Lady of
American Letters.
The tall, slender author,
her classic looks
so reminiscent of
ladies in an elegant
Victorian era salon,
reads one of her
earlier short stories
at the Free Library
of Philadelphia.
She speaks with such
feeling and precision,
we close our eyes
and envision her
youthful heroine's
anxiety and naivete
in that familiar setting
of an upstate
New York town.
Later, in another room
of the library,
I will meet her
too briefly at a
book signing.
She stands to greet me,
smiling so pleasantly
and asks, "What do you do?"
in the friendliest way.
I reply "I'm a
proofreader," somewhat
embarrassed at my
flimsy Dickensian
credential.
This was my own
personal brush
with greatness
and I find myself
tongue-tied with
hero worship.
She is gracious
and fragile, exquisitely
feminine and warm and
I would learn I was
not the only groupie
in the library throng
that evening -
a multitude of fans
lined up to meet
the literary icon.
Joyce Carol Oates,
as her critics
rightly rhapsodize,
is a force of nature,
a uniquely powerful
writer whose brilliance
rests not just in the
singularly American
landscapes she paints,
not just in the
idiosyncratic
characters who people
her storytelling,
but in the creation
of rich personal
moments of intimacy,
of revelation and insight;
she makes us witnesses,
eavesdroppers, to her
characters' deepest
thoughts, longings,
her voice reaches out
to us from the pages,
a voice as poignant
as a mother's in the
gloom of night,
reading to her children
just before prayers
are murmured and
sleep tiptoes in.
The path of
literary greatness
leads us to her heroes...
James Joyce, Emily Bronte,
Thoreau, Faulkner,
Flaubert, Hemingway;
like each one of these
celebrated wordsmiths,
she is an iconoclast,
an original...
unique,
incomparable,
our own
quintessential
national treasure.