>Sewanee–Day Five

>Today started with more readings by Scholars (Holly Goddard Jones, Peter Levine and Gardner McFall). I missed the rest of the morning activities because I had my conference with John Casey–nearly an hour and a half at the coffee shop, a terrifically useful discussion about two of my stories.

Our workshop met in the afternoon–a packed couple of hours in which we talked about 3 stories, and then there was James Wood’s lecture on Narration, specifically on the virtues of the Free Indirect Style of Narration. He’s great and I enjoyed the talk very much, even though it was the same lecture he gave at Bread Loaf last summer. Wyatt Prunty did the evening reading, some old and some new poems.

And tonight is the mid-conference party: The Dance.

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  1. >Cliff, Thanks for the daily updates on your Sewanee experiences. I’m having withdrawals from the Tin House conference, so love getting a close-up on Sewanee. I’d be interested to hear what James Wood means by “Free Indirect Style of Narration.” Is the lecture published anywhere in essay form? Keep the posts coming. Karen McBryde

  2. >Karen, I don’t think the essay is published, although I did pick up a copy at Bread Loaf last year and James told me when he signed my copy of The Book Against God that the essay plagiarizes himself from the novel, but since I haven’t read it yet I can swear to that. Anyway, Free Indirect Style refers to third person narration in which the voice of the narrator and the point of view character are so close that the narration can reveal the thoughts and use the language of the character without specifying “he thought.” In that way it is close to stream of consciousness. Examples that Wood uses are Henry James and V.S. Naipaul, among others.

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