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On March 30, Books Etc. Presents Author Christine Schutt
 Twenty years ago, Christine Schutt, then a graduate student in Columbia's creative writing MFA program, crossed Broadway to take a course at Barnard taught by novelist and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick. "I was thrilled," Schutt says. "I wanted to meet her, I'd be damned if I was going to miss it." Schuttt did study with Hardwick, and when she returned to campus this spring to teach fiction as a visiting faculty member, she experienced a certain emotional resonance.
"I was beside myself, so delighted. If you told me years ago that I'd be sitting where Elizabeth was sitting, I wouldn't have believed it," Schutt says referring to Hardwick, who is also noteworthy for having co-founded the New York Review of Books. Now a published author herself, Schutt's short story collection, Nightwork , was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement.
On March 30, Schutt will be the featured author in Barnard's Book Etc. series, which was created to honor the College's literary tradition, with a reading from her first novel, Florida. The event will take place at 7 p.m. in the Altshul Atrium.
The Books Etc. series has featured some of today's most inspired writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Jhumpa Lahiri and Anna Quindlen, both Barnard graduates, as well as Alice Walker and Ursula Hegi and most recently, first time novelists Suki Kim and Hilary Hamann. Professor Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, director of Pan-African Studies and a member of the English Department faculty, concludes the spring series on April 14 with a reading from her new biography, Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden.
This season's series, titled "Uncommon Women," highlights women authors exploring identity, experience, memory, and coming of age in new fiction and biography. Florida , Schutt's novel, is the story of Alice Fivey, whose father dies when she is seven. Three years later, she is left in the care of relatives when her mother loses custody because of mental illness. As she moves from place to place, Alice finds consolation and meaning in books, storytelling and the power of language.
Schutt says she wrote it quickly at first, thought she had it finished in a year and a half, and then spent two more years revising it. "Every time Florida was rejected," she says, "I read it again. I would read it and I would say to myself, 'I like this.' I still believed in it." She recalled the advice of Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People : "She said that the reason she was before us was because she never quit. She had been with people who were more talented, but they gave up. They stopped." At the time, she thought the advice depressing, but after years in the business, Schutt has come to agree.
Schutt speaks of the publishing process as particularly difficult and sometimes disheartening. Which is part of the reason she thinks "teaching at the undergraduate level is heaven. The atmosphere is lovely. The students are responsive. There's a willingness to attend to what other people are doing and saying. The students are listening." And, she notes, referring to the constraints of publishing, students "are not worried about advances."
—Elissa Matsueda
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