What do you
want to be when
you grow up?
Help nurse Walt
achieve his dream.
Contact Barbara Bourgoin
941-752-5398 or
BourgoB@SCF.edu
88 SARASOTA SCENE | MAY 2019
MIRIAM WALLACE
Chair of Humanities at New College of Florida
What are you reading now?
I just read The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden—a rewrite of
a Russian folktale.
What’s the last great book you read?
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Machado and Sunshine State by
Sarah Gerard. I gobbled up Machado’s short stories like salty chocolates—
not quite sweet, not quite savory, but you can’t stop. I loved “The Husband
Stitch” and the imagery of the ribbon around her neck as the one thing
her husband cannot touch. There’s an Angela Carter-esque element that
still sticks with me (see The Bloody Chamber).
Sunshine State is a great collection of essays for anyone living on this coast
of Florida and even if you’re a transplant. I particularly resonated with
the pieces that are what I’d call long-form journalism—about a particular
bird rescue organization, about Amway, about growing up in a Christian
Science household.
So, you’re inviting four characters from books (real or imagined, living or
dead) for a round of golf at The Meadows Country Club. Who joins you on
the links for this golf fivesome?
Alice from Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland—we could even play with
flamingoes. Emma from Jane Austen’s novel of that name (I imagine she’d
carry a tea cup). Yet we need a bad boy to keep things interesting—how
about Stephen Daedelus from Joyce’s Portrait of a Young Artist? I bet
he’d mope about rather than playing and regale us with philosophical
conundrums. And I have to invite Frankenstein’s monster—it being his
200th birthday and all.
Jane Austen. Yay or nay?
Yay all the way. Sooo many ways to read her!
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