|
Speaking of Stories transforming
short stories from the page to the stage
|
| Next Performance |
ELLEN GILCHRIST She was born February 20, 1935, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She earned a B.A. from Millsaps College in 1967, and later did postgraduate study at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She has worked as an author and journalist, as a contributing editor for the Vieux Carre Courier from 1976-1979, and as a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition from 1984-1985. Her commentaries from NPR have been published in her book Falling Through Space (1987, 2000). Gilchrist’s first book was a book of poetry, The Land Surveyor’s Daughter (1979). A few years later, she followed it up with Riding Out the Tropical Depression: Selected Poems, 1975-1985 (1986), but it was as a fiction writer that she has garnered the most attention. She attracted critical and popular accolades from the publication of her book of short fiction, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, in 1981. In its first ten months in print, the volume sold more than 10,000 copies in the Southwest alone, a feat particularly impressive given that the book was published by a university press and thus lacked the usual promotional campaigns common from larger publishers. Critics shared the public’s opinion of the book. In a review for the Washington Post Book World, Susan Wood wrote, “Gilchrist may serve as prime evidence for the optimists among us who continue to believe that few truly gifted writers remain unknown forever. And Gilchrist is the real thing alright. In fact, it’s difficult to review a first book as good as this without resorting to every known superlative cliche — there are, after all, just so many ways to say ‘auspicious debut.’” Gilchrist followed up with her first novel, The Anunciation, in 1983, and the following year, a second collection of stories, Victory Over Japan, which won the 1984 American Book Award for fiction. Like her earlier collection, it too was received warmly by critics. Beverly Lowry in the New York Times Book Review wrote, “Those who loved In the Land of Dreamy Dreams will not be disappointed. Many of the same characters reappear.... Often new characters show up with old names.... These crossovers are neither distracting nor accidental.... Ellen Gilchrist is only changing costumes, and she can ‘do wonderful tricks with her voice.’” Gilchrist has continued to publish fiction, alternating between short story collections and novels. Although some critics have found her more recent work to be more “uneven,” most concede that such unevenness is only in relation to the tremendous achievement of her earliest work. In 2000, Gilchrist published Collected Stories, which features 34 stories from seven different collections spanning her career. |