Tell Me What You're Reading No. 50: Amy Shearn and Hannah Oberman-Breindel - To the Lighthouse
I enjoyed talking with Amy Shearn and Hannah Oberman-Breindel this summer when they were in the Artist-in-Residence writing program at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, and even more so on our recent podcast discussion of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which is considered to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century.
I had not previously read any Virginia Woolf and I had not studied literary modernism. Despite being uninitiated, I was struck by the way Woolf captured the human condition and, in a realistic way, the unstructured non-linear thought processes of her characters.
Written in 1927, the novel spans the time from just before to just after World War I
The story itself, which has numerous autobiographical overlaps, revolves around the Ramsey family and their guests at their summer home by the sea in the Scottish Hebrides. Long married and multi childrened, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are quite different from each other. She is devoted and caring, he is preoccupied and oppressive.
The difference between Mr. and Mrs.Ramsay is typified by their first exchange. The first line of the novel responds to a question we do not hear.
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.
After describing the joy of their six year old son at hearing the promise of sailing to the lighthouse, Woolf adds -
"But," said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, "it won't be fine.
And then life goes on, with the Ramsey’s eight children and a variety of guests in the cottage by the sea. Lots goes on, but only in the sense that life goes on, and it’s all really great.
Our podcast discussion was very much in the vein of Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative style, depicting “the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator, “an overlapping of images and ideas”.
Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary,
“The method of writing smooth narrative can’t be right. Things don’t happen in one’s mind like that, we experience, all the time, an overlapping of images and ideas, and modern novels should convey our mental confusion instead of neatly rearranging it. The reader must sort it out”.
And we did try to sort it out!
Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, The Resort LIC, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Amy's work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living, among others. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children.
Hannah Oberman-Breindel is a prose writer and a poet. Her work has appeared in The Washington Square Review; The Literary Review; Forklift, Ohio; and Connotation Press, as well as in the anthology, A Body of Athletics, from the University of Nebraska Press, among other places. Hannah has received numerous residencies, fellowships and grants, and teaches high school English in New York City. Hannah has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin.
What Amy is Reading
Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, by May Sargon
Reviews Polly Castor | Novel Readings | The New York Times
What Hannah is Reading
Boarder Vista Poems, by Anni Liu
Breadgivers, by Anzia Yezierska
Reviews The New Yorker | The Paris Review | Irish Journal of American Studies | Literary Hub
Manahatta, a play by Mary Kathryn Nagle (The Public)
Works in Progress
Amy’s new novel Dear Edna Sloane, is due out in April 2024
Another due out in March 2025, “Animal Instinct”
And “Homestead”, currently a 100 page draft, to follow
Hannah's WIP is her poetry manuscript called “Carry”, plus a yet untitled novel currently in the form of a manuscript that's labeled [Ache] followed by a number.
Other References
Orlando: A Biography, a novel by Virginia Woolf
Reviews The New York Times | The Guardian
