By Jennifer Zittnan

news@thewoodstockindependent.com

Book critic, author and professor opens CreativeLiving series

Maureen Corrigan, author, professor, prior juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and book critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” will give her presentation, “Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading,” on Oct. 15 at the Woodstock Opera House as part of the Creative Living series. 

Corrigan published a literary memoir in 2005 titled “Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading.” She served as one of three jurors for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In 2014 she published “So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures.” More recently she was invited to create a course titled “Banned Books, Burned Books: Forbidden Literary Works” for Great Courses, on the issue she describes as “one of the great literary topics of our age.” She says she’s currently working on a book about ten banned books in America and “what they say about the America of their time, what they tell us about our own time and our own obsession with book banning.”

Early days and early works

Growing up, Corrigan says she thinks she always wanted to do something involving books. She said: “I actually came across last year one of those black appointment books that people had way back when and someone must have gotten it and given it to me. And for a little while I tried to keep a diary. And this was like, third grade. And one of the entries, it says something about a book about a cat that I guess everybody was reading in third grade and passing around. And I read my entry and it said something like ‘My friends, Susan and Mary Ellen, really like this book, but I don’t like it at all.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, here’s my first book review.’”

She says at first she wanted to be a novelist but that “pretty early on I realized I didn’t have that kind of imagination, and I loved great novels so much and Dickens was a particular favorite… that to write some paler imitation, just that the thought of that depressed me. So I kind of realized that that wasn’t going to be the kind of writing I would do. And I love to try to figure out what makes a good book work and where they sometimes fail. But mostly I love to try to figure out, you know, what makes a book really magical, and that’s criticism, that’s not actually writing the book yourself, but that’s a work of criticism.”

Work as pleasure

When asked if she ever has time to read solely for pleasure, Corrigan said: “The answer is my work and my personal pleasure kind of happily comingle.” She said “I never think of it as a business of being a book critic… but really, it’s a vocation, it’s a pleasure. It’s, God, it’s a lifelong passion.” She says that the positive of being a book critic is that she’s discovered so many books she wouldn’t have been aware of had she not received alerts about them from publishers. 

She says: “It’s the greatest job in the world, if you love to read, because I’m constantly finding new people and just expanding my list of books, my list of authors who I’ll look for next time.”

“Our friendship was forged in blood”

When asked about her time as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for 2012, she said “it was exhilarating, it was a great honor, and it was infuriating.” As one of three jurors, along with Susan Larson and Michael Cunningham, she had nine months to read over 300 books. By Thanksgiving of 2011 the jurors had to give the Pulitzer board the titles of ten books they thought were worthy. After that, the jurors submitted their top three finalists. The Pulitzer board makes the final decision of which book gets the Pulitzer prize.

However, that year the Pulitzer board decided not to award a prize in Fiction. Corrigan said that, up to that point, this had been done only seven times. The backlash, she said, was incredible, but it was directed toward the wrong people: the jurors, instead of the board.

Corrigan said: “I feel like our work was disrespected and, you know, the books were disrespected. And these were books that we all three thought were more than worthy.” 

Two positives came from her experience. First, she describes how independent bookstores across America stepped up, featuring the three books with displays and contests where the readers got to read all three books and decide the winner themselves. 

Second, she described the friendships she made with Larson and Cunningham: “The happy news is, Susan and Michael and I, our friendship was forged in blood… It’s wonderful. I mean, we really have become friends beyond literature, and that they can’t take away from us.”

The Creative Living program will begin at 10 a.m. at the Woodstock Opera House. Coffee and conversation will be offered at 9 a.m. in Stage Left Cafe. Tickets can be purchased at the Woodstock Opera House box office, by calling 815-338-5300, or by visiting woodstockfinearts.org. The Creative Living series is put on by the Woodstock Fine Arts Association. Woodstock Fine Arts Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.