[OPLINLIST] Pulitzer Prize Winner to Speak in McArthur

[Erick C. Walker]

Severance author to speak in McArthur April 13

 

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, the Francis Eppes Professor of English at Florida State University, will offer a reading for Cherishing Family: A Spring Literary Arts Festival in McArthur, OH on April 13.

Butler will read from Severance: his latest collection of short fiction consisting of sixty-two dramatic monologues delivered by narrators immediately after their bodies have been separated from their heads. The human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by the intersection of these concepts, Butler wrote the stories, each exactly 240 words in length, to capture the thoughts passing through a person's mind in that situation.

In Severance, the characters are both real and imagined-Medusa (beheaded by Perseus, 2000 BC), Anne Boleyn (beheaded at the behest of Henry VIII, 1536), a chicken (beheaded for Sunday dinner, Alabama, 1958), and the author (decapitated, on the job, 2008). Told with the intensity of a poet and the wit of a storyteller, these final thoughts illuminate and crystallize more about the characters' lives and perceptions than many full-length biographies or novels. 

Butler has written three collections of stories and 11 novels. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is the collection that won him America's highest writing honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993. Butler has also written screenplays and his stories have been included in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories. He is the director of the creative writing program at Florida State.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and two National Magazine Awards (one  in 2001 and another in 2005), Butler has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Society of Arts and Letters. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and numerous other magazines and journals.            

Butler garnered much attention when he began a unique program which allowed the world-at-large to witness his creative process of story writing via a dedicated website. For his Inside Creative Writing project, he began with a simple concept for a story and began writing every evening for about 19 days, allowing millions of students and would-be writers a golden opportunity to learn from every creative decision as it happened. At the close of each episode, he answered questions e-mailed to him during the broadcast.

Butler will read at 2 p.m. on April 13 at the Herbert Wescoat Memorial Library.                                                                    

Cherishing Family: A Spring Literary Arts Festival is sponsored by the Herbert Wescoat Memorial Library and the Friends of the Herbert Wescoat Memorial Library, Inc., in McArthur, OH. The festival opens at 1 p.m. on Friday, April 13, 2007 and the last event will commence at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 15, 2007. All events are free and open to the public.  For more information contact the library at 740-596-5691 or www.vintoncountypublic.lib.oh.us.

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