Michael Cunningham at Writers' Week

Pulitzer Prize winning author of the The Hours and Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham, gave a very entertaining session at Writers' Week today. Seeming to sense that most of the audience would be more interesed in The Hours than his most book (which he admitted was not doing very well commercially), Cunningham spent most of the hour talking about the influence of Virginia Woolf on his life and work. It was inspiring to hear one writer talk about the way that another writer had literally changed his life. Woolf opened the world of serious literature to a boy from the suburbs of Southern California, and he described how he thought that Virgina Woolf was doing with language what Jimi Hendrix was doing with a guitar, expanding its potential and redefining the way one looks at the art. He also described how Woolf brought the suburbs to literature, showing, in Mrs Dalloway most especially, that every single one of us, no matter how mundane, is the potential subject of an epic novel.

Interestingly, Cunningham inscribes his books: To Ashley, Peace, Michael Cunningam.