Michael Cunningham Visits The University of Puget Sound

I ended last week by attending a performance of Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, reading the prologue of the acclaimed novel to the music that inspired its creation. Cunningham thrust us into the experience of listening to literature to a soundtrack. Mozart and Schubert best captured the general tone of what he thought his novel would be. He described listening to the classical compositions over and over again until the lives of his both fictive and historical characters came into fruition. So he read to us his written incarnation of Virginia Woolf while the Northwest Sinfonietta String Quartet played Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" live to the cadence of his voice. To sum it all up, he completed his reading of the prologue, the intimate scene depicting his vision of Virginia Woolf's suicide, to the music from the motion picture composed by Philip Glass. From second row center, I closed my eyes and listened to Mrs. Woolf being engulfed by eddies of water through the unsettling trills of two violins, the deep current of the pulsating bass and the swift arpeggios of the piano that insistently pulled her along the river bottom. That night I got a book signed, purchased my first Philip Glass album, went home, listened and read.

Cunningham did me a favor really. I realize now how to use music to benefit my writing. Picking a tone is like picking the color of a certain day or feeling. Now something that seemed intrusive to my writing process can take part in getting some of those blasted words down onto some paper, or into the screen, for a change. As a musician myself I can only leap for joy at the joining of these two art forms, and I have to say, I've come away from it all with some new ideas.

Sephia Day

The day Grandma Banks died, people congregated in one space, brought dining chairs into the living room, sat on the floor, laid on each others' laps, laughed and quietly brushed at watery eyes for the first time in years. They let their hair down again. They loved and remembered. She had passed away and so we all came together, out of the woodwork, for her. The cousins I had grown up with, who I had not seen for over seven years were suddenly all together as familiar strangers and adults. I was ecstatic and solemn, feelings so far apart that they hardly made any sense at all.

I can't really describe what it was like, experiencing death among loved ones for the first time, finally grasping that my step-mother's family was mine too, had been all along, and being sad too. But that day I remember in sephia because it was like living in a memory. Because my emotions were polar opposites, black and white, like an old photograph. Then and now. Before and after. We were girls in white dresses and lace socks, we are grown women, independent, working, maybe in love, and confused because we are still young. And one day we'll be gone too. The sensation is too fresh to get now, but sephia describes it and makes a home of it for me.

In Loving Memory of Idella Cavit Banks (May 16, 1925 - March 19, 2009).