Uncategorized – WORD CHASE with Adair V

June 6, 2018June 6, 2018Adair V

Literary Arts interviews Adair V

This past January, I was thrilled to be awarded a 2018 Oregon Literary Fellowship. I’m using the award to finish my work Quantum Entanglements, which is a fiction-memoir-personal essay hybrid. The announcement was a happy shock and also a shot of adrenalin. I’ve used the time well and should have a finished manuscript in the […]

July 19, 2015June 2, 2018Adair V

The Imagined Divine

In 1305, the adjective ‘divine’ in English meant ‘of a god’. By 1470, a weakened sense of the word had evolved, meaning ‘excellent’. In the same period, the etymology of the verb form involved the idea ‘to make out by supernatural insight’. By the early 15th century, another concept emerged in association with the verb […]

May 13, 2014June 2, 2018Adair V

In Search of Marriage in Literature

Originally posted on WORD CHASE with Adair V:
Searching for marriage in literature is like holding a kaleidoscope to the world—at the slightest movement the arrangement, colours, shapes, angles, relationships, and mood are altered. In literature as in life, there are good marriages and bad, good marriages that turn bad, and marriages that on any…

March 13, 2013June 2, 2018Adair V

What makes for good writing?

What makes for good writing? There are a thousand ways to go about answering this question. One might offer examples—Shakespeare, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. These are writers who have produced good writing. But listing them doesn’t get at why they are good. And it offers no help to the writer who is wondering how to […]

April 18, 2010April 24, 2011Adair V

Review: blueyedboy by Joanne Harris

Joanne Harris, the acclaimed author of Chocolat, departs from sunny characters and a feel-good story in her latest work, blueeyedboy.

January 7, 2010January 7, 2010Adair V

Holiday Reading

At the beach house in Coolum, with an evening stretching out in front of me with nothing to read, I began fossicking for the books others left behind. This is what I found. . . .

July 29, 2009Adair V

Food in Revolution–A memoir of China by Xiaomei Martell

For those interested in the history of the Cultural Revolution, Lion’s Head, Four Happiness might disappoint. Like everyone in China, Martell’s family and neighbours were touched by Mao’s campaign. Red Guards, re-location and re-education all figure. But these events tend to be minimised, serving only to trigger associations with meals shared or missed out on or fantasised about.

June 14, 2009June 14, 2009Adair V

The mark of a really good book

Hemingway speaks excitedly about his latest work and, opening another bottle of Champagne, tells Ross, “The mark of a really good book, you know, is how much good writing you cut out of it.”

April 30, 2009Adair V

“One cannot hide from the glare of one’s own writing”

There is a unique relationship between art and engagement. According to Eva Sallis, “A writer is neither exactly private nor exactly expert.” What a writer brings to an issue, however, is an ability to represent, to communicate effectively and emotionally, to convince.

January 21, 2009June 2, 2018Adair V

Review: Muhajababes by Allegra Stratton

The experience of reading Muhajababes is like watching music videos. It’s all gloss, glitz and glamour. Stratton glibly observes that the battle between piety and secularism is being waged on television screens across the Middle East and that some women choose to wear the veil not out of religious devotion or as a political statement, but merely because it’s trendy.