Jane Smiley, author of many books including A Thousand Acres (Pulitzer prize, 1992) and 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, appeared interviewing S.E. Hinton (author of The Outsiders) and appeared on a panel "About Reading."
Her partner, Jack Canning, accompanied her. He is a cousin of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, who introduced him and a former wife to A Course in Miracles many years ago.
Jack said that he and Jane both read from A Course in Miracles and ask every day, "What does the Holy Spirit want me to do today?"
As for religion and organized religion, he said that he, like Jane, identifies himself as an "indifferentist."
Jane was brilliant and thought-provoking in her interview of S.E. Hinton, as well as in the panel "About Reading."
She said that after reading some 130 novels and proto-novels from various centuries and cultures, starting with the Japanese Tale of Genji, "As a result I now have no critical standards at all."
"The novel cultivates this inner life among the readers. By the 19th C. writers expected the reader to have this rich inner life," she continued. "But in the 10th C., there was not this same inner life." She cited the comments of readers in Boccaccio's Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (for details, see Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel).
"The novel had transformed our sense of who we were and how we think," she said. "It enters our mind in a complex way and cultivates our thinking."
Others on the panel were
1) Laura Miller, a co-founder of Salon.com and author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (2008).
2) Lizzie Skurnick, NPR book critic and author of Shelf Discover: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.
3) Sara Nelson, author of So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (forth-coming in July).
C-SPAN filmed the panel and aired it; it may be available through C-SPAN.
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