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Photo by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
English Professor and novelist Mona Simpson brings her
famous friends to UCLA in a popular writers' series. |
A writer who knows writers
by meg sullivan
ucla today
After returning to Los Angeles, the town where she grew up, acclaimed
novelist Mona Simpson found that she stayed in touch with writers
she’d met at writers’ colonies in picturesque New England,
her job at “The Paris Review,” at parties full of young
editors and waiters with aspirations and, yes, college.
“You start out in college, where everyone you know is reading
literary books, and you talk to everyone you know about what you’re
writing,” said Simpson, who joined the UCLA faculty in 2001.
“And then, as you go on in life, fewer and fewer people have
that interest, so you cling to your writer friends.”
The English professor is going into her third year of giving clinginess
a good name. The latest evolution of the writers’ series she
organizes at UCLA leverages those valuable contacts made over the
years. And it appears from the buzz the series is generating that
the author of such best-selling novels as “Anywhere But Here,”
“The Lost Father” and “A Regular Guy” has
hit her stride.
The series, given a slightly new name, “Some Favorite Writers,”
also has a new location, the UCLA Hammer Museum’s Gallery
6 theater. Admission now is free. “Atlantic Monthly,”
to which Simpson occasionally contributes, foots the bill, along
with Fox Searchlight, the studio that made “Anywhere But Here”
into a 1999 movie starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman.
David Foster Wallace (“Infinite Jest,” “Obsession”)
drew a standing-room-only crowd to the season opener last month.
The series continues Dec. 1 with National Book Award-winning author
Jonathan Franzen (“The Corrections”) and Jan. 20 with
Marilynne Robinson (“Housekeeping,” “Gilead: A
Novel”). Simpson is hoping next year to lure the great Canadian
writer Alice Munro, whom she once interviewed for “The Paris
Review.”
Simpson, who taught at Bard, Columbia and NYU before joining UCLA
in 2001, conceived the series during her first year on campus, when
she noticed her students got “very excited” when she
suggested inviting such friends as Christina Garcia (“Dreaming
in Cuban”) and Michelle Huneven (“Jamesland”)
to campus.
“This is a major coup for UCLA,” said fellow English
Professor Katherine Hayles. “Mona’s own cachet as a
creative writer is clearly critical in her success.”
But who would expect anything less from the writer hailed by “Newsweek”
as being in “the front ranks of our best novelists”
upon the 1987 publication of “Anywhere But Here”?
Like the book’s protagonist Ann August, Simpson moved from
the Midwest to L.A. at a tender age and left town to attend college.
Eventually she settled in New York, but began living part-time in
L.A. in 1994 and finally settled on the West Coast five years later.
Now she is busy editing her sixth book. “My Hollywood”
traces the life of a Filipina nanny in Hollywood, an idea that started
gnawing at her after she gave birth to her two children, ages 4
and 11.
“I’ll get an idea and notice a couple of years later
that I’m still thinking about it,” Simpson said. “Some
of them just stick more.”
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