Advertisement

Coming of age in The Hudson Review

Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Innocence lost: That is the theme uniting the pieces collected in ‘Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review’ (Ivan R. Dee). Edited by Paula Deitz (the magazine’s editor since 1998), the book gives us writers of the first rate, among them William Trevor, Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Spencer.

But -- and this is what makes this book unique -- the idea for ‘Writes of Passage’ didn’t originate in a desire to simply showcase the talent that has visited its pages over the years. This collection originated in a program at two Harlem high schools where The Hudson Review ran a Writers in the Schools program. As Deitz explains in her foreword:

‘It soon became clear during these lively and revealing classroom discussions how many of the stories and memoirs from the Review addressed the students’ own experiences and conflicts about coming of age as they learned the true value of integrating the lessons of literature into their own lives.’

Advertisement

Among the selections are stories by Wendell Berry, Steven Millhauser and Steve Yarbrough and memoir from Hayden Carruth, Nicole Graev and Robert Schultz. Whether one is reading stories or memoir, however, the truth is still the same--as Trevor explains at the opening of ‘In Co. Cork’:

All memory is grist to the fiction writer’s mill. The pleasure and the pain experienced by any storyteller’s characters, the euphoria of happiness, the ache of grief, must of course be the storyteller’s own. It cannot be otherwise, and in that sense all fiction has its autobiographical roots, spreading through -- in my case -- a provincial world, limited and claustrophobic.

Nick Owchar

Advertisement