Introduced as a satirical writer who loves the world, Mary Kay Zuravleff certainly gave her audience some satire to chew on at her reading on Tuesday night.
No stranger to Hopkins, she graduated from the University with a Master of Arts in Writing Seminars and learned under such notable writers and Hopkins professors as John Barth and Stephen Dixon. Currently, Zuravleff is the 2008 to 2009 American University Writer-in-Residence.
The audience was filled with numerous IFP (Intro to Fiction and Poetry) students who were required to attend as well as the usual cluster of Writing Seminars graduate students. However, there were a number of other listeners who came out to hear the Oklahoma City native read from her latest novel-in-production.
Describing the untitled work, Zuravleff said it is a tale of two twin brothers who are distinguished as elder and younger by a mere six minutes. Before reading from one of the chapters, she said that this distinction would forever mark each of their future lives.
Zuravleff's effortless voice narrated the story of the elder brother, Will, a University of Pennsylvania student, who comes home for the summer and watches his dad get struck by lightning. At the hospital, Will leaves his unconscious father and the rest of his family to find solace and comfort in his annual summer companion, Kyra. His father's injuries release some emotional restraints inside Will and a long-brewed romance finally takes shape between him and Kyra that moves from the beach to the bedroom.
Both Zuravleff's writing and delivery hooked her audience from the beginning. With vivid, in-your-face descriptions of Will's nighttime drive to the sensuality of Kyra's body, Zuravleff did not shy away from anything. All of the audience was engaged.
They laughed when they were supposed to and exchanged looks and grins at the multiple sexual references and scenes. The audience listened intently as Zuravleff tirelessly voiced her piece, emphasizing dialogue and thoughts while making it clear who was saying what.
Even her transition of flipping from page to page was entertaining; when Will and Kyra's sexual encounter traversed multiple pages, Zuravleff, fanning herself with her story, asked her audience, "Is it getting hot in here?"
Don't let this sex scene portray Zuravleff as a writer of romance novels who strives to create the steamiest episodes possible. Far from this, she is a notable writer with two successful books under her belt.
The Bowl is Already Broken is about a museum director struggling to keep internal forces from collapsing the museum. The titular broken Chinese bowl that falls down the museum's stairs in the first scene of the book is just one of a number of problems facing director Promise Whittaker.
Her other novel, The Frequency of Souls, winner of the James Jones First Novel Award and the Academy of Arts and Letters's Rosenthal Award, follows the lives of a refrigerator designer and his new colleague and the different role electricity plays in each of their lives. The designer seeks to use it to revive his business, while his officemate sees electricity as a tool to possibly prove that life exists after death.
When she finished reading the chapter, Zuravleff was greeted with gracious applause by the entire audience. She then started taking questions from her listeners, from which more of the author's affability and literary approach were revealed.
When one listener asked if she had a title for her current work, she said no and asked him whether he had one for her, which again drew laughter from the audience. She then threw out some title suggestions like The Meter Man or The Light, but went further into her holistic construction of the novel, saying that it is intricately connected from the title to the first line, from the characters to the sub-plot.
She said that titles were hard but important and that she often found herself "going to page 151, then back to page six," alluding to the difficulty of keeping a story well-tied. Another question from the audience revealed her novel-in-a-semester class at George Mason University, where she and her students wrote 40,000-word stories by the end of the term.
From her wonderful story-telling to her inviting personality, Zuravleff gained more and more acclaim with every word spoken.
Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The News-Letter.