On Friday, Dec. 13, award-winning author Karen Russell visited Kingswood Oxford as the 42nd annual Baird English Symposium speaker. Ms. Russell spoke to both Middle and Upper School students in assemblies, shared lunch with students, and held a Q&A session at the end of the day.
Ms. Russell’s literary works dive into the genre of magical realism: stories that weave magical elements into an otherwise realistic world. Her works include the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel “Swamplandia!,” a dystopian novella titled “Sleep Donation,” three short story collections, and an upcoming novel called “The Antidote” that will be released this spring.
Symposium is a signature program at KO that was started in 1983 by longtime English teacher Warren Baird. For KO’s 75th anniversary, each department chair was encouraged to host a special event or activity. Former English teacher Morgan Shipway had a friend who knew American novelist E.L Doctorow, so Mr. Baird (who was the English Department Chair at the time) and Mr. Shipway visited Mr. Doctorow and persuaded him to come visit KO for a day.
The visit turned out to be so successful that it became an annual tradition, and by 1987, KO created the Symposium course for seniors devoted to studying an author’s entire body of work. Throughout the years, KO has brought many accomplished authors to campus, and this year, KO had the privilege of welcoming Ms. Russell to that roster.
To begin the assembly, English Department Chair William Martino shared the history of the Symposium program and the dedication of this year’s Symposium classes in studying Ms. Russell’s works. “You have given life to Ms. Russell’s works and interpreted them on your own terms,” Mr. Martino said. “You have suspended your disbelief and traveled with your classmates to the Everglades, to the Arctic, to lemon groves, and beyond.”
Mr. Martino then invited seniors Julia Sohn and Joella Asapokhai to the stage to introduce Ms. Russell. Julia and Joella discussed the timeline of her works, awards she has received, universities where she has taught, and other highlights of her distinguished career. They also spoke about the impact her stories had on them. “In a busy world where it’s easy to get caught up in our daily lives, it’s difficult to appreciate the beauty and strangeness in just living,” Julia said, “but in reading the works of Karen Russell, we can reconnect with the wonders and mysteries that make us human beings.”
To begin her speech, Ms. Russell shared how it is a gift for students to be at a time in their lives where they are able to think freely and to be able to learn at a school where intellectual curiosity is encouraged and nurtured. “It [school] is so much about helping students identify what is best and wildest and most idiosyncratic and most alive in them, what their passions are, and giving them wings and helping them to fly,” Ms. Russell said. “It’s a gift to be in a place like this.”
Next, Ms. Russell read from her short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” She wrote the story when she was in graduate school, and it became the title story for her first published collection. The tale is about girls who are raised by werewolves and then taken in by nuns to conform them to human society. Despite the magical elements and otherworldly premise common in all of Ms. Russell’s work, the story addresses real-world themes of assimilation, coming of age, and identity.
After reading from the story, Ms. Russell shared more about her writing style and how writing her stories through a semi-magical lens allows her more freedom of expression. She shared an example of how in “St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” the magical premise allowed her to explore its themes in a way that was more authentic to her than in a more realistic setting. “I think other writers would write about it in a school,” Ms. Russell said. “It would be in a more straight, realist account. For me, having access to these other registers… I think it really lets me get at the strangeness of being alive and certain kinds of joys and pains, that are just a different palette to try and tell in a true story.”
Then, Ms. Russell shared her experiences as a reader when she was a child, wanting to dive into the fantastical worlds of the stories she read. “As a kid growing up in Miami, I lived in a closet of my mind, trying on costumes,” Ms. Russell shared. “Later, I’d go to college and read textbooks in which academics tried to shove the universe into various corsets, but as a kid, I wasn’t reading for that kind of knowledge. I just wanted to wear new skins; I wanted scales and wings.”
She didn’t get to take a creative writing course until college. In the first stories Ms. Russell wrote, she tried to portray the real and distinctly non-magical worlds she thought adult literature had to consist of. However, these stories weren’t authentic and true to herself as a writer, and became known to her as “flat cola stories.”
Then, a beloved professor of hers told her she could write like some of her favorite authors: George Saunders, Kelly Link, Gabriel García Márquez, Octavia Butler, Italo Calvino, and Franz Kafka. “They extended my notion of what books could be and do, and gave me permission to write at midnight on islands,” Ms. Russell said.
She shared the challenge of writing fiction stories with magical premises. “The greater the story’s strain on credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be,” Ms. Russell explained. “That’s the challenge no matter what kind of fiction you’re writing: to convince the reader through the art of detail that the story you are telling is a true one.” To conclude the assembly, Ms. Russell fielded questions from students who wanted to learn more about her stories and writing style.
Prior to the assembly, the seniors in the Symposium classes were privy to a masterclass taught by Ms. Russell, in which she taught a lesson on ghost stories. Throughout the entire semester, the seniors in the Symposium classes dedicated themselves to Ms. Russell’s work: not only did they read, analyze, and discuss all of her stories, but they also wrote their own magical short stories and taught other Middle and Upper School classes about Ms. Russell and her writing leading up to her visit.
KO got the privilege of hearing Ms. Russell’s wisdom and inspiration, and her visit was one the KO community will remember for years to come.
