Guest Author - Sharon Cullars
Joyce Carol Oates’ stories are sometimes disturbing, her protagonists sometimes dark, her villains sometimes sympathetic but, well, darker. Oates delves into the landscape of the human psyche, presenting the reader with a roadmap of twisted paths and grottoes in which demons and trolls lurk, waiting to attack. Sometimes she shows us that we harbor these monsters within us. In a recent article for the Boston College Magazine (Winter, 2002), she wrote: “Evil isn’t a theological concept…(it) is the mote in the Other's eye, a passing wink or twinkle in our own, for which we protest that we are blameless—innocent.”
Achieving a par excellence in almost every genre she has written, Oates has received several awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, and the National Book Award for her first novel, Them.
Writing since her 20's, Oates, like many of her literary contemporaries, was influenced by her environs, which in this case was Detroit, Michigan (where she and her husband settled in 1962), a city that was just on the edge of civil unrest. Eyewitness to the racial strife that would one day go from simmering to full conflagration, Oates was suddenly privy to the world of the Other, and this revelation became the focus of Them. She once wrote: "Detroit, my 'great' subject made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am—for better of worse." From 1968 to 1978, Oates taught just across the Detroit river at the University of Windsor in Canada, and during that time she wrote many novels and short stories, publishing a book or two a year.
Oates and her husband later resettled in Princeton during the late 70’s, and she began teaching a creative writing program at the University. Subsequently, she and her husband also began operating a small press and literary magazine called The Ontario Review. During the 80’s, Oates wrote what many consider her tour de force, Bellefleur, a multigenerational saga of the fictional and very eccentric Bellefleur family that included a wealthy noctambulist; a baby born with the lower half of her twin brother protruding from her abdomen; as well as a female vampire with a tragic love affair in her past. The novel combined realism, magic and fantasy in a tale described as “rich, baroque and haunting”.
With several short story anthologies under her belt, Oates published her latest collection, Faithless: Tales of Transgression, in 2001. Faithless features stories exploring the private lives between men and women, exposing their deepest secrets, showing the potential of good and evil that’s within us all.
One of Oates' earliest works, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, was published in 1966, and the story has been included in many college curricula since then. Oates borrowed from the headlines to create the fictional Arthur Friendly, master manipulator and deadly Svengali. Based on a real life pied piper who led two teenage girls to murder one of their friends, Oates provides a chilling, insightful look at the twisted relationship that develops between Friendly and one of his victims. Read the story and enjoy one of America’s talented authors.
