BY SARAH CAVAR '20
On Tuesday, Cristina Henríquez, acclaimed author of Mount Holyoke Common Read “The Book of Unknown Americans,” spoke in Chapin auditorium. Vice President for Student Life and Dean of Students Marcella Runell Hall began the evening by asking the waiting audience to consider: “What kind of community do we want to be in together?”
BY SARAH CAVAR ’20
On Tuesday, Nov. 14 at about 10 minutes to 7 p.m., Mount Holyoke English Professor Andrea Lawlor arrived at the Odyssey Bookshop to a buzzing crowd. Packed tightly into metal chairs, audience members waited impatiently for Lawlor to read from their debut novel, “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl,” which was published on Nov. 1. Odyssey Bookshop’s owner, Joan Grenier, thanked the audience for coming and fellow Mount Holyoke English professor Valerie Martin made beginning remarks. Martin extended them generous praise for their work as a writer and as a professor. “Lawlor’s goal,” she said, “is to get students beyond ‘received ideas’” and toward the ability to put those ideas into practice.
After 17 years, the first book in a much-anticipated companion series to the “His Dark Materials” trilogy is set to be released in October 2017. The HDM trilogy has received international acclaim in the years since its release, as has its author, Philip Pullman. Pullman, a decorated author and current president of Britain’s Society of Authors, has long been known for his vocal humanism, political involvement and successful two-decade writing career, has until recently been nearly silent about the prospect of a companion series.
BY SARAH CAVAR '20
“Write a novel? In a month?”
When I first heard about the existence of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, this was my skeptical first thought. That, and, “What a tedious acronym.” However, for many people across the country, and around the world, NaNoWriMo is a kind of religion. The objective of this month-long event? Complete a 50,000 word-long novel in just thirty days — a goal that, to many people, seems bizarre and impossible.
BY SARAH CAVAR '20
As a child, I was fortunate enough to live within a short drive of a quaint independent bookstore, not unlike the Odyssey Bookshop here in South Hadley. Like Odyssey, it was situated relatively near to similar attractions: a café in which one could find fair trade coffee and vegan scones baked with local, seasonal fruit, and a quirky clothing store filled with overpriced jewelry and maxi skirts. In short, it was as much of a tourist trap as could exist in a small town.
