Ingres’s Madame Moitessier (1856) alongside Picasso’s Woman with a Book (1932)
Painters learn by copying the masters. But we know it is more than learning, it is a response, an intimate conversation that knows not the bounds of time or place.
Writers copy and respond to their masters, too. If you were in the Katherine Mansfield class last month, you already know that Mansfield’s “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” is a copy of Anton Chekhov’s story, “Sleepy.” If you’ve been working with me for a while, then you may have been a part of the first Responding to Stories with Stories class, where we read David Foster Wallace’s rewrite of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and John Updike’s rewrite of James Joyce’s “Araby,” among other examples of story pairs.Join us now and add more art and literature to your life, learn how to read closely and like a writer, respond to your favorite author or story, and do so in a wonderfully perceptive, talented, and supportive community of readers and writers. We start on April 18, which means I'll be sending the stories next week!I’ve been collecting story pairs for a while. Below is my non-exhaustive list, where the second story in each pair is the rewritten version of the classic. You may recognize some of them, be surprised by others, and hopefully make some discoveries!Flannery O'Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Alice Munro “Save the Reaper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Doris Lessing “To Room Nineteen”
Edith Wharton “Roman Fever”
Alice Elliott Dark “The Secret Spot”
Ernest Hemingway “Hills Like White Elephants”
David Foster Wallace “Good People”
James Joyce “Araby”
John Updike “A&P”
Anton Chekhov “The Lady with the Little Dog”
Ehud Havazelet “Gurov in Manhattan”
Another writer who copied Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Little Dog” is Joyce Carol Oates. In her book Marriages and Infidelities, she rewrote at least four stories by the masters and kept their original names to show her respect and admiration for the originals. Other than her version of“The Lady with the Little Dog” by Chekhov, Oates wrote “The Metamorphosis” after Kafka’s story of the same name, “The Turn of the Screw” after Henry James’s novella, and “The Dead” after James Joyce’s final story of Dubliners. In her interview with The Atlantic, she said, “These stories are meant to be autonomous stories, yet they are also testaments of my love and extreme devotion to these other writers; I imagine a kind of spiritual ‘marriage’ between myself and them….”Anton Chekhov “Sleepy”
Katherine Mansfield “The Child-Who-Was-Tired”
Henry James “The Jolly Corner”
John Cheever “The Seaside Houses”
John Cheever “The Five-Forty-Eight”
Raymond Carver “The Train”
Vladimir Nabokov “Symbols and Signs”
Lorrie Moore “Referential”
Jamaica Kincaid “Girl”
Bret Anthony Johnston “Boy”
James Thurber “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
Rivka Galchen “The Lost Order”
William Trevor “Three People”
Yiyun Li “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl”
Do you have other examples? Please send your story pairs my way.Ready to sign up? Please contact me, and we’ll take it from there! Thursdays not good for you? Tuesday and US-timed sections may be opened on demand for a minimum of 4 participants.
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You may read the class introduction for Responding to Stories with Stories - 2: Alice Munro-Flannery O'Connor here
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Writing Talks meeting is on Wednesday, April 10. We begin at 8 PM (Beijing)
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Margins of Memory - Winterson & Woolf with 三明治 begins April 27
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