The Green Room, Summer 1979

To many Americans, the name Andalucía may well sound like a new brand of perfume or something equally exotic, enchanting, and totally unfamiliar. Proud of our own history, we should well be humbled by that of Andalucia, whose past is as old as tragedy and as lingering as beauty. Indeed, as Allen Josephs> notes, its civilization “is the oldest in the Western world.” MR. Josephs, a professor of Spanish at the University of West Florida, has spent years studying, working, and living in Spain. His article on Andalucía is the opening chapter of a book, White Wall of Spain, which Mr. Josephs is writing in collaboration with Douglas Day, a professor of English at the University of Virginia (who is completing a biography of the Andalusian poet, García Lorca). The book is due to be published by Viking in late 1979 or early 1980. The two Americans are attempting to show Andalucía as it existed in antiquity and as it still exists up to the present. Mr. Josephs holds graduate degrees from the University of Madrid, New York University, and Rutgers University.

In recent months the nightly TV news programs have sometimes seemed like television’s version of The Decline of the West. And the babel of conflicting voices has only served to compound the confusion and hasten a sense of despair. It is this despair to which KENNETH W. THOMPSON addresses himself in calling for the development of a public philosophy which will deal with both “man’s noblest ends and his narrowest self-interest.” Mr. Thompson is director of the White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. A former vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, he received a doctorate in international affairs from the University of Chicago, where he was a student of the noted scholar, Hans Morgenthau. Mr. Thompson’S most recent book is Ethics, Functionalism, and Power in International Politics. A noted authority on the relationship between morality and foreign policy, he has been asked by the International Political Science Association to conduct a plenary session on human rights at their triennial meeting in Moscow next month.

When last heard from, Susan Heeger was, in her words, “madly trying to organize my life in New York,” to which she had just moved. A 1975 graduate of Harvard University, Miss Heeger is now working as an editorial assistant for a New York publisher. She is a former Emily Balch fellow in creative writing at the University of Virginia. While this is her first story to appear in VQR, one of her earlier stories, “After Dark” (Shenandoah, Spring 1976), received mention on the first roll of honor for the Best American Short Stones of 1977.

Harold Fromm, associate professor of English at Indiana University Northwest, has an ongoing interest in the works of Virginia Woolf. In addition to his VQR essay, he has written on To the Lighthouse for English Miscellany, reviewed for Criticism, and has just finished a major essay on Between the Acts. “My principal interest is history and theory of criticism,” MR. FROMM writes. “I have a book on Shaw’s drama criticism and have recently written on current Continental and American critical perspectives.” His essays have also appeared in the Yale, Massachusetts, and Georgia Reviews, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times.

A newcomer to the pages of VQR, ELLEN WILBUR lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares magazine, and three of her “vignettes” have recently appeared in New Letters.

Although she, too, is appearing in VQR for the first time, Merrill Joan Gerrer is a widely published, versatile writer. She is the author of three published novels and a collection of short stories, and her last novel, The Lady with the Moving Parts, is to be published as a Ballantine paperback this year. Her stories have appeared in a variety of magazines, including The New Yorker, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Sewanee Review. A native of Brooklyn, Ms. Gerber now lives in Southern California with her husband and three children.

While serving as the British Ambassador to Laos, Alan Davidson became interested in the fish and seafood of Southeast Asia, and the result was one of his first books. Now retired from the British Foreign Office, he has written a series of volumes on fish and seafood, covering the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic as well as Southeast Asia. His knowledge of Dumas as a cookery writer is hardly superficial. For two years, he and his American wife Jane worked on an abridgement and translation of the monumental Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine by Alexandra Dumas the elder. This work was published in August of last year, in a collector’s edition, by the Folio Society of London and New York.

Carl Dennis teaches English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His third book of poems, Signs and Wonders, will be published this summer by Princeton University Press in their Contemporary Poets Series.

A widely published poet, Sydney Lea is also an editor of the New England Review, a journal which began publication last fall.

Jay Meek’s second book of poems, Drawing on the Walls, will be published this fall by Carnegie-Mellon University Press.

A well-known poet, Frederick Morgan helped found and continues to serve as editor of The Hudson Review.

David Bergman’S poems have appeared in the Yale Review, American Scholar, Paris Review, and elsewhere. He has served as a teacher of poetry at Towson State University and the Maryland Poets-in-the-Schools program.

Both a poet and a short story writer, Judith Johnson Sherwin published her first short story in VQR exactly 20 years ago. Of her six books of poetry, the most recent are How the Dead Count and Waste. Her first work, Uranium Poems, won a Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

Sherod Santos is a graduate student at the University of Utah and has poems forthcoming in The Paris Review, Antaeus, and Poetry.

Stephen Dobyns, currently teaching at Boston University, is both a poet and a novelist. His first book of poems, Concurring Beasts, published in 1972, won the Lamont Prize. His third poetry collection is due out next spring.

Currently a doctoral student in comparative literature at Princeton, Rachel Hadas lived in Greece for five years, and that nation served as the scene of many of her poems, including Starting from Troy, which appeared in 1975.

Randy Blasing is the author of Light Years and has translated the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s book, The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin.

Kinereth Gensler has worked in the Massachusetts Poets-in-the-Schools program, and the result of that work was An Anthology of Contemporary Poems with Ideas to Stimulate Children’s Writing. She is an instructor at Radcliffe.

Cleopatra Mathis, a recent graduate at the Columbia University School of the Arts, will publish shortly her first book of poems with Sheep Meadow Press.

As Carolyn Porter wrote in submitting her article on Emerson, “This essay is a chapter in a projected book on American literature in which I go on to argue that Emerson’s epistemological model—as defined in this chapter—is unstable, largely because of its equation of “use” with vision. I then deal with some other figures, primarily Henry Adams and Faulkner, in whose work I find related problems, in particular, a conflict between detachment and participation.” Ms. Porter is a member of the English faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.

Norman Fiering is Editor of Publications at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. For the academic year 1978—79 he has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. His study of Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought will be published in 1980.

Raymond Nelson is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia whose biography of Van Wyck Brooks will be published in early 1980.

The director of the American Studies program of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Philip F. gura has written widely on the New England Transcendentalists. He is now completing a booklength manuscript on the study of language among 19th-century American Romantics.

William E. Cain is a member of the English Department at Wellesley College and is completing a study of Ben Jonson’s poetry, entitled The True Relation.

At the time she submitted her review, Lucinda macKethan was facing the difficulty of bringing two small children through the Christmas holidays while coping with a full-time teaching schedule in the English Department of North Carolina State University at Raleigh.

A native of New York City, Martin Lebowitz has contributed to numerous journals, including The Kenyan Review, Partisan Review, and the Yale Review.

Richard King is a member of the faculty of the University of the District of Columbia.

Karen Whitehill is a graduate of Middlebury College. Her poems have been published in Shenandoah magazine and other publications.

Irving Malin teaches at City College in New York. He is the author of books on Bellow, Singer, and Faulkner.