Feminist author offers voice, hope

Beneath the dimmed lights of room 142 in the Music Building, aspiring writers and readers alike huddled to hear Cris Mazza, a novelist, short story writer, essayist and editor, read excerpts from her work Jan. 22.

This literary gathering was organized by Lucy Corin, head of JMU's creative writing department. She has arranged similar events in the past, to which she invites her creative writing students.

The author was open for questions and a book signing following the reading. The experience allows the listener to identify the voice and the intonation that accompanies the words on the page, according to junior Jackie Sennessey.

Corin, an author herself, introduced Mazza as a "comrade." "There's a woman out there and she's writing things and she makes me feel like I'm not alone," Corin said.

Mazza said she "was looking for something different, something that stretched the boundaries of what has been considered ‘women's writing,' something that might be able to simply be called ‘writing' without defining it by gender, and yet, at the same time, speak the diversity and depth of what women writers can produce rather than what they're expected to produce."

Thursday's event proved to be all of Mazza's hopes and more. "Hesitation," the last of the four stories Mazza read, was written in a three-page-long single paragraph. Her stories flowed as though they were devoid of punctuation, though she uses the occasional dash to pause for a breath.

Mazza's themes were uniquely feminine and honest. She read four excerpts from her writing, including the piece "What Kind of Mother" from her upcoming novella, "Disability," which will be released next year.

Mazza, a teacher in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has written numerous books. "How to Leave a Country," garnered the PENN/Nelson/ Algren Award. Her collections of short fiction include "Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?" and "Former Virgin." Mazza also has co-edited two anthologies of alternative women's fiction, "Chick-Lit" and "Chick-Lit 2," in which newly discovered talents share the pages with more renowned women writers.

Mazza's works are "literary sitcoms from hell … Ms. Mazza is a subversive, anarchistic writer … hardly forgettable," the Wall Street Journal stated on Mazza's Web site, www.cris-mazza.com.

The "Chick-Lit" anthologies introduced what Mazza refered to as post-feminist writing, according to her Web site. "[The literature is] not anti-feminist, but it's sort of irreverent — and funky, sassy, droll and frisky."

The session with Mazza was enlightening. The enitre audience, males included, was not struck by an overwhelming sense of what it is to be female in a not-so-traditional world, Sennessey said.