{"id":39193,"date":"2011-01-06T13:27:26","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T18:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/home.bates.edu\/?p=39193"},"modified":"2018-06-04T09:22:20","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T13:22:20","slug":"39193","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2011\/01\/06\/39193\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-Standard interviews novelist Elizabeth Strout &#039;77"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Syracuse<em> Post-Standard<\/em> interviews <a href=\"http:\/\/latimesblogs.latimes.com\/jacketcopy\/2009\/04\/pulitzer-goes-to-elizabeth-strout-former-la-times-book-award-winner-.html\">Pulitzer Prize-winning<\/a> author <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/x115005.xml\">Elizabeth Strout &#8217;77<\/a> prior to her appearance at the Central Library, where she delivered the final 2010 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.giffordlectureseries.org\/\">Rosamond Gifford Lecture<\/a>, on Dec. 21.<\/p>\n<p><a href='https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2011\/01\/turningpoints-spring2010-strout.jpg'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"400\" height=\"266\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2011\/01\/turningpoints-spring2010-strout-400x266.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium alignright\" alt=\"turningpoints-spring2010-strout\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Strout, an English major who earned an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/x220743.xml\">honorary Doctor of Letters degree <\/a>from Bates in 2010, talks about her devotion to Olive Kitteridge, the problematic and flawed title character of her <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/04\/20\/books\/review\/Thomas-t.html\">2008 novel<\/a>: &#8220;As I was writing  it, I personally had a great deal of sympathy for her, as I do with all  my characters. I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anybody I write about who I don&#8217;t  care for deeply in some way no matter what their behavior is.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>About her own writing process, Strout says, &#8220;I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively  rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you&#8217;re just  lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that&#8217;s great. But  that&#8217;s not ordinary in a day&#8217;s work. So I just rewrite constantly,  constantly, constantly, trying to make sure that every sentence can hold  the depth of the feeling I&#8217;m trying to get at.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And about her brief legal career, after earned her law degree from Syracuse in 1982: &#8220;I did work for legal services in  Syracuse for six months. But I was a pretty terrible lawyer. A really,  really terrible lawyer. I was terrible first of all because I just wanted to be writing  stories. And also, I was not adversarial. And I didn&#8217;t know that about  myself. I hadn&#8217;t thought about that. But when my job was to get on the  phone and call up somebody and tell them they weren&#8217;t giving my clients  their proper due in the school system or something like that, it was  very, very difficult for me to do that.&#8221;<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.syracuse.com\/cny\/2010\/12\/elizabeth_strout_pulitizer-prize_winning_novelist_gives_next_rosamond_gifford_lecture.html\"> View story from the Post-Standard of Dec. 19, 2010.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Syracuse Post-Standard interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout &#8217;77 prior to&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,7,11010,133,11009],"tags":[11051,3271,9512],"class_list":["post-39193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-alumni","category-arts","category-creativity","category-the-college","tag-bates-in-the-news","tag-english6","tag-writing-at-bates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39193"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87207,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39193\/revisions\/87207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}