Talk To Me From Wnyc

At last month's True Story: Non-Fiction at KGB Bar, famed essayist, journalist and critic Vivian Gornick talked about womanhood, working and life as a woman worker. KGB curator Erin Edmison introduced the night with a story of how she came to first read Gornick's work. Bon Mots Gornick on making work her priority: "The only important thing, I told myself, was work. I must teach myself to work. If I worked, I'd have what I needed. I'd be a person in the world. What would it matter, then, that I was giving up love? As it turned out, it mattered."  Gornick on her sacrifices for work: "I love my hardened heart. I've loved it all these years. But the loss of romantic love can still tear at it." Gornick on her place in the working world: "Clearly what I have here is—what I've lived on and with and all the rest of it—is what's called an elitist preoccupation. The whole world of ungratifying work, of mechanical work, of work that is drudgery still exists." True Story: The Non-Fiction Reading Series at KGB returns in

Two is a famously bad age for toddlers, but it seems to be a prime number for a reading series marking a rite of passage—in this case, the celebration this past Wednesday of the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series’ two-year anniversary at Joe’s Pub.  Host and curator Amanda Stern called the evening “Old Friends/New Friends” and invited as readers Nelly Reifler and A.M. Homes—her first two guests when she started the series at a Chinatown bar seven years ago. Both women read stories that might be called modern fables. Reifler’s “Formica Dinette” was written for the Web site Underwater New York, which collects writing and art inspired by the waterways around New York City (take that, James Cameron). In this darkly comic piece (the actual dinette is somewhere in the East River) the Formica company somehow joins with a survivalist family gearing up for the final battle, and kitchen redesign is linked to the rehabilitation of a possessed parent. A.M. Homes’ untitled piece, written for her friend, the English pai