Evelyn Scott Society officers 2020-2025
Caroline Maun -- President |
Caroline Maun is an associate professor and Chair of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She teaches creative writing and American literature. She is the editor of The Collected Poetry of Evelyn Scott, and author of Mosaic of Fire: The Work of Lola Ridge, Evelyn Scott, Charlotte Wilder, and Kay Boyle. Her poetry publications include the volumes The Sleeping, What Remains, and three chapbooks, Cures and Poisons and Caroline Maun: Greatest Hits, both from Puddinghouse Press, and Accident, published by Alice Greene & Co.
I was introduced to Evelyn Scott by Dorothy Scura, a professor and later my dissertation director at University of Tennessee. She included Scott's 1929 novel The Wave in a syllabus of non-canonical southern American women writers. As it turned out, the Hodges Library at University of Tennessee had a number of Scott's rare books on the shelf. While doing research for my seminar paper, I wrote to Robert Welker, then Chair of the Department of English at University of Alabama-Huntsville, who had written a dissertation on Scott at Vanderbilt in the late 1950s. He was in possession of a large number of her papers and opened that archive to me for my dissertation. I hope that by resuming the activities of the Evelyn Scott Society that we can collectively encourage more scholars to dive into her important archives. |
Denise Scott Fears --
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Evelyn Scott is my grandmother.
She had one child, my father. He was born when Evelyn was in Brazil with the man she “eloped” with: the story of this period of Evelyn’s life is the subject of her autobiographical novel Escapade (1923). I have never had any contact with my grandmother. During my childhood my parents made it clear that she was a destructive influence, causing great difficulties for my father and consequent hardship for the family. We moved numerous times during my childhood, and I understood that these moves were mostly an effort to escape her influence. As a child I discovered a grainy photograph of her home in Tennessee, the Gracey mansion. I had a romantic vision of a Southern grandmother floating around in hoop skirts sipping mint juleps. It did not match the picture of her painted by my parents. Fast forward to 1985 when I came across David Callard’s biography, Pretty Good for a Woman, with the first photo I had ever seen of her on the cover. I devoured the book and for the first time had a more rounded picture of the woman who was my grandmother. Fast forward again another 30 years, and I am in Tennessee, first to Clarksville where I saw the site of the now-demolished Gracey mansion, and on to the University of Tennessee where I had a chance to read her correspondence. This provided an explanation of many of the events of my childhood and revealed a side of my grandmother’s story that was completely new to me and presumably to her biographers. At around this time my mother died and I discovered among her papers numerous letters from Evelyn from the 1950s and 1960s, many unopened. Since then I have gathered as much of her correspondence as possible from university collections Evelyn’s last novel, The Shadow of the Hawk, was published in 1941, at the time when her correspondence demonstrated the beginnings of the mental illness leading to the obsessiveness and paranoia which plagued my father and filled her life with difficulty. Although working on another novel for years, she was not publishing (apart from a few minor works until the late 1950s), in part because her publishers found her very difficult to deal with. I am totally absorbed in the personal story, and am now editing the collection of over 1500 letters by and to Evelyn to tell that story. I hope others will be equally absorbed. |
Graça Salgado -- Secretary/Treasurer |
Graça Salgado is an Associate Professor of English at Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and a translator from English into Portuguese. Researcher in the field of critical discourse analysis and life writing, she has published on gender, memory and emotion in life writing discourses such as letters and autobiographies. She translated Stefan Zweig and Lotte Zweig’s South American Letters: New York, Argentina and Brazil, 1940-42 (Versal 2013) and more recently Evelyn Scott’s Brazilian autobiography Escapade (Versal 2019) whose historical context is World War One. She has been working on Scott’s life, thought, and writing since 2012 and published, in 2022, she published the article "Dissonant Discourses: Evelyn Scott and Cyril Kay Scott's Experiences in Brazil (1914-1919)"
https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2116762 |