![]() Brews & News: Voice of San Diego Live Podcasts.This is meant to be a tribute, and even though Carson McCullers could be very shy and very humble, she also sang her own praises very well.Our Border Sewage Crisis Has a Solution. I’m going to pretend that this song is actually a dramatic monologue, and I’m going to tell you all about McCullers’s feelings about other writers of her generation, and especially about Harper Lee. First-edition covers of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Houghton Mifflin, 1940), The Ballad of the Sad Café (Houghton Mifflin, 1951), and Reflections in a Golden Eye (Houghton Mifflin, 1941) And we need her work today more than ever. I love her because she was tough and yet so fragile and needy, and sometimes cruel in her private life. I love her for her prescient vision of the Civil Rights era back in 1940 in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published when she was only twenty-three years old. I love her for her compassion, her empathy, her eye for detail, especially regarding children. I have always found Carson McCullers to be a singularly modern sensibility, regardless of what era I was working in. Suzanne Vega as Carson McCullers (Sandra Coudert) It was made into a film directed by Michael Tully in 2019. I rewrote the whole thing, and the final version of the play was called Lover Beloved, and that had its premiere in 2018 in Houston, Texas. The play Carson McCullers Talks About Love came out in 2011. This was a project I revisited throughout the decades. This was way before my first record deal. Her gin-drinking, smoking, bisexual persona was heady stuff for a nineteen-year-old, and I ended up writing a half-hour one-woman show based on her life and her work as my senior thesis in 1981. Carson McCullers in 1959 (Carl Van Vechten / Library of Congress) I picked out a little jacket and then bought a pack of cigarettes and swaggered into class the next morning, ready to field questions. I took the book out of the library and read as much as I could overnight. But here she was, on the cover of this 700-page biography. I couldn’t wait to read more of this guy, Carson McCullers, whoever he was. One seeks the love and friendship of the other, who treats him badly and calls him “Sucker.” Over the course of the story, the tide turns the other way. It was called “Sucker.” It was a short story about two boys. I had only read one piece of writing by Carson McCullers at that time. I remembered this image and sought out the book. It was of a tall, boyish girl with blunt-cut bangs, a little jacket, a Brooks Brothers shirt, with the saddest eyes I had ever seen. I was struck by the portrait on the cover. This was in the 1970s, and the wonderful biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr had just been released. I worked many jobs back then, and one was as an assistant librarian, where I put books back on the shelves after they had been borrowed (if I wasn’t sitting on the floor reading them). The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr (Anchor Books, 1976) The Collected Works of Carson McCullers I was given an assignment of choosing a person who was no longer alive from the world of the arts and coming in the next day dressed as that person and ready to answer questions as though I were on TV. I was attending Barnard College, studying English literature and theater. I’ll speak for a few minutes about my longstanding love for the great Southern writer Carson McCullers. ![]() ![]() Suzanne Vega speaking at LOA’s 40th anniversary gala reception on May 1, 2023. To see photos from the event, click here. ![]() ![]() In the weeks ahead we’ll be posting the full remarks of other featured speakers, each of whom who paid tribute to American writers whose work shaped their own. The following remarks were given by Suzanne Vega at LOA’s 40th anniversary gala reception on May 1, 2023. “Her gin-drinking, smoking, bisexual persona was heady stuff for a 19-year-old”: Suzanne Vega on Carson McCullers ![]()
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