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Living between Two Worlds:

Author Lynn Freed, a South African expatriate who has lived in the United States for the past thirty years, will be visiting Chico on March 30 and 31. Her free public lecture, "Living between Two Worlds," will be given Thursday, March 30, at 7 p.m. in PAC 134. She will also talk about her craft in the Humanities Center, Trinity 126, at 3 p.m. before her lecture on March 30, and then again as a guest of the Conversations on Diversity series at 9 a.m. on March 31, Trinity 126.

Freed is the author of Heart Change, Home Ground, The Bungalow, and The Mirror, as well as published essays and short stories published in the New Yorker, Harper's, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. She was raised in Durban, South Africa, in a large Jewish family and attended an Anglican girls' school. She received her B.A. from the University of Witwatersrand in 1966 and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York. She has been the recipient of MacDowell, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim fellowships. She now lives in Sonoma, teaches at workshops throughout the country, travels, and writes.

As a self-described "bold and daring girl," Freed was encouraged by her parents, who produced theatre, to write and perform. "Writing," she has said, "was as natural to life as playing." She memorized literary passages -- Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw, and psalms from the Bible -- because, she said, "I loved having the words by heart, accessible always."

According to Freed, those who lived in South Africa during her youth were taught that the best life lay far away, and the best literature originated in Britain. However, as an adult, Freed found her own voice, one which frequently takes her back to the haunts of her childhood on the Indian Ocean -- full of hot beaches, bush, and sugar cane.

The recurring threads in Freed's work include women defining themselves in a social fabric that would make them invisible, the complexity of race relations, and a yearning for "home" in the most varied sense of the term. Freed's most recent novel, The Mirror (Ballantine, 1997), about a sexually liberated business woman in post-World War I South Africa, encompasses all these themes.

In an interview with Sarah Anne Johnson in The Writer's Chronicle (October/November 1999), Freed reveals her acuity. She talks about South African white liberals who espoused opposition to apartheid but "were seldom moved to act" upon their views. And she talks about racism in America, "every bit as hair-raising" as what she grew up with in Durban. Although she scorns the limitations of labels such as "feminist," or any other -ists and -isms, her interest clearly lies with women who break the mold.

But what might characterize her essence and craft the best is the sense of yearning derived from an all-encompassing homelessness. She describes the writer as the "perpetual foreigner," explaining that the painful distance a writer feels from people, place, and childhood is the basis for authorial insight and inspiration. She argues against sentiment and nostalgia, however, which she claims are "fatal to fiction."

"One must go into the territory of the imagination," she proclaims, "with sure feet, not fainting with glorious misery. I suppose travel, for me, is a sort of search for home. And also for romance. And also for hope."

Lynn Freed's visit is made possible, in part, by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sponsors from CSU, Chico include the School of Graduate, International, and Sponsored Programs; the Humanities Center; the Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies; the College of Humanities Modern Jewish and Israel Studies Program; the College of Humanities and Fine Arts; Chico Performances; and KCHO. For more information, call Rob Burton, director of the Humanities Center, at x6568. -- Thomasin Saxe, College of Humanities and Fine Arts