A few months after Julie’s death, her writing colleagues held An Afternoon With Julie, a convocation honoring her work.
At that time, Sharon Solwitz,1 an award-winning, extraordinarily talented writer who also led a workshop in which Julie participated, gave a reading of Little Lisa Marie. The audio portion (extracted from the video tape taken at An Afternoon With Julie) can be played below.
The first portion of the audio may be difficult to understand but the quality improves with the first 1-2 minutes. Because of the length of the reading, I’ve broken it down into segments.
The manuscript of the short story, Little Lisa Marie, can be read or downloaded ~here~
Sharon Solwitz Reads Little Lisa Marie By Julie Showalter
From An Afternoon With Julie – 2000
Introduction To An Afternoon With Julie & Introduction Of Sharon Solwitz (2 minutes)
Little Lisa Marie, Part 1 (10 minutes)
Little Lisa Marie, Part 2 (7.5 minutes)
Little Lisa Marie, Part 3 (3.5 minutes)
Note: Originally posted May 21, 2006 at 1HeckOfAGuy.com, a predecessor of AllanShowalter.com
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- Sharon is now an Associate Professor of Creative Writing; Fiction at Purdue. This biographical information is from the Purdue website:
Sharon Solwitz is the author of a novel, Bloody Mary, and a collection of short stories, Blood and Milk, which won the Carl Sandburg Prize from Friends of the Chicago Public Library, and the prize for adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Several of her stories have been selected for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and in Best American Short Stories. Other honors for her individual stories, published in such magazines as TriQuarterly, Mademoiselle, and Ploughshares, include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, the Nelson Algren Literary Award, and grants and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. Solwitz teaches fiction writing at Purdue University and lives in Chicago with her husband, the poet Barry Silesky. Her new novel, Once, in Lourdes, is scheduled for publication May 30, 2017. [↩]