Patricia Hampl impresses SLC audience

by Caitlin Durham '11

Thursday November 29, 2007

As part of the Graduate Reading Series, Patricia Hampl read from her most recent work at Sarah Lawrence College on Wednesday Oct. 3. Known for her memoirs and autobiographical writings, Hampl has also published two collections of poetry. She is the recipient of several fellowships, including one from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bush Foundation and the McArthur Fellowship, and she has received the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship twice, once for prose and once for poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Hampl’s latest work, The Florist’s Daughter, is a recently released memoir. Before an audience of 50 to 60 people, Hampl read excerpts from this work and discussed the ideas behind it. Written as an elegy for her parents, both deceased, Hampl’s intention was to make an “inquiry” into “innocence,” specifically as experienced in the Midwest, which she called the “archive [of] American innocence.” Before she began to read, Hampl explained that the memoir is framed by an account of the night of her mother’s death. This script-like concept was evident throughout the excerpt as she weaved episodes of memory and flashbacks into that final night at the hospital.

Hampl selected a passage near the middle of the book to read, describing her father and mother in relation to the florist shop in town and the greenhouse further away where the necessary but unattractive manual labor was hidden away from costomers. She interwove snapshots of her family as each detailed description of other shops, the street, and proprietors circled back to their impact and relation to her family; Hampl accomplished this directly or through an indirect comment on her father and mother and the philosophies they lived by. Her characters leapt off the page and engaged the audience. When she described the intermingled “smell of roses and chocolate” emanating from her father’s store and the candy shop attached to it, the audience inhaled it with her.

Hampl followed her reading with a short question and answer session, mostly concerning the technique of writing memory. She described memory itself as “shards of a pot” that must be combined with other things to form the whole again. As with her reading her remarks held the audience’s attention. Once the official session ended audience members charged the author and many were slow to leave the building, evidence of a very successful reading.