UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 39, Page 5
August 4, 1994
Jeanne Walker: poet, playwright and professor

     Award-winning poet, playwright and professor of English, Jeanne
Murray Walker has been focusing on writing poetry and scripts for the
theatre this past year, thanks to a fellowship from the University's
Center for Advanced Study.
     Walker completed a series of poems entitled God Like A
Spendthrift: Meditations on Insects and Spiders. "The poems," Walker
said, "turn the microscope on 30 tiny creatures, examining their
sometimes astounding habits and capabilities. For example, when a
grasshopper injures a leg, it can grow a new one, but only if it eats
the old one first. Such facts become the occasion, in these poems, for
reflection on human fear and hope."
     In the poem Mosquito, Walker writes:
       Six hours for everything!
       She has to make some
       choices. I would do what
       she does-fly up
       from the cool water
       like a dust mote,
       dry my wings, hoping they
       might lift me further.
       I would jazz it up,
       all for love, draw circles
       on the air. In this
       brief, expanding universe
       of suns, I would try to be
       nothing but longing,
       entirely hunger. And when I died,
       I'd leave behind a memory
       like an itch.
     Walker's fourth book of poetry, Stranger Than Fiction, published
in late 1992, won the Colliday Prize and $1,000 from The Quarterly
Review of Literature. As part of the 50th anniversary celebration of
The Quarterly Review, Walker was invited to give a reading from
Stranger Than Fiction at the Small Press Book Fair in New York City.
     In addition to writing poetry, Walker also drafted several
scripts and worked with two theatres to develop plays. The Chosen
Daughter, Walker's second play, had its premier in April at the Arena
Theatre in Chicago. It was developed over two years in collaboration
with Arena Theatre director Jim Young and dramaturge David McFadzean,
who writes and produces Home Improvement on television.
     The Chosen Daughter, which concerns the coming of age of a young
concert violinist and her slow realization that she is haunted by her
great grandmother Sophie, will be produced in March in Iowa and also
is under consideration by several other theatres, Walker said.
     Walker's third play, Inventing Chicago, won a script competition
and was given a staged reading in London last February by the Man in
the Moon Theatre. A new script, In This Light, will be given a staged
reading in September at the Hedgerow Theatre in Pennsylvania.
     In addition to her fellowship from the University, Walker was
awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts
and a fellowship in theatre by the Pennsylvania State Council on the
Arts last winter.
     This summer, Walker is teaching at the Artists Teachers Institute
in New Jersey. She recently had her essay, "Ways to Move Beyond the
Self" published in Shenandoah, the Washington and Lee University
Review. Walker will return to campus  in September.
                                                   -Sue Swyers Moncure