After Sappho with author Selby Lynn Schwartz and Professor Loretta Stec
Channel: Mechanics' Institute
Date: 2023-10-30

Watch author Selby Wynn Schwartz in conversation on her debut novel, After Sappho, with Professor Loretta Stec, English Department, San Francisco State University.

“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.

After Sappho is written “after” Sappho in the manner of an ode, one that gathers and cherishes the fragments of these women just as they treasured the iconic poet’s verses.  In a famous fragment of Sappho’s writings, she promises her beloved that they will not be forgotten — someone will remember us / I say / even in another time. Centuries later, Schwartz’s debut makes good on that promise, centering the poet’s iconic work in a dazzling exploration of lesbian desire.

Selby Wynn Schwartz holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and the forthcoming novella A Life in Chameleons.

Loretta Stec is a Professor in the English Department of San Francisco State University where she teaches courses on modernist literature with a focus on women writers; animal studies and literature; Southern African literature in English; and literature of exile and migration. One of her favorite courses to teach is an intensive study of Virginia Woolf’s works. She has published articles on Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, D.H. Lawrence, Bessie Head, and other 20th-century writers. 

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