Welcome letter from Gail

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HER TIME IN MIAMI AS A REPORTER AND HER SUBSEQUENT CAREER AS A WRITER

Like her heroine, Emma Gant, Gail Godwin began a job as a reporter in Miami after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1959 with a degree in journalism. Her employer was The Miami Herald and she was a general assignment reporter (she was determined not to end up in the women’s section). Al Neuharth, who went on to found USA Today, was the Assistant Managing Editor of the Herald and he told Godwin that he could see her “turning into a real newspaper gal.” She was promoted to the Herald’s Fort Lauderdale bureau, where they said she had a “flair for leads.” But, as she admits in her forthcoming Journals, “I let my boredom show . . . After I had completed my one or two assignments for the day, I actually took frequent trips to the hairdresser down the block and came back freshly coiffed, and with different shades of hair. I acted out the role of the flighty starlet who was headed back to Miami as soon as her trial period in the bureaus was over.”

She was then sent with a few others to start the Pompano bureau, which she describes in her journals as “a heady time. We were all young, ambitious, and had lovely expense accounts. We had a hand in every aspect of newspaper production, including page make up and still had energy left over for late night drinking and midnight ocean swims.” But then she was sent back to the Ft. Lauderdale bureau for, what she did not know, was her last chance. Ultimately, she was fired. Her ambitions and impatience for promotion did her in. More seasoned reporters were still waiting to be called back to Miami and she did not seem willing to wait her turn.

Meanwhile, she was married briefly to a Miami Herald photographer. When the marriage and the job were over, she moved back to North Carolina and took a job as a waitress in a mountain resort in order to save up enough money to travel to Europe and begin her creative writing career.

Her European travels -- from Denmark, to the Canary Islands, to London -- are covered in the first volume of her journals and were a time when she truly embarked on becoming a writer -- storing up experiences, reading great writers, and forcing herself to focus on the work of writing. She also married again (and again briefly) to an English psychiatrist, who helped her to begin writing seriously.

At age 29, she was admitted to the graduate writing program at the University of Iowa, where she went on to earn an M.A .and Ph.D. in English. Along with John Irving and John Casey, she studied with Kurt Vonnegut, and her thesis turned out to be her first published novel, The Perfectionists (1970). Thus began a long and prolific career as a writer. Godwin has received tremendous critical acclaim, was nominated for three National Book Awards and has had several national best sellers. Her eleven novels, two short story collections and one nonfiction work are:

The Perfectionists (1970)

Glass People (1972)

The Odd Woman (1974) Nominated for a National Book Award

Dream Children (1976) Story collection

Violet Clay (1978) Nominated for a National Book Award

A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) Nominated for a National Book Award; three months on the New York Times bestseller list; #1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. Godwin was interviewed by Jane Pauley on the “Today” show (and was interviewed several more times over the next ten years).

Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983) A novella and five stories.

The Finishing School (1984) New York Times bestseller

A Southern Family (1987) New York Times bestseller

Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991) New York Times bestseller list.

The Good Husband (1994)

Evensong (1999) New York Times bestseller list

Heart (2001) Godwin’s first work of nonfiction

Evenings at Five (2003)

Gail Godwin has lived in Woodstock, NY since 1976 with her longtime companion, the composer Robert Starer, who died in 2001. Together they wrote ten musical works. Among the honors she has received in addition to her three National Book Award nominations are a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Her archives are in the Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.