| From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters Author's Page: Sylvia Hart Wright Joins the Web Publishing Revolution By Ryan Ramon Mar 27, 2004
She is a beautiful, olive skinned, silver haired, large-eyed, small-boned, graceful, relaxed yet intense woman, no longer young but not old, either. She and her husband, activist Charles Gray, live in an airy, modest, Northwest bungalow down by the Willamette River. She sparks with an elemental flame. She is a person who lives and writes from her strong intellect and equally strong heart. Nature, spirit and the built environment are always part of her narrative. "Breaking Free: A Novel of the Sixties," her first major work of fiction, is not a memoir but it reads like it could be since Wright has the gift of synthesizing personal experience into a collective composite. It is a kind of historical mirror of the volatile era, the sixties, when cultural and political changes swept through lives like a flood tide. Her characters live on the edge of low tide. (Maybe her next novel will reflect what the flood left and where it carried her characters.) Now she has ventured where most published writers fear to tread, e-book publishing. After its trial period online at this zine, she has moments of doubts about the format. "You can't get cozy with a computer in the tub or bed." No kidding! (You can print out the pdf. file but it is bulky.) She made the choice to first offer the book online as a commitment to the concept of writers developing a direct relationship with their readers with no middlemen. And she wanted to find a fundraiser for West By Northwest.org so we can benefit fifty percent from sales. So far, we aren't chuckling all the way to the bank but are encouraged by the initial reception. During an exchange of e-mails, here is what we learned about this dynamic writer. A third generation New Yorker who now lives in Oregon, Sylvia Hart Wright has authored several books and numerous other publications. During the Thirties, an uncle of hers published handsome reprints of literary classics. He went on to head the paperback firm, Avon Publications. Sylvia grew up surrounded by the books her Uncle Joe sent her struggling Italian/Jewish family. At sixteen, Sylvia won two scholarships which paid her tuition at Cornell University. There she majored in both English, and Speech and Drama. After graduation she worked in the theater, performing with a Gilbert and Sullivan company off Broadway while working part-time at the New York Public Library. When the lure of greasepaint waned and reality set in, she enrolled in the library school at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree. At the time she thought of librarianship as a portable skill which would provide her with part-time jobs and eating money while she wrote The Great American Novel. She didn't write any such thing. Instead, in 1961 she moved to Berkeley, California, landed a part-time job as newsletter editor with a trade association, and wandered into a center run by an umbrella organization for numerous groups opposed to the Cold War policies of the time. Soon she was volunteering at the peace center, writing its newsletter - as well as the one which paid her bills - while forming fast friendships with activists she met there. In 1963 she traveled east to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the fabled event at which Martin Luther King, Jr. made his "I have a dream" speech. Whites like Sylvia formed just twenty percent of the predominantly black crowd of a quarter million. In 1964, Berkeley started sizzling with the Free Speech Movement which demanded that the University of California allow on-campus organizing for off-campus causes. Paramount among these causes were the Civil Rights movement and - since that year the Republican presidential convention was being held in San Francisco - recruiting students to oppose the nomination of Barry Goldwater across the Bay. That year, Sylvia married Howard Wright, a Midwestern ex-farmboy, then a doctoral candidate at Cal. Both of them participated enthusiastically in the FSM and in actions of the Vietnam Day Committee which followed in its footsteps, sponsoring historic teach-ins, marches and demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam War. Howard, a zoologist, finished his doctorate in 1966 and won a postdoctoral year with the Smithsonian Institution, to be served at their facility in the Panama Canal Zone. By this time Sylvia was pregnant. She accompanied her husband to Panama and on the day before Christmas gave birth to their child. But her marriage was coming apart - her husband wanted out. In July of 1967, she moved back with her son to New York City. Following up on a lead provided by one of her old peace center buddies, she landed a job as librarian with a pre-college program for disadvantaged students. Here she set up and headed a collection which attracted national attention for acknowledging and meeting the needs of the program's skeptical and often alienated students. Meanwhile, she started work on a master's in sociology at New York University. Articles of hers, based on this library experience, eventually appeared in major journals and her master's thesis was published as a monograph, Black Youth, Black Studies and Urban Education (1976.) When this pre-college program shut down in 1971, Sylvia moved on to the City College of New York (CCNY) where she worked first with their social science collection and then, from 1976-1991, headed the library of the School of Architecture and Environmental Studies. While there she authored two guides: "Highlights of Recent American Architecture" (1982) and "Sourcebook of Contemporary North American Architecture: From Postwar to Postmodern" (1989.) Throughout this period she kept faith with her activist past, frequently traveling down to Washington, DC for demonstrations. She also started work on a novel based in part on her experiences during the Sixties. In 1973 she had remarried. Her husband Paul, born and raised in Tennessee, had lived in Paris, spoke French like a native, taught French and was the ultimate Francophile. Unfortunately, as a result of diabetic retinopathy, by 1977 he was legally blind. Six years later her husband died. Shortly after his death, Sylvia and her son jointly had a dramatic experience that suggested that Paul was trying to contact them from beyond the grave. A lamp of his turned itself on and flashed in what seemed to be meaningful ways. Startling indeed to someone steeped in the scientific method and agnosticism! She and her son, when alone or together, continued to sense contacts and she learned that two male friends of Paul's had also sensed his presence on at least one occasion. Scholar that she was, she started delving into the writings of doctors and social scientists about such events. They were, she learned, commonplace, often sensed by healthy, "normal" people. Polling data showed that 25-40% of Americans had sensed such phenomena; among widows the percentage rose to two-thirds. Around the world, educated adherents of a wide range of faith traditions looked on contacts with the spirit world as patently real. In 1991, Sylvia took early retirement from CCNY where she had risen to the rank of full professor and moved to Oregon. There she worked on two projects: studying evidence for spontaneous contacts with the dead that didn't involve mediums, and completing her novel on activism in the Sixties. In 1995, Sylvia's novel - then entitled, Waging Peace on the Avenue - was a finalist in one national competition and a semi-finalist in another. But still she wasn't satisfied with it; she set it aside. She wrote the book and libretto for the children's opera "Webfoot Country" and short stories. Her non-fiction book "When Spirits Come Calling; The Open-Minded Skeptic's Guide to After-Death Contacts" appeared in 2002. In 2004 her Sixties novel (revised and retitled) "Breaking Free" is published by West By Northwest.org Faithful to her activist roots, in recent years Sylvia has traveled to Nicaragua and Kenya to study Third World conditions and to visit with families living at the subsistence level. The first of these trips, she says, was "a life-changing experience." It taught her that "poor people in these countries can be intelligent, gracious, subtle - but the odds are stacked against them. It's all they can do to pay for basic schooling for their kids and a painfully bare bones life style." In 1999, she demonstrated against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Two years later she served as an international observer in Mexico when the unarmed leadership of the Zapatistas caravaned from Chiapas to Mexico City to argue before the Mexican Congress for indigenous rights. Always driven to function at the cutting edge of social change, Sylvia Hart Wright sees no contradiction between her writing projects, old and new. In a time of overwhelming materialism, she sees an aching need for spirituality: recognition that the spiritual side of existence is real, documented, not to be denied. "This may sound flaky," she says, laughing, "but I'm a four-way Aquarian - sun sign and three planets - and Aquarians live in the future. Guess I'm stuck with that." Sylvia Hart Wright may live in the future but her most powerful fiction to date will take you to the past, not as a self-conscious period piece but as a vital record of life honestly lived. © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
