Illuminating Fiction

Julia Glass: A Palette of Words

20 Julia Glass A Palette of Words Julia Glass, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction, invited the characters in Three Junes to set up a home inside of her head. Three Junes is a lush and evocative novel told through the eyes of a grieving Scottish widower, a single pregnant woman, and a young gay man. It unfurls over the course of three Junes (1989, 1995, and 1999) and spans two continents. When she accepted the National Book Award for Fiction, Glass dedicated her speech to “late bloomers”; her first short story was published when she was thirty-seven, her first novel nearly a decade later. Glass has always been a lover of books, and from fifth grade through high school she worked at the public library in her hometown. As an undergraduate at Yale University, she studied art and subsequently spent a year painting and drawing in Paris on a travel fellowship. A few years later, when she found herself drawn toward writing fiction, she felt guilty about devoting her time and energy to an art form other than the one she had studied. During the next ten years she faced many personal traumas, including the end of a marriage , breast cancer and the suicide of her sister. In 1993, Glass was awarded a Nelson Algren Fiction Award for “My Sister’s Scar.” In 1999, her novella Collies won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. (Collies was the genesis, and ultimately the first part, of Three Junes.) In 2000 she was awarded both a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Fiction and a Nelson Algren Fiction Award for “The World We’ve Made.” In 2001, she won the Ames Memorial Essay Award for her essay “My Sister, My Surgeon, Myself.” In May 2002 Three Junes was a selection of the ABC/Good Morning America Read This! Book Club. Three Junes was also a May/June 2002 selection of Book Sense 76. In 2004 Glass was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship as well as a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which enabled her to finish her second novel, The Whole World Over, which was published by Pantheon Books in May 2006. Julia Glass’s stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Bellingham Review and the ChicagoTribune Literary Awards supplement. Her Julia Glass 21 essays and feature articles have appeared in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Gourmet, Redbook, More, Glamour, Parenting, Literal Latte, and in the anthology Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes From the Midlife Underground by Twenty-five Women Over Forty, edited by Kim Barnes and Claire Davis (Doubleday, 2006). Her paintings have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, and various art galleries. She has also designed and hooked rugs, several of which appear in the book Punch Needle Rug Hooking by Amy Oxford (Schiffer, 2002). In the fall of 2003 I met with her over coffee atTartine, a café in Greenwich Village. The frames of her eyeglasses were spring green and emphasized her ginger-colored hair. Sherry Ellis: In the New York Times, Katherine Wolff stated that Three Junes contains “fitting locales for a novel that illustrates emotional isolation .” What do you believe is the importance of the locations you selected for Three Junes? Julia Glass: People ask me about the locations, and certainly on a simple level I chose locations that I know to some extent. At the point I wrote the novel, I’d only been to Greece once, for two weeks, in 1979. I hadn’t spent too much time in Scotland either; my mother had done genealogical research and found cousins of hers, and I was sent to visit them when I was seventeen. Having finished the book though, and looking back on it, I see that there is a certain amount of symbolic resonance to some of the settings. I think of Greece, for example. What country is more steeply rooted in the past than Greece? And Paul MacLeod is of course reviewing his past. There are temples everywhere and goddesses preserved in alabaster, and there Paul MacLeod is, haunted by the memory of his wife whom he adored and had put on a pedestal. And Scotland is a place that I very much associate with family, and I don’t just mean my family. Scotland seems like a very obvious choice symbolically, to set a family drama, the history...