Literary lights ponder before dinner at the Folger; media types don aprons for a cause.
By Donna Shor
REVELATION = INSPIRATION
At the 21st annual PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award Gala, humorist Calvin Trillin announced that he lacked credentials to produce a trendy public confessional. “I had a happy childhood,” he said from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Elizabethan Stage.
“But please don’t let that get back to New York!”
Twelve distinguished writers read their three-minute takes on the official topic, “Revelation.” Several referenced the Biblical book of Revelation, with Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks wittily extracting, “Write what you see” from the musings of John of Patmos. National Book Award winner and Bethesda resident Alice McDermott captured a funny and fruitless dialogue with her mother on the Virgin Mary’s place in that controversial scriptural work.