THE EDDICE B. BARBER VISITING WRITER RESIDENCY

Fiction writer
Judith Guest

Tuesday-Friday, March 28-31, 2006

Writing Workshop
Tuesday-Friday, 9:00 P.M.—CSU Room 202
Talk on craft
Tuesday, 3:00 P.M.—CSU Ostrander Auditorium
Reading
Thursday, 7:30 P.M.—CSU Ostrander Auditorium

JUDITH GUEST’S first novel, Ordinary People, was published in 1976. It spent five months on the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a feature film, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1980. The novel has been published in seventeen countries. Her second novel, Second Heaven, was published in 1982, and her third book, Killing Time in St. Cloud, a mystery co-written with Rebecca Hill, was published in 1988. Guest has also written several screenplays over the years, among them “Rachel River,” an adaptation of three stories by Carol Bly which was filmed in Minnesota. Meg Wolitzer of the New York Times described a more recent novel, Errands, as “beautifully told.... I will always admire writers like Judith Guest, who dare to illuminate the small moment.” And in reviewing Judith Guest’s most recent book, a mystery titled The Tarnished Eye, Dean Koontz called her work “wonderful, written in spare prose that achieves a swift pace and a compelling elegance of tone and mood. The characters are so real that their insistence on hope, in the face of inexplicable evil, suggests how all of us might best cope in these perilous times.”

This year's Good Thunder Reading Series is funded by the Minnesota State University Department of English, the MSU College of Arts and Humanities, the MSU Office of Institutional Diversity, MSU Library Services, the Eddice B. Barber Visiting Writer Endowment, the Robert C. Wright Endowment, and individual donors. This activity is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council from funds appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature. This activity is also made possible in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.