PAMLA Polygloss Celebration I: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Lydia Davis Story (Roundtable / In-Person)

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Special Session
Special Event / American

Craig Svonkin (PAMLA and MSU Denver)
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In "PAMLA Polygloss Celebration I: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Lydia Davis Story," reader/writers will offer very brief creative or scholarly responses to Lydia Davis's 1976 two-sentence story, "The Thirteenth Woman," which Davis described as her "first seminal story.” These varied commentators/explicators/creative interpreters will share their work with each other ahead of time, so as to allow all to prepare loving and respectful responses to their fellow participants. Audience members will likewise be able to respond to the story, bringing the number of glosses to thirteen.

The Polygloss innovators believe they just may have created a new and important kind of literary party game; they are hopeful that the event will encourage others to emulate and adapt the form and diffuse its practice until celebrations of literary adaptation and interpretation spread across the world, practices that are interactive, playful, joy-filled, and communal (yet individualistic) interpretive celebrations.

In "PAMLA Polygloss Celebration I: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Lydia Davis Story," reader/writers will offer very brief creative or scholarly responses to Lydia Davis's 1976 two-sentence story, "The Thirteenth Woman," which Davis described as her "first seminal story.” These varied commentators/explicators/creative interpreters will share their work with each other ahead of time, so as to allow all to prepare loving and respectful responses to their fellow participants. Audience members will likewise be able to respond to the story, bringing the number of glosses to thirteen.

The PAMLA Polygloss Celebration designers at first thought they might call this new interpretive practice, which will both begin and conclude with a loving reading of the Davis short story, such neologistic titles as: Glossa Extraordinaria, Glosspree, Glosstravaganza, Glossogesis, or Glossorama. But they landed on Polygloss, hopeful that the name would trip off many professors' and students' tongues. The Polygloss innovators believe they just may have created a new and important kind of literary party game; they are hopeful that the event will encourage others to emulate and adapt the form and diffuse its practice until celebrations of literary adaptation and interpretation spread across the world, practices that are interactive, playful, joy-filled, and communal (yet individualistic) interpretive celebrations.

Please submit a rough version of your interpretation or response to Lydia Davis's 1976 story, "The Thirteenth Woman." Submissions that are experimental, joyful, thoughtful, creative, or otherwise unusual are welcome. But those accepted to participate will only have five to seven minutes to present their work.

The Thirteenth Woman
By Lydia Davis

In a town of twelve women there was a thirteenth. No one admitted she lived there, no mail came for her, no one spoke of her, no one asked after her, no one sold bread to her, no one bought anything from her, no one returned her glance, no one knocked on her door, the rain did not fall on her, the sun never shone on her, the day never dawned for her, the night never fell for her; for her the weeks did not pass, the years did not roll by; her house was unencumbered, her garden unattended, her path not trod upon, her bed not slept in, her food not eaten, her clothes not worn; and in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her.