By Riley Harker
Novelist Rivka Galchen visited Susquehanna University on Tuesday, Sept. 13 to do a Q&A and a public reading in Isaacs Auditorium.
Each year, as part of the Writer’s Institute’s Seavey Writers Series, internationally recognized writers visit Susquehanna University for public readings. Galchen was the first writer to visit this year.
At the reading, in addition to talking about her process and how she became a successful writer, Galchen read from two short stories she had written, one of which was unfinished. She later asked the audience, which was widely filled with Creative Writing and English majors, for suggestions on how she should finish her short story.
“I think it’s kind of an invaluable experience because the creative writing world, after college once you’re looking to get published, is such this scary mystified world. You have to break into the community and into the publishing world and having writers come and demystify and explain in plain terms what they’ve done and their process and how they have navigated that world is really helpful because it makes it less scary,” Creative Writing major, Brenna Fyfe said of the experience.
Galchen was a recipient of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She has written for Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times and the London Review of Books in addition to having written two notable novels among other works.
Her most recent novel, “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” is based on the true history of the witch trial of astronomer Johannes Kepler’s mother. Signed copies of the novel were available for purchase after the talk.
One piece of advice Galchen gave to her audience of aspiring writers on the topic of rejections was; “Building up the muscle to not experience and to not have a special emotional relationship with each rejection because they’re inevitable. Just think of it as a separate physical task separate from your writing.”
