Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting 'The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’

The SpokenWeb Podcast

Today, we are welcoming you to Season 3 by reintroducing and replaying an episode that exemplifies what our podcast is all about. In January 2020, we released the episode “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” created by researcher and producer Myra Bloom. To kick off this season, Hannah and Myra sat down for a new introductory conversation that puts Myra’s past episode in the context of the SpokenWeb project’s values and Myra’s forthcoming podcast series. Then, we invite you to listen to the voice of Elizabeth Smart again, or for the first time, and consider what caring for and sharing the sounds of literary archives means to you.

Over the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which details an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover, is celebrated for its lyricism, passionate intensity, and its basis in Elizabeth’s real-life relationship with the poet George Barker. After publishing By Grand Central Station, Smart lapsed into a thirty-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single-parented four children. In this poetic reflection, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first-person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station and the obstacles that prevented Elizabeth from recreating its brilliance.

Featured in this episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer. This episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Producer Bio:

Myra Bloom is Assistant Professor of Canadian literature at York University-Glendon campus. She is currently writing a book called Evasive Maneuvers about Canadian women’s confessional writing, including Elizabeth Smart, and is preparing a SSHRC-funded podcast on the same topic.

Guest Bios

Kim Echlin is a novelist. Her novel, The Disappeared, was short-listed for the Giller Prize. She has written a biography of Elizabeth Smart titled Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity in which she discussed the work and life of Elizabeth Smart in the context of writing, motherhood, and earning a living. Her new novel will appear next year.

Maya Gallus is an award winning documentary filmmaker whose work screens at numerous international film festivals. Most recently, The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution, was the opening night film at the 2017 Hot Docs Film Festival and the 2018 Berlinale Culinary Cinema programme. She is also recognized for her critically acclaimed literary biographies, The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche and Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels.

Sina Queyras is a Canadian writer, editor, and creative writing professor at Concordia University. They have published seven collections of poetry, a novel and an essay collection. Their third collection of poetry, Lemon Hound, received the Pat Lowther Award and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and their fourth, Expressway, was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Award for poetry. They are currently researching Elizabeth Smart for an academic project.

Rosemary Sullivan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and the author of By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life. She has published fourteen books in the multiple genres of biography, memoir, poetry, travelogue, and short fiction. Her biography Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won numerous prizes including the Governor General’s Non-Fiction Award. Her latest book, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, published in 23 countries, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the BC National Non-Fiction Award, the RBC Charles Taylor prize, the Plutarch Biographers International Award and was a finalist for American PEN /Bograd Weld Prize and the U.S. National Books Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Special thanks to Vineeta Patel for transcription help. Donna Downey at the MUN archives. The Glendon Media Lab. Aisha Jamal, Ali Weinstein, Heather White, Lauren Neefe, Sarah O’Brien, Lynn Bloom, Leonard Bloom, Lana Swartz for feedback.

Credits:

Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.

MUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.

All the music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.

Clips Featured in Introduction:

The voices of Michael O’Driscoll, Annie Murray, and Jason Camlot from Stories of SpokenWeb

A clip of Mavis Gallant from Mavis Gallant Reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU

The voices of Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy from Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU

A clip of Muriel Rukeyser and the voice of Katherine McLeod from ShortCuts minisode You Are Here

Music in the introduction is Lick Stick by Nursery from Blue Dot Sessions.

Tape noise sound effects from FreeSound.org.