Lucy Ferriss - Learning While Female in Kabul

With Rilla Askew and Mary Kay Zuravleff at the Authors Guild Gala

Read Past Newsletters

"Ferriss strikes the perfect balance between the global and the personal." -- Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

Selected Works

Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"

"Lucy Ferriss brings her signature honesty, clarity, and grace to bear on Christina Stead's famously challenging and rewarding novel about the frightening misuses of paternal power. I happily followed her into such literary byways as what to do with "impossible" characters (in books and in life), the virtues and pitfalls of excess in fiction, and how writing can sometimes save our souls. Through it all, Ferriss reckons with her own late father and his influence on her emerging artist's vision. This is a beautiful blend of memoir and deep reading."—Pamela Erens

Essays

Meditations for a New Century

"Lucy Ferriss's modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist's art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar." --Sudip Bose, American Scholar

Fiction

The Misconceiver

The Misconceiver is a startling novel in ways that highlight how unsurprising most pro-choice novels are. Ferriss isn't interested in merely confirming our liberal ideals; she makes us work for them. . . . The novel offers a challenging exploration of one woman's struggle to work through the profound moral dilemmas of her life. -- Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Foreign Climes

"The geographic breadth of Foreign Climes is only the beginning of its power. What makes the collection stunning is Ferriss's ability to go deep inside her characters, to the hidden places where we are foreign to those closest to us and even to ourselves, inviting profound reckoning." -- Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

A Sister to Honor

"As ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." -- Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

The Lost Daughter

"From its harrowing prologue to its final sentences, I was emotionally engaged with this fine novel. Ferriss is a masterful storyteller." —Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True

Memoir

Unveiling the Prophet

"Ferriss’s exploration of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball is a must read. . . . This is one of the best books of the year."

-- Riverfront Times

Learning While Female in Kabul

January 25, 2024

Dear friends,

I have been AWOL from this newsletter, and I apologize. I could say I took a break from writing, but that wouldn't be quite accurate. Rather, my life has been swept in an unexpected direction, and I've been on an exhilarating, challenging journey. I'm still on it, only I'm getting a chance to catch my breath and return—to friends, to books, to the world of the imagination.

A little over a year ago, as most of you know, a disaster arrived for hundreds of thousands of women as the Afghan Taliban barred the gates of universities to female students and banned women from almost all occupations. Shortly thereafter, I received an email from a colleague at Trinity College, asking if we didn't think we ought to do something about the situation. Of course we should, I thought. For once, professors were the doctors in the room, uniquely qualified to answer the call for help.

But do what? As a small group of us met last spring, it became clear that the best option was for us somehow to Zoom into the country, into the Afghan homes where young women were suddenly isolated, and bring university education to them. Luckily, through some volunteering, I'd gotten to know an Afghan refugee who had been working with women's education before he fled Afghanistan, and who was able to recruit students from all the major provinces. Also luckily, I happened to be a member of the Authors Guild, where our little group—titled AFSO, for Afghan Female Student Outreach—could set up a website. And luckily, I'd been doing a little volunteer ESL instruction, so I could research online platforms and find what we needed for students whose English was not ready for university courses. Over the summer, plunging in where we felt there was an emergency, we offered eight pilot seminars for 120 students.

The response was overwhelming. Not only were the students unbelievably grateful; they were also hungry for much more. Somehow or other, since then, we've expanded to an international collective of 53 professors offering 22 courses this spring across the liberal arts & sciences. We've screened well over 600 applications. With the help of a one-year individual gift, we've been able to hire an executive director. And somehow or other, I seem to be the president of this operation.

It's been gratifying beyond words to work with these brilliant, indomitable women who thought the world had forgotten them. But a girl can't do everything. I had to take a pause on revising my novel. I was able to read Stephen Greenblatt's fabulous Swerve, followed by Will in the World, and I enjoyed Rebecca Makkai's mystery, I Have Some Questions for You; Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch; and Homeira Qaderi's Dancing in the Mosque, to name a few. (Homeira is now on the Board of AFSO. She's terrific.) But my own writing has been limited to an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the enormous hurdles facing Afghan women and those who try to educate them. (You can download it from my Newsletter page.) Now that I'm able to devote at least a couple of days a week to fiction again, I think it may have been a useful absence; ideas seems to be coming to me brighter and fresher than they did before.

I hope your year is off to a good start, especially since it will be such a challenging year for all of us. If anyone wants to learn more about AFSO, or to donate to this richly deserving cause, please visit us at http://www.afsousa.org.

Warm best,

Lucy