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WSU event provides setting for award-winning book

By Amy Geiszler-Jones

A French author has used a one-month stay in Wichita during which she participated in a WSU conference on women writers as inspiration for an award-winning book.

Paule Constant’s ninth and latest book, “Confidence pour confidence,” (Secret for Secret) won France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, earlier this month.

The fact that Constant used Wichita and the now-defunct WSU International Conference on Foreign Literature as the novel’s setting created quite a stir among the French faculty at WSU when the award was announced.

Ginette Adamson, professor of French, who is writing a book about Constant and personally knows the writer, says she received numerous e-mails and faxes from colleagues in the United States and France after the Nov. 9 announcement.

“In France, being a literary country, these kinds of things are watched with the enthusiasm we would reserve for the NBA playoffs,” says Michael Vincent, professor of French.

Using literary license, Constant has fictionalized the location of the Kansas town, calling it Middleway, and the name and focus of the conference to the Feminists Conference of the Witches of Middleway hosted by Middleway University. The WSU conference, held for 12 years and discontinued in 1995, had centered on women Francophone and Latin American writers.

Constant’s novel focuses on a day during the conference when four women in their 40s — two American academics, a French writer, and a Norwegian actress — “tell the truth about their failures in their private lives, as opposed to the successes of their professional lives,” Adamson says. She was among a select group to get an advance copy of “Secret for Secret” from its French publisher earlier this year. The book has not yet been translated to English.

“I guess the reason I became interested in her work to begin with is the way she can manipulate personal experiences and turn them into something completely imaginary,” says Adamson who started following Constant’s work in 1987. “She has a great talent for that.”

Constant, who teaches at the University of Aix-Marseille III, participated in the WSU conference in 1988. She returned in 1989 to again participate in the conference and teach the three-part seminar “Feminine Literature and Civilization: Women Mythologies,” which was about the mythical and modern woman in works by women writers.

Inside WSU is published by the Office of University Communications for Wichita State University faculty and staff on Fridays - with an exclusive online version every other Friday - during the fall and spring semesters. Items to be considered for publication should be sent to campus box 62 or amy.geiszler-jones@wichita.edu 10 days before publication.

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Amy Geiszler-Jones

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