What We're Reading: Kim Todd

She's written one book about those cheerful marauders, house sparrows, and another about a female naturalist who, in 1699, voyaged from Amsterdam to South America to study insect metamorphosis. Kim Todd joins the Creative Writing Program this fall as a third creative nonfiction writer, alongside Regents Professors Patricia Hampl and Madelon Sprengnether. What author has she been loving lately?



Kim Todd, our new assistant professor of Creative Writing, grew up in the West--so she's already missing mountains. Luckily she has a strong imagination: In her three books, she's ranged from Amsterdam to South America (telling the story of a 17th-century naturalist in Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis), from China to the Arctic (following that vagabond Sparrow), from Europe to America (tracing invasives in Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America). Todd has an MFA in creative nonfiction and an MS in environmental studies, both from the University of Montana, and a BA in English from Yale. (More Q & A with Todd here.)

What are you reading, Professor Todd?
Earlier this summer, I read Book of Ages, a biography of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane, by Jill Lepore. It is a case study of Virginia Woolf's imagined Judith Shakespeare, a bright woman deprived of opportunities given to her brother. Though Jane Franklin's life was hard (no education, a husband drowning in debt, a son who was dangerously insane), there is something cheerful in her ability to express herself with wit and good humor in the scraps of writing Lepore includes. "I want to know a Thousand little Perticulars about your self," she tells her niece. "Dont let it mortifie you that such a Scraw came from your sister," she instructs Benjamin. Her personality--and the whole Revolutionary world she inhabited--comes through.
Almost even more than Book of Ages, I liked Lepore's New Yorker essay about the process of writing it: "The Prodigal Daughter, Writing, History, Mourning." It focuses on Lepore's mother, who urged Jane Franklin on her daughter. Lepore resisted the idea for years, in part because Jane Franklin had left so little material: "I thought she was joking. It would be like painting a phantom." The impossibility of the project, and her fear of engaging too much with her heroine--a woman who didn't live up to her potential--make a compelling study of how a writer claims or is claimed by her subject matter.