Pulitzer winner to talk at convocation ‘Gilead’ author Robinson, Collins among Bangor seminary speakers

BANGOR – An Iowa writer who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction will be the keynote speaker at Bangor Theological Seminary’s 101st annual convocation next week.

Marilynne Robinson, author of “Gilead,” will deliver the Samuel Harris Lecture on Life and Literature at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23, at the Hammond Street Congregational Church in Bangor.

She will sign copies of her book, released this month in paperback, after the lecture.

Other speakers at the three-day seminar include U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine; the Rev. Wilson Yates, founder of the journal Arts in Religion and Theological Studies; and Tony Campolo, a retired sociology professor.

Collins is to open the convocation at 10:30 a.m. Monday, Jan. 23.

She will talk about the role of faith in society and how religious groups responded to Hurricane Katrina.

Registration for the convocation will begin at 9 a.m.

Robinson’s novel “Gilead” is set in southern Iowa, not the biblical city east of the Jordan River. The novel is the story of an elderly preacher who, fearing his imminent death, sets down his “begats” to his young son.

The Rev. William Imes, president of the seminary, said this week that he didn’t think a novelist had spoken at convocation for years.

“I really liked it,” Imes said of “Gilead.”

“First of all, I’m from Iowa, it’s set in Iowa. It’s about an old congregational minister. I’m not 76, but I’m an older congregational minister,” said Imes, 62. “It takes religion very, very seriously,” he said, “and, if I pressed her, I bet she’d say she’s a pretty pure Calvinist, but [the book is] also very clear about the need to press faith into action. … I’d sure say this novel really is an evangelism tool.”

A fourth-generation Idahoan, Robinson, 62, grew up in Sandpoint and other towns in northern Idaho and Washington.

She graduated from Coeur d’Alene High School in 1962. She studied religion and writing at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and earned her doctorate from the University of Washington in 1977. She has taught at the University of Iowa’s acclaimed Writers’ Workshop since 1989.

“Growing up in Idaho made me very aware of the richness of the experience of the physical world … the sense of presence in landscape,” Robinson told the Idaho Statesman in an e-mail interview earlier this year.

“I suppose nothing has been more important to me than that. … There was plenty of time to myself to read old books and write bad poetry. And, always the plangent woods and the haunting lakes. It was all a great good fortune for me.”

Reared a Presbyterian, Robinson “slid into Congregationalism,” she said in an interview last year, because its logic and long silences suited her. She has served for six years as a deacon in her church in Iowa City and sometimes preaches on Sundays.

“They ordained their first woman in 1853,” she said. “They ordained their first black clergyman at the end of the 18th century. They ordained gay clergy in the 1970s … so they’re always in some degree of friction with the larger culture in a way that only recommends them to me.”

The seminary asked Robinson to speak at convocation about 10 months ago, after “Gilead” began garnering good reviews but before the book began amassing prizes. Seminary officials were introduced to the writer through one of her former students.

Erica Bleeg, assistant to the director of the seminary’s Portland campus, earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2004 from the University of Iowa. She took three courses on non-fiction writing from Robinson and became friends with the novelist’s son James.

“After convocation last year, I thought that she would be a wonderful match,” Bleeg said Thursday. “She’s on sabbatical now and has many upcoming lectures. I’ve been told that she doesn’t have a standard speech, but writes each one fresh for a particular audience.”

For information on convocation, visit the seminary’s Web site at www.bts.edu.