Author Tobias Wolff lectures at CSUMB Nov. 1

Master storyteller, award-winning author and Stanford University professor Tobias Wolff will lecture at California State University, Monterey Bay’s World Theater on Nov. 1 as part of the President’s Speaker Series.

The talk will start at 7 p.m., followed by a question-and-answer session. No tickets are required for this free event, but reservations are strongly recommended and can be made online at csumb.edu/speakers or by calling the World Theater box office at 582-4580.

Wolff chronicled his early life in two memoirs. “This Boy’s Life” (1989) deals with his adolescence in Seattle and Newhalem, a remote company town in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State. The memoir describes the nomadic and uncertain life he and his mother experienced after the divorce of his parents and then his mother's subsequent marriage to an abusive husband and stepfather. “In Pharaoh’s Army” (1994) he wrote about his year in Vietnam as a member of the Special Forces.

After his Army service, he attended Oxford University. A Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford followed, then years of teaching at Syracuse University. In 1997, he returned to Stanford, where he teaches English and creative writing.

He has also written the novels “The Barracks Thief” and “Old School,” and the short story collections “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” “Back in the World” and “The Night in Question.”

His most recent collection of short stories, “Our Story Begins,” won The Story Prize for 2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award – both for excellence in short story writing – the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other magazines and literary journals.

Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, Wolff's prose is characterized by an exploration of personal/biographical and existential terrain. As Wyatt Mason wrote in the London Review of Books, "Typically, his protagonists face an acute moral dilemma, unable to reconcile what they know to be true with what they feel to be true. Duplicity is their great failing, and Wolff's main theme."

To reserve a seat, click here.

The World Theater is located on Sixth Avenue on the CSU Monterey Bay campus. Driving directions and a campus map are available here.

There is a need in us for exactly what literature can give, which is a sense of who we are, beyond what data can tell us, beyond what simple information can tell us; a sense of the workings of what we used to call the soul.

—Tobias Wolff in an interview with Stanford Today