Author, meet your gargoyle
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She is outside all the time, and on these gray days, you have to fret a little. For it has been bitter cold and always ready to rain.
Still, you can't worry too much about her; she is in good company, and people like to visit.
On Monday, just before 3, she got a visit from herself: Joyce Carol Oates dressed in a purple plaid coat met Joyce Carol Oates cast in concrete. The author met her gargoyle, which overlooks the grounds of the Redmond Regional Library.
"Well," the author said, peering up from under the brim of her hat. "It does look like me."
Not exactly. The rooftop gargoyle's hair is pulled back, her eyes set eternally downward, as she leans upon a book set upon a spout.
The author's hair is down, dark and kinky and runs down her shoulders like rain. Her large eyes are constantly moving, taking in everything to feed what she calls her "fascination with the human personality." To imagine them frozen is impossible.
But the gargoyle's face is definitely Oates' - serene, small and delicate, a Victorian visage for the modern world.
And it is clear, watching Oates watch herself, that this is a woman who doesn't get out much.
She has become one of the country's best-known writers for capturing what we try to keep from the light and the rain: Transgressions, dark thoughts. Secrets.
"I don't know how to see myself," she said, peering up at her stone face. "When I first heard, I was really surprised and pleased. It's a great honor ... unusual."
At the same time, it seems natural that an author many consider dark and gothic to be immortalized this way.
The gargoyle is one of four made by Seattle sculptor David Jacobson. Oates is in good company: Saul Bellow looms large. Nearby is Toni Morrison, a colleague of hers at Princeton University, where Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. Raymond Carver is around the corner.
For all her skill with words, though (she won the National Book Award for her novel, "Them"), Oates couldn't find any to describe how it feels to be cast in concrete.
"I'm speechless," Oates said.
This is odd, since Oates' book "Black Water" masterfully describes a woman sinking to her death in a swamp; and one of her poems details people having their blood sucked by leeches.
Oates likes that gargoyles are thought to chase bad spirits away. She likes that gargoyles were placed on cathedrals by stonemasons - the everyman's mark on the pillars of power. Oates believes she speaks for the everyman, the common human caught in not-so-common circumstances.
And sometimes, she has them herself.
In January, her novel, "We Were the Mulvaneys" made Oprah's list.
"It's strange looking at your face and head adorning the corner of a building," she told the crowd. "What does one say?"
She began her speech. And without knowing it, she finally answered my question about how it feels to be set in stone and raised on a roof.
Out there. Forever.
"There are sides of us," Oates said, "that are never exposed to daylight."
Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-4646-2334, or at nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.