Introduction
Greetings and thank you for allowing me to serve as the Secretary/Treasurer of the International Virginia Woolf Society from 2024 through 2027. I was asked to run for election because I happened to mention in an email thread “my boring financial experience” (and probably because I kept asking questions about money). I’ve enjoyed my time as a Member-at-Large of the IVWS and was happy to say yes to the Secretary/Treasurer nomination, even though filling Susan Wegener’s shoes will be a huge task.
My peculiar swerve from literature to finance occurred because I needed a job and answered an ad for a proofreader. Unbeknownst to me, the ad had been placed by a national accounting firm, and the proofreading consisted entirely of financial statements: all numbers, no words. I lasted three months, but after that anyone who looked at my résumé saw finance, not literature, so that’s where I stayed. An unfinished dissertation on the style of Virginia Woolf’s criticism followed me around for decades as I moved from accounting to securities brokerage to investment banking and finally to nonprofit development, mostly for the arts.
I see financial reporting as requiring much more than accuracy with numbers. Numbers tell a story, and my goal is to translate that story from numbers to words for the IVWS officers, members-at-large, and membership. I’ll be looking for historical patterns and anomalies to help me build a financial profile of the IVWS. I hope that I’ll be able to share my curiosity and excitement about financial matters with the leadership team and with other IVWS members.
I have three projects that I’d like to pursue as Secretary/Treasurer. The first is to define the job of Secretary and consider whether combining those responsibilities with those of the Treasurer still makes sense. The second is to look at how often we are asking our members to contribute and whether we can manage the timing of these solicitations to prevent donor fatigue. I would also love to introduce a low-key planned giving program to the IVWS so that members have the opportunity to leave a legacy.
And remember that unfinished dissertation that followed me around for decades? I’m now at a place in life where I can finish it, learning the things that writing a dissertation teaches as well as articulating my ideas about Woolf. Like many of us, I came to Woolf through her novels. I came to love her work, however, through her essays. When I first read them, in the Leonard Woolf edition, I wondered why they weren’t considered criticism—why criticism couldn’t be written in such an accessible and engaging way. (This was in the ‘80s, I should add. Derrida ruled, at least at my university.)
My dissertation argues that Woolf uses a feminine style to achieve the feminist end of disrupting and questioning the hegemonic masculine norm. I would call it interdisciplinary since it draws from the fields of linguistics and rhetoric, not just literary criticism, but I have come to believe that the idea of so narrowly defined disciplines is no longer a very useful one. In any event, I’m excited to delve into unknown territories and report back on what I find there. I am particularly excited to make the argument that Woolf’s criticism is relevant to today’s writing by marginalized groups and to public-facing scholarship. In other words, criticism can, and sometimes should, be written as Woolf wrote it.
You have probably detected, as I just have, a similarity between what I love about financial reporting and what I love about writing literary criticism: the sense of exploration and discovery. Thank you again for the opportunity to engage in what I love on behalf of the IVWS.
IVWS 