- There is a new page on A celebration, this is. The new page is an index of known works by Sylvia Plath. Listed are all poems and prose (non-fiction and fiction) that I could find. Plus, there are a couple of poems referred to in sources but otherwise unknown. The page is located in the bibliographies section and I hope that you find it useful. If you know of a work not listed, please contact me via email.
- The first volume of Plath Profiles was published on Sunday 10 August, 2008.* It features really wonderful essays, poems, reviews, and artwork from a widely international group of scholars. Most of the essays were presented at the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Oxford in October 2007 (and/or at Smith College in April 2008), but some are original, too. One step forward...
- Plath Profiles deeply apologizes for any inconvenience, however, it was necessary to make some editorial changes to Barbara Mossberg's Introduction to Elizabeth Gray's Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. Please re-save or re-print this if you want the most up-to-date version, which was uploaded this morning (16 August 2008) at 10:00, eastern US time. We do not seek to make a habit of this.
- Plath Profiles is currently accepting papers, poems, etc. for its second volume. If you are a high school or college student, writer, scholar, artist, or general fan of Sylvia Plath's, please consider submitting your work to Plath Profiles. Submission guidelines and deadlines and contacts and other information are all available through the link in the preceding paragraph.
- Susan Basalla May interviewed novelist Joanne Rendell in the 12 August 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Keep your eyes peeled in 2009 for Rendell's second novel which "explores the high/low-culture debate through a standoff between two female protagonists: one a Sylvia Plath scholar, the other a scholar of popular fiction." It sounds like a good read.
- There is going to be a movie made from Jennifer O'Kieffe's screenplay "Sex and Sylvia Plath." The movie is about "a death-obsessed 16-year-old who loses her virginity to a teenager, only to discover that her mother is also having an affair with him." The screenplay won the 52nd annual Samuel Goldwyn writing award in 2007 and has been called one of the "hottest unproduced screenplays." Two steps back?
Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...