Audrey Niffenegger is a Jane-of-all-trades. Throughout her career, she’s written novels, such as “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and “Her Fearful Symmetry,” illustrated two art books, including “The Three Incestuous Sisters,” taught printmaking at Columbia and helped form the college’s Center for Book and Paper Arts.

On March 30, Niffenegger spoke to Columbia students in a Q-and-A format session as a part of the college’s “Critical Encounters: Fact & Faith” event series. The discussion was hosted by part-time Columbia professor and Illinois State Museum curator Doug Stapleton, who spoke to Niffenegger onstage and invited audience members to ask questions and join the conversation.

Niffenegger spent much of the lecture talking about the various media she’s worked in.

“I never actually decided to be a novelist,” she said. “I tell people it’s my hobby.”

Niffenegger began in printmaking, but she said she always wanted to tell stories in her art. She works in the medium that draws her attention at any given moment.

“It’s a series of accidents—at the moment, I’m headed toward ballet,” Niffenegger said, explaining that she had been approached by London-based companies interested in adapting her art books into narrative ballets.

When asked by an audience member what she thought of the film version of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Niffenegger admitted that she hasn’t seen it.

“The process of having a movie made, if you’re an author—as far as I can tell from my limited experience with just this one thing—[is] what movie people really want is to have you to sign the contract,” she said. “Then they say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and then they go off and they want to do their thing. They don’t want some pesky writer going, ‘Hey, um, let me help you with that.’ They just don’t want to hear it.”

Niffenegger said she detached herself from the project, not wanting to interfere with the filmmakers’ right to make the movie they wanted to make.

“I made a conscious decision to just let go,” she said. “Because I realized that the filmmakers had a right to make their own movie, and me standing there shaking my finger wasn’t going to help them. I thought, ‘They can do whatever they want, and that’s OK.’”

Critical Encounters Faculty Fellow Eric Scholl said he believed Niffenegger was a good fit for the “Fact & Faith” series despite the fact her work doesn’t explicitly deal with faith or belief. He said he was impressed by her ability to create vivid characters and worlds that are simultaneously believable and surreal.

“So it’s not really faith in the way of belief, it’s not really fact,” Scholl said. “It’s more just how our brains process information and how that’s translated into very unusual storytelling.”

Scholl also said that hosting artist lectures such as the Q-and-A benefits both the Columbia community and the artists who participate.

“It’s nice for us, in that we get to see how other people do it, and it becomes sort of a mentorship thing,” he said. “It’s also nice for [the artists] because they’re talking to an audience that understands their process much more than a general audience would. If she’s talking about the process of turning her book into a film, these guys are going to understand.”

Kristen Iannuzzi, a senior TV major, came to see Niffenegger because she was a fan of both the book and film version of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”

“I feel like with artists, more than any [other] type of profession, their goals are about seeing dreams realized,” Iannuzzi said. “And more than any other profession, I think it’s hard to do. It’s really about making it happen and relying on yourself more than anyone else. So being able to physically meet and see and talk with and pick brains with people who have actually done it, and done it in many different ways, is extremely beneficial.”

Despite everything she’s done, Niffenegger never seems to stop working. In addition to her prospective ballet plans, she said she will have an exhibit in September at the Printworks Gallery, 311 W. Superior St., which she hasn’t yet “done a whit of work for.” She said she also began working on her third novel.

“That one is called ‘The Chinchilla Girl in Exile,’” she said. “It’s about a 9-year-old girl who is completely covered with hair. And this is a real medical condition—it’s called hypertrichosis—and basically, I wanted to write about difference, and how people are treated when they’re really different, especially with children.”

Niffenegger will also start teaching at Columbia again next year, although she couldn’t say yet which department she would be in.

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