Writers and Readings and Panels at AWP Denver/1

So, while everyone else typed their notes up at Denver, on the plane from Denver, and directly post Denver, I wrote mine in my head mostly and find I have them these days as a sort of subterranean constant companion--procrastination is my middle name apparently, I could possibly take up a new career selling it by the pound. I'd like to say I was so wrapped in teaching, writing, reviewing, playing with Sophie--not to mention taking her to school, signing up for her next school, also to tennis, piano, ballet--not to mention getting caught up in all the myriad little things we necessarily do to hold the world together sundawn to sundown--but I kinda know about those writers out there who do Everything and do it All the time and generally put me to shame.

The spring semester ended and the summer semester started too soon. I am back to teaching online--two classes through the Writer's Center, one through GW--back to sneaking time in between grading for my own writing, back to the old craving for time to read. Nevertheless, here is some of what I wanted to say, about AWP, which to me was a marvellous experience, and a first, since I've never been able to afford it before, time or money-wise. (This time it was all-expense-paid, thanks to the Grace Paley prize--for which yes I'm very grateful--they flew me out, put me up, wined me, dined me, all of it, very dizz-inducing.)

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It was nice, first of all, to run into Jane Shore at the airport, and then after that Ethelbert Miller, and then later, Nancy Naomi Carlson on the plane, and, since we all shared that ill-fated flight to Denver which was held up by the sneakily-smoking Qatari diplomat who had to choose that particular evening of all the 365 in the year (with all of us trapped in a pressurized cabin thirty thousand feet above sea level, literally rocking above the Rockies) to sass some seriously unsassable flight attendants about lighting bombs on his shoes and thus precipitating a national crisis which held us up from check-in at our hotels for at least 5 hours if not more--a saga I should probably expound on elsewhere!--we definitely had time to catch up.

Books to look for and read: Nancy Naomi Carlson's new book of translations of Rene Char's poems: Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char; Jane Shore's A Yes or No Answer: Poems ; Ethelbert Miller's The 5th Inning.

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The funny thing was, I had carried with me the Dec 2009 issue of The Chronicle to read the interviews with Colum McCann and Ethelbert Miller on the plane, and then we ran into Ethelbert at the airport, which was marvellous. If you've never met him, not only is he a terrific poet and poet's advocate and literary editor and social commentator and activist, he is just the nicest person, with lots of advice for someone with a new book who is still exploring ways to promote it. Ethelbert runs a blog at http://eethelbertmiller1.blogspot.com/

I wanted especially to make a note of his advice to writers at the tail-end of Shonda Buchanan's interview with him: "It's important to keep tradition alive. Try and document as much as possible. This will help to reclaim memory in the future....it's important for all young writers to understand that they have the capability to shape history and not simply be shaped by it. I would remind writers to see themselves as witnesses, and to always speak the truth to the people, as well as truth to power..."


The whole interview is in The Writer's Chronicle, Volume 42, Number 3/Dec 2009.

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And, having run out of playtime, on all things AWP Denver, I'll have to write more later....

Readings and Books

I read a story this cool rainy afternoon at The Writer's Center in Bethesda to a small and intimate group of listeners who braved the dripping rain beside the wonderfully and diversely talented Dan Gutstein, who read a series of variously intense and playful non/fictions from his new book titled Non/Fiction. It's a book to dip into and savor, and it's another I'm adding to my review list for this summer.

The story I read (from Temporary Lives) was The Man on the Veranda, written years ago in the first flush of Garcia Marquez fascination, published in small spiral notebook, also making an Honorable Mention in the Zoetrope Fiction prize (2003 I think). It's the first time I read a story whole, and I was worried about boring my readers to death.

Choosing a story to read at a reading is an interesting exercise--I don't want to keep reading the same story, but it seems like some stories elicit a stronger reaction than others. Balancing the niceties of time constraints with excerpts intending to whet rather than dampen interest in the rest of the work, with being present in the moment and responding to audience reaction while still planning a few things to say, etc. all seems very delicate. Still, The Man... is a story I like, and I learned a few things reading it all the way through aloud like this--one, as one of the audience also advised me later, I don't really need to read every paragraph! to keep a sense of the central narrative alive, and two, each time I rush as I worry about time (in a subterranean attempt to ease the listener) I could actually lose a listener. Lessons to apply to the next reading, I guess.

It was lovely to read with Dan Gutstein though, whom I've shared an office with at GW, and also charmant to run into Mark Wallace, prolific author of poetry and fiction and various other forms, also from (even longer ago) my days of teaching composition and literature at GW. It felt like a GW thing, which was cool, and raised echoes of the last, great reading, in April at GW, with Gina Welch, who read from her very intriguing memoir of living among evangelical Christians in Jerry Falwell country, In the Land of the Believers. (For more on that reading, please see Tess Malone's vibrant blog post in April on the GW English Blog.)

That was a very special reading, for many reasons, not least that I come from as-dedicated and often evangelical Christians in the deep south of India, which seems to bear uncanny resemblance to the deep south here in the US, and read from the one story in Temporary Lives which touches on this (the title story)--not to mention how extraordinary it was reading with Gina, who is amazingly talented and charismatic, and, although it was rather surprising to see the room so packed, it was also nice to end my semester at GW on such a high note. Another book on my list!

For now I'm reading Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise : A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, also a book I discovered on attending a reading at GW--a fascinating memoir of his experiences in Iraq and his re-creation of his father's and other relatives' lives--especially interesting to me because of my (maternal) grandfather's connection with Iraq, a story I am excavating and wanting to write about--after serving in the British Army during World War I he stayed on and lived in Basra and died in Basra, as did my grandmother--another amazing character I want to write about. I'll post a review when I'm done. In addition to catching up to all those posts I wrote in my head for April!

Bree O'Mara

It's been more than a month, I know, and I have so much I've been plotting and planning to write about, but everything is interrupted for this. I can't seem to get over the enormous tragedy of South African Irish writer Bree O' Mara's life being taken, in the recent Libyan plane crash--the one where the lone Dutch boy survived--along, of course, with all else on the plane. I'd not heard of her before, but just the tragedy of the circumstances--an "emerging" writer with a book deal traveling to London to sign said deal--and the enormity of her talent, along with the exuberance of her personality and her life, feels arresting.

What especially intrigues me in her writing is her interest in humor--Home Affairs, her first book, described in The Times as a satirical look at the new South Africa, won a Citizen book prize, voted on by the South African public, and her second book, Nigel Watson, Superhero, which she has described as being about "turning 30, hating your job, and finding your wings,” also pursues comedy. Quoting the Times: "Humorous in tone, it is set in London and follows its nondescript anti-hero as he tries to be “someone else, somewhere else, doing something completely different”."

I've become awfully interested lately in reading humor, because it brings to mind early obsessions with P. G. Wodehouse and Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde in particular, and I'm especially keen on reading "adult" takes on humor (rather than YA) although I'm still wallowing in children's humor these days, as I read to my daughter, who's five now, particularly Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss. Although it is probably gauche to admit it, I absolutely loved Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary--trust me, it beats the movie hollow, if you haven't read the book yet; and although this one felt less compelling (too much sameness), also The Edge of Reason. This spring, by way of his visit to GW and to my Intro to Creative Writing class, I also discovered Howard Jacobson, another writer whose work is deft with humor, whose books I am lining up to read. As also Tom Mallon's--he's the new Director of Creative Writing where I teach and I chanced to hear him read from one of his many novels, Two Moons, a year ago, a book I'm yet to read, but there you go, another for my list. My first novel (not yet published) has humor in it--and I want to return to that lightness which carries depth in other work.

So to me it feels like a double loss, a woman writer, who writes satirically, with humor and wit and intelligence. I want to read Home Affairs and Nigel Watson, Superhero. I wish there were a more natural, writing-world way I had come to know of these books and their author. I wish Bree O' Mara's work long life and continuity. I wish I could say to Bree, thank you, keep doing what you're doing, you inspire me. All I can say is I am sure when I read her I will learn from her. And I will write again about her books.

The Book of Light, by Lucille Clifton

born in Babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did I see to be except myself?

I made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

from “song at midnight”

Intimate, confessional, personal, the poems in The Book of Light range nevertheless from the secret center of the self to a lived, visceral, intimately-moved encounter with the world. Lucille travels calmly from the self to the world, starting with poems of memory, childhood, love, loss—the hints of early loss in these poems (a mother who will not live long) are offered in glimpse and allusion, as also the hints of a father’s abuse ( a man whose fingers will itch/ to enter me)—and travelling outward through whorls of the external and the iconic —Elvis, Superman—a series of poems addressed to Superman, but markedly personal in their revelation of risk, longing, a wry comprehension of fantasy.

Yet throughout a real sense of the poet’s feeling, as much evident in her sparseness of detail as in her close-focus poems on the horrors of all-too-recent-racism:“move” on Philadelphia’s bombing of a black neighborhood where the families comprised the Africa-inspired group Move in 1985, in which 11 people including children were killed. Or in her poems against war, “january 1991” and “dear Jesse Helms” unflinchingly, about the Gulf war “something awful is happening/something obscene”. Or in her meditation on Columbus Day in “seeker of visions”—“who will believe/ a tribe of ice might live/and we might not?” As also in her love for the earth and her close sense of alignment with animals, the earth, in poems featuring the yeti, crabs, the earth as “a black shambling bear…/a black and living thing/..a favorite child/of the universe.”

The sense of quiet at the heart of these poems. The sense of center. The sense of blackness—a conscious telling of it, a conscious reaching to the telling, as in the powerful poem “fury” of her mother’s poems burning, the sense of wishing to redress, reprieve.

In persona poems ranging through voices from Greek myths—atlas, leda—and the Old Testament—cain, sarah, naomi, and the final series of poems where Lucifer converses with God—she slips out of self, into “other” in a way that seeks to excavate hidden, secret whorls of feeling, that evokes each of these mythic figures in a charged, restless light. Every poem an occasion for questioning, disrupting an old mythology. I was especially drawn to “far memory,” a poem in seven parts, a meditation on a nun’s sense of calling, journey, failing, ending with “gloria mundi”:

so knowing,

what is known?

that we carry our baggage

in cupped hands

when we burst through

the waters of our mother.

that some are born

and some are brought

to the glory of this world.

that it is more difficult than faith

to serve only one calling

one commitment

one devotion

in one life.

The power of her poems oddly enhanced by that remoteness from punctuation, that distance from “standard grammar” – and because lifted from ordinary speech, or from our expectations of written speech, more ethereally projected in a way so the words seem to float in their own space, even as the poems are so rooted and centered.

“lucille, which stands for light”— that centering of light in these poems, in the structure of this book, in its many names –title and sections; working like an anchor for all these poems, which range so closely to self, so closely to world.

Although I've read her work before, and seen and heard her read--a long time ago, at George Mason University--I think I'd read her work mostly in anthologies, so this sustained focus was immensely revealing--I know I'll look for all her work now, read her book by book. Such a tremendous gift.

More poems from Lucille: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/79

In honor of Lucille: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuar/.artsmain/article/9/1338/1617967/People/Poet.Lucille.Clifton.%27Everything.Is.Connected%27

The Writer as Migrant, by Ha Jin

Early in this book of essays, in the Preface actually, Ha Jin states that his “choice of the word “migrant” is meant to be as inclusive as possible—it encompasses all kinds of people who move, or are forced to move, from one country to another, such as exiles, emigrants, immigrants, and refugees,” and reveals his intent to “place the writer in the context of human migrations” in order to “investigate some aspects of the “migrant writer’s” life and work.”

Later: “My observations are merely that—my observations. Every individual has his particular circumstances, and every writer has his own way of surviving and practicing his art.”

Initially presented as talks for the Rice University Campbell Lecture Series in 2006--see a write-up here --these essays focus essentially on questions of a migrant writer’s sense of identity, how closely tied or not it is to his/her originating country, whether the writer carries a sense of spokesmanship/representation, what part language plays in this sense of identity and the persona the writer adopts—both the mother tongue and the language “of betrayal” the writer chooses to use in the land he/she has migrated to-- what “homeland” comes to mean to the migrant writer, and whether the experience of “homeland” can remain static. Each essay returns overwhelmingly to the conclusion that seems to be at the heart of Ha Jin’s questioning, that ultimately it is only the writer’s ability to transmute his politics and struggle into art that ensures his survival: “His work will be of little value if not realized as art.”

I started reading these essays because, being someone who stepped outside her home country, chose to travel, and eventually found herself continuing to live and write in the United States—yes, a longer subject I will explore one day—I’ve become awfully interested in the experience of other “migrant” writers, and curious, too, about their perceptions and configurations of their experience. I’d recommend this collection to anyone in a similar situation thinking about these things, it’s a thought-provoking set of essays, and offers context, a way to begin or write around some of these questions of identity and intention.

I admire Ha Jin’s work and find his thinking interesting. He is rather extraordinary because he started to write in English only after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989—see Exiled to English; like Nabokov and Conrad, whom he writes about, he chose to write in a language other than his mother tongue. In this month’s Paris Review where he was interviewed by Sarah Fey, he says—in that portion of the interview that The Paris Review allows us to view online: "To be a literary writer does not mean just to write books—you need to look for some space in a language and find your niche in it. That was what intimidated me. Beyond the practical reason of earning a livelihood, there was the desire for a meaningful existence despite the forces that mean to reduce and silence you. In this sense, for me, to write is to suffer, but there is so much meaning in it that I must fight my battles on the page."

Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Lin Yutang, the exiled Chinese writer whose The Importance of LIving I found fascinating when I first read it at 13, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, V. S. Naipaul, Milan Kundera, the German writer W.G. Sebald, James Joyce—these are the writers he considers at length, writers exiled and expatriated, often writing in a foreign language, and yes, it’s interesting, sobering, to consider their peculiar predicaments and longings: Solzhenitsyn wanted desperately to return to Russia, as Lin Yutang to China; Nabokov saw Russian as a dying language and rejected the totalitarianism of the Russia he withdrew from; Conrad wanted to represent the Polish even as he felt the only way to survive as a writer was to write in English.

I found much in these essays that made me think and want to write more about issues of identity, writing intention, and notions of home or homeland. I found the breadth and depth of Ha Jin’s scholarship impressive. I liked especially his open revelations of his own struggle with notions of identity and writing self, his inclusion of his poem “In New York City” after his reading of Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River,” where he first encountered the notion of “the insignificance of an individual to the tribe.”

I found it troubling though that no women migrant writers or characters were considered in any depth. Apart from brief mentions of (male) immigrant characters in Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Sigrid Nunez’ A Feather from the Breath of God, a textually-anonymous quote on homeland from Belkins Cuza Male—attributed to her only in a footnote, as taken from an anthology, Looking for Home; Women Writing About Exile, a mention of Nadine Gordimer’s views on writers as needing to be political, to embody conscience from The Essential Gesture, mentions of Eileen Chang, Pearl S. Buck—women seemed non-existent in this discussion. To be sure, it is a set of private observations, by a male writer—but it is also a set of public observations, by a male writer. To a woman reader, such an omission does not merely feel peculiar, it feels supremely wanting.

Underneath all the tropes of exile, lay, or perhaps I should say, rowed Odysseus. For eternity, rowing into every masculine paradigm of exile and migration, taken apart, picked over, gazed at, eternally eulogized in this gaze. Odd, when his sojourn into the unknown began with an imperialistic quest (remember that wooden horse in Troy?). And where are all the Greek goddesses of exile and migration and departure and arrival? (Okay, maybe they don’t exist, there’s abduction and marriage instead preceding travel (Persephone, Helen)—but must we for all eternity fixate on Homer, on Odysseus?!)

Must men write only about men? Do male writers believe, accept, and deliberately perpetuate the notion that literature is quintessentially male, and one’s scholarship and diligence and seriousness is inevitably to be proved only by a scholarly focus on past male writers—a practice which tends to further idolize and exalt said past male writers? Sometimes, it seems so—this is what I found most difficult about this book.

I am conscious that Ha Jin is seeking to write “within the tradition,” so to speak—he states early on that exile is his particular interest and as such, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn and Conrad and the others cannot be overlooked—he also states that the most significant literature of migration is that of exile—can this be true? I also wonder if his choice of subject was not tempered by the occasion of the lecture series prompting the creation of these essays.

Still, in this century, to not strive to be inclusive across the genders feels inexplicable to me. Women writers write frequently of male writers—do male writers write seriously of women writers? Apparently we still exist in a straitjacketed space where a male writer would need to be consciously radical in order to bring up and talk about a female writer—on par with/among male writers—it’s not the looked-for, prized, or awarded thing. Not recognized as normal. Or even plausible.

I have to say I wouldn’t want that to be the last word on Ha Jin’s essays, which I found mostly enlightening. Exile is a powerful subject, and I thought these essays insightful in many ways. I know I’ll want to read them again, when I sit down to write more about migration.

I found it interesting also that in an interview Edward Said too says he has felt a strong affiliation with Conrad—despite the exclusions and bias (which he excuses as emblematic of his time) in The Heart of Darkness—Conrad was a teenage runaway, an exile from very young, a sailor with the British Merchant Navy, a world traveler, who learned English at 20 and became a writer in his forties, who still retained a strong nostalgic connection to the Poland he never could quite return to in his work—and as Ha Jin notes too, an extraordinary writer in English. “He had this strange sort of exilic consciousness; he was always outside any situation he wrote about, and I feel that affinity with him.” (Said/Power, Politics, & Culture/Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, 1996). Evocative, isn't it—from both their readings; makes me want to read more of Conrad now.

Website online

Finally, the site is online: www.ramolad.com.

Now I just have to worry about the Big Snow, and getting in to DC when the Metro is not running above-ground, and the next big storm headed our way tomorrow and a 5-year-old who's excited about two more snow days! (What do you do after romps in the snow, igloos, snow forts, frozen toes, sledding, did I mention frozen toes? (my mitochondria are not northern European!) raisin bread (that rose and fell and half-rose thereafter), Emma on PBS, nature shows online--hummingbirds, bald eagles, four-winged dinosaurs, putting together Valentine's day packages for all her preschool friends, clean-up, organizing, reading...eating icicles off the front porch railing---I don't know! But Sophie is out sledding again for the second time today with her dad and I am stealing my time now, while I have it!)

Thrilled to be free at last of html, css and font types and sizes and colors. I abandoned my plans for major graphic design--my mind's not on it--javascript, anything else. The site is simple, as much as I can do right now. I've never wanted to put up a web site for myself, didn't think I ever would. Odd all around, posting one's self on the Web in this fashion, but I guess the point is if anyone's looking, there's something there. A pointer to and samples of my work, contact info, etc. Bios, lists, readings, all that.

And yes, I'll admit I do need to let everyone know, I am still looking for that one special agent who would like to represent my second fiction collection--set in the US and India--and my novel, set in India. I haven't given up on you, world!

So, back to the written word....

little writer bits

No, I'm still not ready to write a new review--not least because I switched from reading one book to three--and gone apparently are the days when I had the time to sit still and read from start to finish--sitting still is a luxury!!

Reading, like writing these past weeks continues in tiny little fragments of time.

I have been reading Ha Jin's collection of essays The Writer as Migrant on the metro as I train in to DC to teach and back, Mark Slouka's The Visible World en route to and in snowy northern Michigan and back, and still, yes, on my nightstand, I flinch to confess, Susan Minot's Evening, which is lovely but so long!

I am still also working on my web site, which almost warrants its own post. I wonder how many writers sit around developing their own web sites--it feels completely odd to me, creating my own little mini-brochure for myself, but there you are. Impoverished teachers and writers everywhere who have worked in web design end up using up all their reading time in this useless fashion, I suspect--I mean, surely I am not the only misguided site-maker on the planet. (Feels better imagining a community of my kind out there, slaving away....)

In the second snow of this week I stay up wanting to write and not able to get past that website!

But I did make rather a pleasant discovery, surfing the Web: a starred review of Temporary Lives at Publisher's Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6716116.html--very nice surprise!

Tomorrow I start my class online for the Writer's Center--Writing the Lyric Personal Essay--reading I can look forward to. That's one thing, teaching keeps me reading for class--poetry today (highlight: Men at Forty, by Donald Justice) lyric essay tomorrow--I get that reading done, one way or the other. And teaching creative writing keeps me thinking continuously about writing, about all those bits of craft we struggle with everyday on the page. The one job I don't want to quit, even when grading absorbs time like a sponge. (And I've been an exemplary job-quitter, all through my varied working life.)

Today after class, the most angelic of my new Intro to Creative Writing students--there's always one student in every class it seems who is just so amazingly ethereal, so innocently charmante she is almost seraphic--came up to me and told me how much she loved this class and looked forward to it, and how she had just been wanting to tell me this. I was charmed! Amazed! Flattered! Grateful! Please, spread that news around, I wanted to say. It is a lovely class, isn't it! To tell the truth, it did make an enormous difference. On the way in to work--when I wasn't reading The Writer as Migrant, that is--I had been thinking darkly about how long it has taken for Temporary Lives to see the light of day, how many years--a subject I am talking about openly in interviews, and thinking more about. I'd actually been feeling a bit invisible myself, as my manuscripts/books have been, for years. It was very gratifying to hear appreciation.

I've been keeping company with that snow tonight. I can see it outside, looming masses weighing down the pine, and hear something: a crinkle of ice on ice, on trees, on the roof, wonder if it's turned to sleet. And I can hear Sophie upstairs, magically sensing my absence in her sleep and snuffling protest -- so finally, bon nuit, mes cheres, and to all, goodnight.

Ways to Give Now to Haiti

From what I read, it seems like the most wanted help is funds for all the groups taking food, clothing, medicine, water to Haiti. So I had to post these two links that came my way, in case anyone is looking for a women's group to donate to, or a quick way to donate online or from a cell phone:

http://codepink4peace.org/blog/2010/01/how-you-can-help-in-haiti/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/186937/haiti_relief_how_to_use_tech_to_make_a_speedy_donation.html

Everything seems to stop at a time like this. It feels like when the tsunami hit, in 2004, or earlier, when the planes hit. Reading suspended. I was able to donate online through Save the Children (pl. follow the PC World link) -- if anyone knows of other organizations taking donations through Paypal online, please let me know, I'll post the link. My heart is with the people of Haiti tonight.

Links for Writers

While I am reading—and reading and reading—and still working on my web site which I hope to have up soon--maybe sometime this month, if I'm lucky--and working a little on publicity for the book, I’ve missed writing on the blog! (I can tell this blog is rapidly evolving into something other than a reviews-only space.) I wanted to share what I’ve been uncovering lately though, and to point to great books on my reading horizon, that you might like to explore too.

Surrounding the (very very recent) release of Temporary Lives (Dec 2009)—which I hope to highlight on the blog for a bit, by the way, until the web site is up--I’ve been researching blogs, fiction sites, bookstores, and stumbling upon some great sites.

Here are some of the great web sites I’ve discovered recently, all resources for writers and readers.

The Short Review is tailored for short story readers and writers. From the UK, edited by short story writer Tania Hershman and Diane Beck, with a whole staff of reviewers, this site offers reviews of current short story collections, interviews, news, contests, and more—if you are a short story writer, this is a site to check out. They send out a monthly newsletter that you can subscribe to on their web site, and run book giveaways each month.

PEN Grants and Awards Online Database is a great resource, available at a small price ($12, payable online) to writers looking to find fellowships, funding, awards for their work. The site link is sort of hidden away on the main Pen page—the PEN American Center site (which highlights PEN award writers and writings, and international writers in need of support). Supplements the resources you can find at Poets and Writers, whose calendars of course are invaluable.

For listings of literary magazines, there’s of course Poets and Writers and Duotrope’s Digest—an electronic database of magazines accepting fiction and poetry that you can search to pinpoint your preferences re. electronic/print submissions, etc. , and also Lit Mags and New Pages. I’d thought Lit Mags offered just a listing of magazines, mainly because Google tends to point to this list rather than their home page—a great listing, by the way, because it’s organized by type and category of submission and color-coded for ease of use—but I just noticed they also run a list with notes from the magazines added newly to their database on their home page. The best links to lit mags though, I’ve always thought, are the ones you find in the Links sections of the magazines and presses you like, they tend to list/link other magazines you’d like. New Pages also reviews short story collections, along with novels and poetry.

New Pages needs a shout-out on its own though—like Poets and Writers, it is a compendious resource site for writers with listings of numerous kinds—calls for submissions from magazines, guides to indie bookstores, writer conferences, retreats, blogs, interviews, reviews, contests, writing programs, and more.

The Chapters Bookstore in DC, a wonderful literary bookstore and one of DC’s special book places, like Politics and Prose and The Writer’s Center, lists award-winning books on its web site. If you’d like to explore recent Pulitzers, Bookers, National Book Awards, et al, visit the Award Winners page at Chapters.

And for fabulous interviews with “extra-literary” writers, see the Author Interviews page at Dalkey Archive Press. If you took a class with me or have read my interviews, you may know I have a special interest in interviews, have been addicted to reading them for a long time. I am planning to return to my bicultural interview project soon, as soon as that darn web site is done, so I'll be doing some research soon on mags that publish interviews with writers, and hope to write more on the subject--will list what I find.

At some point I’ll organize these links on the blog so they seem less scattered.

More soon!

Girls Write Now—A Cause Celebre

This past weekend I went up to New York on the train to give a reading and workshop at Girls Write Now, on the joint invitation of GWN’s Stacy Noble and She Writes’ founder, Kamy Wicoff. It was luxury having all that time to read on the train, going and back—I am reading Susan Minot’s Evening, such a beautiful book—but anyway, the workshop: was wonderful.

Fifty participants—twenty-five high school girls from all over New York and their mentors-- came together on a cold but sunny Saturday afternoon, twenty floors above the Hudson and the mad persisting scramble on Eighth Avenue (I almost ran into a bunch of decidedly-youthful Santas as I emerged from Penn station—apparently it was Santa Con day—Santas (meaning anyone who wants to wear a Santa suit) take the subway in to convene, carol, revel, etc. , although the two girl-Santas smoking outside a store I stopped to ask for directions didn’t quite seem to know where they were—maybe they were visiting) to read, write, and talk about fiction.

Apparently this is a once a month event, with two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. GWN provides a table full of food for participants to nibble on, through all the sessions—and the young and dedicated directors and mentors at GWN stay through the day to co-ordinate and manage the whole afternoon (on top of having managed the morning session earlier). The agenda looked impressive—between 2:30 and 6, there was going to be craft talks, discussions, paired sharings, writings, critiques, and mini-lectures on story structure, conflict, perspective.

As guest speaker for this afternoon session (the morning’s was Hannah Tinti), I was asked to speak on characters and point of view—two major aspects of fiction in one 45-minute session!—in addition to reading; I was not at all sure I could pull this off. Given the intensity of the focus on fiction though, and the real interest of the girls in becoming writers and better writers and in exploring forms of writing, it turned out to be a very engaged and engaging afternoon.

The girls began by writing of their neighborhoods, and a few of them came up to read their pieces—about trash on the sidewalks, the sounds of trains, people they saw everyday—lovely, lyric bits of contemplation you didn’t want to end. I read parts of a story (In Another World) from Temporary Lives, opened a conversation on where our characters come from, mentioned the role of conflict and the usual shape of story arcs (to be covered after me), touched on point of view and Rust Hills’ contention that the point of view that works is that of the character who experiences change in the story, and set up an interactive exercise in character discovery. The participation in the exercise was immediate and enthusiastic; interesting answers came out of the focus on character. My favorite was the soft-voiced girl who wondered if our characters could be different parts of our selves (yes so often yes).

I spent a long time afterward talking to the directors, several mentors, and several students who came up to talk or ask more questions on writing characters and point of view. I also looked through all of the news on the wall and browsed through their annual anthologies—an article in the New York Times, a visit from Michelle Obama, a citation for best mentoring-youth non-profit—poems, stories, and essays from teen writers transcribing their experience, feelings, world.

I just want to say what a lovely and meaningful program this is, how genuinely engaged, warm, and enthusiastic all of the GWN’rs I met are—Sarah, Megan, Erin, Stacy, Heather, Marlee, Maria, Maya, Catherine—how focused on their mentees and their welfare the diverse group of mentors are, and how thoughtful and engaged the mentees are. These young women seemed to me very absorbed in their work, self-possessed, self-confident—I love that this program exists to give these New Yorkers a place to come to, to write, to learn, to explore writing, to bounce their ideas off receptive working adults, to receive guidance and counsel. They also get to observe writers at close quarters, to discuss craft with writers, to gain confidence young. It seemed to me a large and lovely thing, to be able to dream of writing young, to write young, and to experience such whole-hearted support young.

Many of the conversations I had with mentors touched on the great What-If question: What if we, our generation/s had had access to such support when we were in our teens, what tragedies in career and profession might have been averted, what heartache elided, what material evidence to display to those families who cannot conceive of a daughter entering the world of writing for profession or livelihood. That we can do this now for our younger sisters is path-breaking—so I applaud everything GWN is doing and hope they can indeed set up shop in every major city in the US.

It’s a great place to go volunteer as mentor if you live in New York, or to support through donations. To read more, see their website: Girls Write Now. The results are tangible: stronger writers, high schoolers who write compelling college essays, who all—with a hundred per cent success rate-- go on to college on the strength of these applications. Mentors spoke too of the strong bonds of friendship formed with mentees, how each in unique ways supported the other.

For me, it was special going up to New York on the heels of my book release—Temporary Lives has just been launched and is online at Amazon and in stores—a way to celebrate stories I wrote mostly in and of a very different place (Madras, India) but stories nevertheless of people whose voices, I believe, needed to be heard, and a rather fitting way to celebrate, with a free workshop and reading for writers just beginning to make their way in the world.

Some days ago, I put out a call on She Writes for donations of my books to GWN, to complement the workshop—it’s not too late; if you would like to support a young writer in her work, and help expand her library, please send a copy of Temporary Lives to GWN, and please let me know.

Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid

In April of this year, I went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum to see and hear Jamaica Kincaid talk about a painting she loved, in the American Pictures Distinguished Lectures series.

I'd never heard Ms. Kincaid read before, or lecture. I'd read her work, taught her work. Before I saw her, I think I'd had in my mind a picture of a precise, articulate genius whose probing insights and deep ruminations and stringent analyses sedately unravelled out of her in measured, methodical tones. I'm not sure I gave much thought really to the person behind the writer. When you come to know a writer through their words alone, the voice that resonates (in your head as you read) can become a disembodied voice.

Because Jamaica Kincaid's work is so focused on the particular and so lucid in its detail, and her prose often formal in its cadences, her great ease of being, her self-deprecation, her informal address, and her brilliant sense of humor--all of these as much a part of her no doubt as her writing is--came to me as unexpected.

(For more on her talk and the pictures she showed, see: http://news.washcoll.edu/press_releases/2009/04/01_jamaicakincaid.php and http://eyelevel.si.edu/2009/05/jamaica-kincaid-on-being-kept-in.)

I'm glad I went, for when I started reading Lucy, I could transpose now this new voice, this ebullience, this light-heartedness, this daring, onto the voice of Lucy. This is not to say I needed to conflate the author with the speaker in her novel, but rather that the author gave me a new way to hear and read the speaker in the novel.

Underlying the somber, quite straightforward, often matter-of-fact and rather explicit narrations of Lucy in her evocations of her island home and her candid contrasts with her new life in the US, I felt I could reach to a more accessible and sinuous fluency of narrative. I could hear humor now, an in-held wit, a cool insistence on the intelligence of difference, a tangible confidence, it kept me engrossed and reading.

Lucy seemed to me a difficult and complex and mysterious character. Arriving in New York as an au pair from her island home in the Caribbean, she is not wide-eyed, placid, absorbent. On the contrary she is cool and unflinching in her observations, acute in her insights, hard, even inflexible, in her attitudes. Yet her voice is singular and compelling. Somehow, it was the precise particularity of her vision, her telling of her story as if there was no other story in the world, nothing before, nothing after, merely a spotlight on her own travelling, moving, thinking, living, feeling self, that drew me into the story.

This world she opens up to us, of living with Mariah and Lewis, of taking care of their four children, of taking in the experience of being in America, of witnessing at close hand the peculiarites and eventual desiccations of their marriage, of the urgency of her own various friendships, romances, and sexual affiliations, all of it came to me as extraordinary, new, strange, primarily I think because of that cool, insistent voice with its singular focus on the individuating, transplanted, post-colonial self.

Running like a thread through the weave are the memories of childhood, of friends, her mother--so slight, the latter, in glimpses and snatches, not enough--of beginning sexualities. Yes, that too took me by surprise, how sexually explicit the text is, how candid--had the voice been too ethereal until then? too cerebral?--but in this too Lucy displays her trademark insouciance, her self-possession. She is never lost, never found in another. She is wholly her own person, unflinchingly analytical in the midst of attraction.

All of this steely resolve and resilience, yet through the story we never know why exactly she has chosen to estrange herself so fully from her mother, never opening her letters, never responding. I found this to mark a curious absence in Lucy's character, a place we could not go because she would not, possibly could not create it for us. It delivers a tension, a worrisome question eating away at the reading, surfacing here and there, subsumed often, submerged for whole periods, never discarded entirely.

This obduracy, this refusal, this hinted-at anger, all of this hidden seething which is not offered to us in entirety.

We wait until the end, or near the end, when she learns her father has died, when Mariah comes close to her and holds her hands together and we begin to recieve an inkling of the secret, sorrowing self, when she tells us she was "about to break apart" and that Mariah was "holding (me) together in one piece." Later she tells Mariah about her life with her mother,and that is when we hear it, the essential break in their relationship, the thing that permeated her experience of childhood, the thing that cannot be borne, cannot be overcome, that lies inside her forever like an open wound.

There is her mother, whose turning-away from her came first, there is her father, equally turned toward his new sons at the expense of his daughter, himself the child of terrible betrayals and abandonment, and there is Lucy, whose peculiar intensity and turned-away-ness we begin finally to understand.

The closing chapter of the book, with its powerful renderings of nostalgia and change--the look-back, the inevitable retrospective on the year that has passed, the placidity and the tumult of it, the understanding that these things that have happened are past, that she is in a different place now, psychologically and emotionally, that she needed to break the old continuity, make a new reality for her self, and the missteps as she begins--deciding to share an apartment with her friend Peggy "just when we began to feel the yoke of each other's companionship"--I found this last chapter dazzling: the language mesmeric, the text compelling.

Lucy seems whole now, a person we can touch. Not because she is struggling again to make another new beginning, but because she consents to be open with us, to tell us what she understands of herself--"I had memory, I had anger, I had despair." It becomes a consent too to the hidden, the submerged, the turned-away-from, to accept, lift, enumerate. This new Lucy is more transparent than the old one, less hard, more comprehensible.

As Jamaica Kincaid spoke that afternoon of the Edward Lamson Henry painting in which a young girl is kept in on a day of sunshine, turned inward then to her own contemplations, her own dreams, her own adventures--a turning she implies is liberating, not its intended opposite--she put up photos on the monitor for us to see of her childhood in Antigua, and one of herself as a young woman with friends on a night out in New York. When the child goes out eventually, it is not to the colonized world of the enforcers in education. "This was the way I went out," she said, and it was all she needed to say.

At the end of Lucy,that photo comes to mind--despite all of it, the wounds of childhood, the estrangements, the removals--both the collective, colonial ones and the private depletions--and possibly because of the self's consent to the quest, the struggle, the coming-through--tangible and intact is the singularity of the vividly feeling and thinking self, separate and glamorous.