Ru Freeman2013-05-26T03:00:13-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=ru-freemanCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Ru FreemanGood old fashioned elbow grease.PEN International: Mobilizing Writers to Defend Free Speechtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32147192013-05-08T19:08:30-04:002013-05-08T19:08:38-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/PEN is an organization, with centers around the world, which boasts of a 91 year history of using those words to give a voice to writers whose lives have been threatened or lost because of what they wanted to say or write. On May 3rd, World Press Freedom Day, and as part of the PEN World Voices Literary Festival PEN America released its latest report, "Creativity and Constraint in Today's China" at a press conference at the Public Theater.
The report, refreshingly evocative in its language and as to be expected of anything produced by those of a literary mind, condenses five years of research compiled by activists outside China and, most importantly, those inside, on the Chinese government and its practice of silencing Chinese writers, the most celebrated of all being Nobel Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo. It is divided into three sections, 'Pressure from Above,' which harkens to the promises made by the Chinese government -- in its bid to host the Olympic Games -- to safeguard the right to free speech; 'Pressure from Below,' which documents the courageous efforts of Chinese writers to counter government crackdowns, which include censorship and surveillance; and 'The Literary Community,' which focusses on the predicament of writers forced to choose between remaining silent or currying favor with a repressive government as the only means of expressing themselves. It concludes with a series of six recommendations which are based on the PEN commitment to free speech and the open exchange of literature.
In his opening remarks, John Ralston Saul, president of PEN International, spoke passionately about the need to "help China find itself," by reminding its government of a history of activism and democracy, and of the benefits accrued to a nation whose citizenry is allowed the freedom of speech:
A country gains nothing by imprisoning or limiting its writers. It is embarrassing to imprison people for words; to sweep up artiss and hold them outside th elaw; to break the constitutional and legal obligations of the state to protect fre speech. There can be no honour in causing writers to suffer, stripped of their rights for simply saying or writing what they believe.
Among those who spoke were Salman Rushdie, Chairman of the World Voices Festival, and Chinese dissident writer, Yu Jie, and activist, Chen Guangcheng, who sought refuge at the American embassy in Beijing after a 400 mile journey, and whose release from Chinese custody was secured by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.
PEN deserves to be recognized for the work the member centers have done to produce this report, for its relentlessness in going to bat for its most far-flung comrades, and for garnering the written support of some of the most celebrated and determinedly political writers, among them Gioconda Belli, Wole Soyinka, and Edwidge Danticat. There is a sense of optimism surrounding the work that PEN does, including this latest initiative on behalf of Chinese writers, that harkens to the greater good that, one hopes, still remains in sight of even the most repressive of governments. The Chinese, as Saul points out, have experienced that good in the past and surely would wish to reclaim it now.
The Chinese government, however, may see things a little differently. In a milieu when money is everything, China has made inroads into every country not only through its exports but through its investments. American men and women lie dead in untenable and ill-advised wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is the Chinese who have come in as free-riders in the wake of efforts to re-stabilize those countries, efforts in which the Chinese government played no part. In much of South-East Asia,South Asia, significantly both in India and Pakistan, and post-war Sri Lanka, China has buttressed it political support by opening its coffers and supplying its labor to rebuild infrastructure from ports to arts centers. America herself lies in the grip of its growing economic debt to China, an imbalance that makes it strategically untenable -- albeit morally imperative -- that the American government lends its voice to magnify the voices of at least its PEN America members. In other words, China is thriving by the very measures of succcess expounded by the West, and the fate of its writers may be the least of its concerns.
Except for the fact that it is those writers who can tell the stories of a nation. PEN is banking on the salient fact that when a government insists upon a single narrative because of political expediency, it is displaying neither pride nor power but a loathing for the richness of its own cultural and historical legacy. We can only hope that the Chinese government -- like any government -- remembers this.
Perhaps it is because PEN is comprised of writers, those individuals who eschew the linear in favor of trolling the depths of human experience, that the organization as a whole recognizes the significance of cultural markers for the Chinese: honor and pride. This report is not so much a scathing condemnation as it is a mirror held up to a face, a mirror that asks: Is this what you want to look like to the world? This time next year we may have a relatively favorable answer and if we do, we would have PEN to thank both for precipitating it and for hearing of it.]]>13 Bests of AWP 2013tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28617332013-03-12T17:34:49-04:002013-05-12T05:12:01-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/piece for The New Republic,as "the vast roving capital of American literary anxiety," and the Hynes Convention Center has breathed a sigh of relief. People learned things, apparently, things such as the fact that writers cannot hold their booze, and that the response to everything can be "it depends." If you want to get a sense of the bitter-wry way in which we can look at all things AWP, look no further than David Duhr, who blogged for Publishing Perspectivesfrom the quiet recesses of the "forgotten ballroom," seated at table z-29. Choice morsels:
Day #1: So what do they get in exchange for four hours of their lives and 40-230 of their dollars? A badge, for one thing, which NOBODY is checking. And for the right to ignore "500 events and 1900 presenters," and to wander dazed through three giant ballrooms'-worth of "more than 600 exhibitors."
Day #2: "If there are 8,000 writers here," said one bleary-eyed AWPer here on Day 2, "7,000 of them are delusional. And AWP doesn't try to end their delusions." The reported number of attendees this year is 11,000, so using the same math, there are actually 9,625 delusional people here. I think I've talked to them all. I've also talked to the other 1,375. I'm not sure which group I'm in, but I do know one thing: Both are equally miserable.
Day #3: ...we'll wander from bar to bar, physically and emotionally exhausted, carting around books and magazines and business cards and our dead souls, firmly entrenched in the knowledge, the absolute without-a-doubt certainty, that this is our last AWP, that we'll never return to this event, ever, that AWP 2014 in Seattle can go f*** itself, and so can the probably 12,000+ hosers who will show up to do it all again for little-to-no personal or financial or professional enrichment whatsoever.
But AWP can also deliver on some of its promises. If you can keep calm and carry on, if you can acknowledge the hysteria without becoming hysterical yourself, if you can avoid eye-contact with the thousands, yet have conversations with the few (usually good friends who can and will see you through life), AWP can be magical. Here, then, a scant 13 "bests" from the 2013 conference.
2. Best Panelists: All the smart, relaxed, happy-to-contradict people on the 'What is Criticsm' (see above), session. Highlights included Sehgal's assertion that ideas make regionalism irrelevant, Gornick quoting Auden on never writing about bad art (i.e. don't review bad work, it will sink on its own lack of merit), and her discussion of the long-road taken to her essay on Israel and the necessity to temper criticism with affection or risk an "yes-but" story, and Woods speaking about writing as a zone of honesty. Kwame Dawes on the 'Baring/Bearing Race in the Creative Writing Classroom' panel, who reminded us that the only barrier we face is the failure of the imagination.
4. Best Found-Poet by Attending a Panel on a Whim: Nazim Hikmet. The call to arms made by David Wojahn, on the necessity of being involved in changing the tenor of relationships between human beings so divided by class, was particularly of the moment.
5. Best Tribute to the Legacy of a Teacher:Derek Walcott. Nothing can beat the stories told by a students - even those in absentia, as Melissa Green was, while the teacher is still around to hear them. Bonus? Yusef Komunyakaa leaning forward to listen, hard.
6. Best Worst-Moment: a bouncer appearing at the bar of a hotel hosting 11,000 writers, and trying to prevent them from getting a drink. Not cool.
8. Best WTF Booth: A tent for psychic readings. Don't ask.
9. Best Addition to AWP: wine bar inside the book fair. Why kid ourselves. In the glare of that florescence we could all use a little help dimming our eyesight.
10. Best Off-Site Event: Super-agent Julie Barer's party across from the hotel. Full disclosure: Julie is my agent. Still, you can't beat the most entertaining guests (Ben Percy? Check), and free drinks, and the fact that the Barer shindig has become a must-go-to for the literati.
12. Best Panels Dealing With Real-World Issues (American, International): First, 'Reduced to I: Israeli and Iranian Poets.' How refreshing to hear writers speak of politics openly, to hear them apply their art directly to the practical matter of peace. Ofer Ziv in particular, who spoke in his remarks about the difficulty of writing about his time of service in the Israel Defense Force. Also, 'Looking Out: American Journals on the World,' with the editors of World Literature Today(Daniel Simon), VQR (Paul Reyes), and Prairie Schoonerr (Kwame Dawes), moderated by Glenna Luschei. John Freeman (Granta) was missing and missed. It was heartening to hear these editors speak to the matter of introducing America to the existence of the world, and even more gratifying to see that they could turn the early morning attendance rate (on the last day of a conference), into a dynamic discussion of priorities and perspectives.
13. Best Non-Participant:Chris Abani, who observed the entire conference (save for a minor journey or two to perform writerly duties), and by his own admission, from the comfort of a couch in the lobby.
So, yes, AWP 2014 in Seattle? You bet.]]>Dear Natalie Gyte: I Hope You Dancetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26870512013-02-17T19:00:00-05:002013-04-19T05:12:02-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/"Why I Won't Support One Billion Rising," by Natalie Gyte from the Women's Resource Center, an umbrella organization of womens charities.
In the article, Gyte argues quite persuasively, against Eve Ensler's effort to raise awareness about violence against women on Valentine's Day via One Billion Rising, whose premise is that people gather in flash mobs and at organized events to dance. Dancing, in this reading, is a way to rise up above the desperation that keeps many women trapped in difficult situations. According to Gyte, Ensler's effort undermines the work of ordinary activists because it does not address the patriarchal system that underlines much of the violence that is perpetrated against women, that it includes men, and is too sexy - though she doesn't use that term - and, therefore, media worthy.
I disagree with almost everything in this piece. I believe firmly in the rights of girls and women to fulfill their ambitions, but I protest equally firmly the notion that the achievement of those ambitions should come at the cost of what women have valued for centuries: peace, safety, security, or the dismissal of what a majority of women embrace: a feminine aesthetic, a female essence, intangible but no less critical to what we bring to the discussion. Hence the post I wrote recently about women in the military.
Gyte berates the movement for including men. She condemns Stella Creasy thus for stating that violence is not limited to gender, that it affects society as a whole: "Really Stella? Really?" Yes, really Natalie, really. Violence is a societal issue. And so long as we keep pretending that it isn't, nothing is going to change. And to speak of violence perpetrated against women by a male hierarchy, as Gyte does, but claim that we must exclude men from the conversation is like arguing that the priesthood is fornicating with little choir boys but we can end the problem by just focussing on the little boys and leaving the priests out!
Gyte explains that two activists - one "beautiful and radiant" Congolese and one Iranian (presumably ugly and drab?) - question the idea that white middle class women (who are in effect the upper class in the global scheme), should tell them what to do. They are right, of course. But might we remember that in that regard, they should also question then the cultural hegemony of white women who do what Gyte does. Fact is, they probably do. Non-White women have questioned for decades the priviledge assumed by people like Gloria Steinem, the 1% of the feminist movement to which Gyte also belongs by virtue of her hue and class. And yet we have chosen to march beside, holding the wheat and letting the chaff blow away in the wind, as best we can, because we champion the better intention over the lesser negligence.
To skewer a fellow activist who has - by her own admission - done admirable work, for choosing to fight this particular battle on several fronts is to confirm the precise stereotype of women attacking other women. It makes me cringe for us all. And it reminds me of another fierce woman warrior, Audre Lorde, whose words have been the foundation of every bit of political work I have ever undertaken; the words that concluded my undergraduate thesis on the brutal and insidious political, cultural, and economic hegemony of the West (the very one that Gyte and the two activists above decry), are still the words that guide me now: "There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives."
Finally, Gyte's harrangue against the joy inherent in this effort reminds me of nothing more than the beautiful exchange between Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Judas berates Mary Magdalene for buying myrrh for Jesus because that money could have raised "300 silver pieces or more" that "people who are hungry, people who are starving matter more than your feet and head". The reply from Jesus is priceless. It reminds us of the fact that it is Judas who condescends to Mary (dismissed by him as a mere prostitute), and that it is he who betrays Jesus, never mind the poor and struggling, never mind the myrrh and silver.
There is something vital and affirming that is lost to us as a collective of men and women when we decide that any expression of joy undermines the sorrows that plague us. And so I come, as I have done before, to these lines from Jack Gilbert, in his poem "A Brief for the Defence", from the collection, Refusing Heaven.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down.
we should give thanks that hte end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
Joy is allowed. Seriously. And dance is all-inclusive. It transcends gender and class, culture and color. It is the great unifier. The revolution begs you, if not on every other day then at least on this day, when you get the chance to sit it out or dance, to choose to dance.]]>The Time Is Now: State by State Referendum on Gun Controltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23121892012-12-17T10:15:25-05:002013-02-16T05:12:01-05:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/asked if the rest of us in the country was responding as she was: "Are they going about their regular activities? Is it just another news story to them?" Twitter, meanwhile, erupted with anger toward Jay Carney, the President's White House spokesman, for claiming that the issue of gun control did not belong in the present arena of grief. Denner is correct to ask for our collective commitment to addressing this moment, and Carney is right to say that grieving must be given its due place. And both these requests can surely be met by those of us whose children and kin were not so foully felled last Friday morning.
As human beings, we mourn for the innocents who had not yet learned to fear, who might have stood and gazed at their assailant, not undertanding his intention, never associating violence as being directed at them, too young to know that there would ever be a time when they might need to hide from an adult who might have reminded them of an older cousin, a young uncle. We imagine those children falling petal like, and just as unblemished, forever six, forever seven. And as we consider those faces, we must also remember that, as fellow-citizens, we have something that has been forever denied to them: our voices.
When we speak of gun control, what we are really asking for is a culture that is not driven by the anticipation of and response to violence.
A majority of Americans support placing restrictions on the purchase and possession of weapons, although in conversation we are wont to refer to the NRA quite as though that body - and not we, the majority - defines the national debate. We speak of national legislation, of lobbyists who are funded by billionaires, of the insurmountable odds of going up against that Goliath. Yet, as was pointed out by Malcolm Gladwell in an outstanding piece in the New Yorker, a few years ago, Goliath was beaten, as every bully is someday beaten, by David's decision to refuse to play by Goliath's rules. Indeed, he uses the research of the political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft, to demonstrate that those who refused to play the rules of the powerful went from being victorious 28.5 percent of the time to emerging as winners 63.6 percent of the time.
It is time for us to do the same. We are expected to decry the national culture of violence, but we are taught to internalize our own lack of power at the street-by-street level, except when it comes to an election. We must take this issue to the polls, and do so state by state. It won't be easy work, but it will be far easier than tuning in to another report of butchery coming out of the next Newtown.
Every single state in this country allows for the legislature to place a measure on the ballot, and we can plead with our legislators to bring gun-control laws to the vote, but there are 27 states from Washington to Maine that have provision for initatives and referendums that can be placed on the ballot by citizens. Let us begin there. By all means, we should support any national effort, including this one, that is collecting signatures to be delivered to members of the Congress and the President, and this one that plans to bring a million children to the capitol in the tradition of the Million Man March of 1995 and the Million Mom March of 2000, which was mean to force Congress to help keep guns out of the hands of children. This latest march is an effort to add a million faces to the twenty who are no more, a trust that the physical reminder of the youngest victims of this tragedy will move hearts turned to stone by the gun lobby.
I attended that Million Mom March more than a decade ago, taking my then four year daughter with me. A few months after that there was another shooting and my daughter asked me, how that could be, when she had already penned her note to the President, crouching at the foot of the Washington Monument? I gave her a convoluted explanation of time, but I realize now, that I was playing by the rules of the powerful, explaining away the inexplicable. We can ask for help from Washington, and we must, but the tears of a President many of us may never meet in person do not compare to those of the parents whose children we've held in our arms. There is no vigil, no service, no words of comfort, that can ease the pain of Jillian Soto or Robbie Parker. But we can ensure that when we say never again, we are finally willing to go to the mat to make that promise a reality.
We cannot wait for national legislation. We must take our grief to the streets, state by state, neighborhood by neighborhood, door by door, voice by voice, until we create for ourselves, not the nation we bemoan but the culture we are proud to have created. It is time to vote.]]>Reginald Dwayne Betts: Reflections From a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18488992012-09-04T12:36:24-04:002012-11-04T05:12:01-05:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, Poetry editor Christian Wiman said, "The history of Poetry is filled with some of the best-known names in American poetry; my guess is that these young poets will be among those we'll be talking about in the years to come." Among the winners who include Rickey Laurentis, Nicholas Friedman, Richie Hofmann, and Jacob Saenz, was Reginald Dwayne Betts.
When he was 16 years old, Betts carjacked a man along with a friend. Though he had no prior offenses, he was convicted for having committed six felonies, tried as an adult in Virginia, and sentenced to eight years among among adult prisoners in some of the worst prisons in the state. In his memoir, A Question of Freedom (Avery, 2009), which won an NAACP Image Award, Betts writes about coming of age in prison, and confronting some of the most profound questions in America, about violence, race and the American justice system. Betts went on to earn an MFA at Warren Wilson, the most prestigious low-residency programs in the country, and became an advocate for the fair treatment of juveniles. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society, speaking out on national platforms about the issues he had seen first hand inside the prisons. His collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm(Alice James Books, 2010) won the Beatrice Hawley Award. He was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship to complete The Circumference of a Prison, a work of nonfiction exploring the criminal justice system's role in the every day lives of Americans who have not committed crimes. Betts' status update on Facebook upon receiving the news is worth quoting in full:
Feels good to have won the Lilly Fellowship. I was a finalist back in 2007 and I thought things like this were a given -- five years later, married now with two children, I understand all the ways that these fellowships keep the writing going. People can and will say what they want, but there needs to be a much more serious conversation going on around the economics of writing, be it poetry or living, and we need to escape this fantasy where all of our classmates in our stunning MFA program end up with tenure, cause it isn't real. And that fantasy is part of what leads to some of the anger around who gets named and who doesn't. Much respect to the other winners, past finalists, those who didn't get named. Eight years ago today I was in prison, so I'm not complaining. Thanks to the folks at the Poetry Foundation for seeing something in the work, thanks to those folks who saw something in the work when I was sending it to their journals from C block.
RF: One day, while you were in solitary confinement, you found yourself at the door to your cell, screaming for someone to throw you a book. A fellow inmate slipped The Black Poets, edited by Dudley Randall, under your door. You have said that this was a pivotal moment that turned you from a reader into a writer. What was it about this particular collection that had such an impact on you?
RDB: I was young. Needed to hear black voices. And then, you have to figure that poets like Lucille Clifton,Robert Hayden, and Sonia Sanchez -- are arguably some of the best poets America has produced. Add Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka and some of the other less known voices and you truly get a rich picture of what the word can say. Anyway -- it was just time and place. During the same period I was reading fantasy, reading those Reader's Digest abridged novels, reading Faulkner. But you can't beat Hayden's "Middle Passage" or Clifton's "cutting greens" for teaching all that a poem can hold and explode.
RF: You changed your name to Shahid while you were in prison, to reflect your position as "witness" (the Arabic meaning of the name), a writer, the one observes how people can destroy themselves. And the title of your collection of poetry is Shahid Reads His Own Palm. While it was an homage to the poet Agha Shahid Ali, it also references that aspect of you as witness. If, as you have said, your non-fiction is about you or "Dwayne's view of eight and a half years in prison," while your poetry is about what you observe of the world, why did you choose to include the name you took on in prison in the title of your collection of poetry? What part of what Dwayne sees about Dwayne in non-fiction is left behind when Dwayne talks about the world in poetry?
RDB: I have had many changes in my life. Many paths to who I am now. "Shahid" is an identity that served me when I didn't have a full understanding of my ability to witness, to write and to be me with my father's name. There is always more wrapped up into any decision than what serves any particular question. I can't really make people understand the reasoning behind the name change unless they are willing to understand how invested you can become in what your name means -- in what you imagine it represents. At 16, Reginald Dwayne Betts represented so much of the ways in which I had become my father. But the thing is I've grown a bit since being the 16-year-old kid who needed a new name to imagine a different life. And this doesn't reduce the affinity I have for the name, or for the poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose work I encountered years after I began carrying the name. Roger Bonair Agard says of his father in a poem "forgive me, for I have become you, inadequately" and I often feel that way -- feel that, once I was released from prison and began to speak with my dad more and see him in a more complete light, I started to understand all the ways in which I'd reduced him to a stereotype and in turn reduced my own possibilities into a similar box. So when I turned to embrace that name, my name, Reginald Dwayne Betts, it is owning who I am. "Shahid Reads His Own Palm" is the title of the poems because frankly I am that too. But I hope that I'm moving to the point where what Dwayne sees and what the boy who became a man in prison saw are more closely aligned. I'd like to imagine not having to give up what that boy learned as I embrace fatherhood and manhood and freedom and being a husband and all those different understandings of who I am that would benefit from the naivete of a kid who did understand how much is in a name.
RF: In April this year you were appointed by President Obama to serve on the Federal Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice. You will serve for three years alongside some of the highest ranked members of the president's cabinet, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Health & Human Services Katherine Sebelius and former director of the CIA and now Secretary of the Department of Defense Leon Panetta. You are the first person appointed to this commission who has been affected by the system of justice that the council hopes to impact. How does it feel to now be in a position that oversees, as far as policy is concerned, the very people who sent you to jail? While, obviously, you will be working to push through a collective agenda, what one thing would you change if that was all you could do during your tenure?
RDB: I should be clear about the Federal Coordinating Council and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. There is important work done by OJJDP, and I'm fortunate to be a part of the system. Fortunate to work closely with really committed individuals -- but often it will not be a Leon Panetta or some of these other really high ranking officials at the meetings. There will be someone from their office -- and AG Holder makes it a point to chair the meetings as often as he can. But the work goes beyond the names of the people who attend the meetings, the work is, at the end of the day, done on a daily basis by people's names we never hear. I'm fortunate to be one of those nameless folks, particularly because my appointment demonstrates that at the very highest level of this nation, decision makers are saying that there is a point where you can redeem yourself and serve the public. But I wouldn't at all say that I am overseeing the people who sent me to jail, in fact I sent myself to prison when I carjacked a man. Of course I have issues with sending juveniles to prison with adults, but there is no way that I can view this appointment as a role reversal of any kind. I've just been fortunate enough that people have helped me train myself to be an effective advocate and consequently some of the work I've done was noticed. As far as agendas go -- to be honest, I have attended one meeting. It is far too early for me to say anything concrete about what I expect.
RF: After the murder of Trayvon Martin, writer Tayari Jones spoke on NPR about the way in which black mothers taught their sons how to "live in a world that fears them." Black girls, she says, learn to protect the men they loved by reminding their men to "keep cool, keep quiet." How does this climate of fear impact you as you not only as someone who knows what it is like to be judged so harshly by a criminal justice system that is biased against young black men, but as the father of two sons?
RDB: I don't really feel like I live in a climate of fear. I do feel like I live in a country where how much money my wife and I earn is crucial to the life we can provide for our sons. No, let me be more specific -- our income is crucial to our sons staying out of prison. The statistics bear it out, if you want a young black boy to stay out of prison -- make 70,000 or so dollars a year. And it sounds crass, but that income level will do all kinds of important things: change your school district, probably mean that you have some college, mean that you don't have to deal with the stress and overwhelming violence that often comes with poverty. This isn't to deny the persistent and pernicious impact that racism still has in the U.S., but it is to say that I'm aware of how someone with the successes I have had could easily act as if the problem is always race and then have race become a means to avoid the serious problems with education, income equity and frankly the cost of renting an apartment in America.
RF: You were an avid reader before you went to prison but you became a writer while you were there. As you continue your activism while also writing both poetry and prose, do you find that the narrative of social-justice pervades both forms? Do you ever actively choose to avoid those issues? Or do you feel that everything we have to say, so long as it is about our place in the world, must necessarily comment on the justice or lack thereof within it?
RDB: I think I just write what I'm focusing on, what is troubling me, what I want to think more about. In the past I haven't tried to confront certain issues with the justice system directly in poetry -- write poems that deal with juvenile certification, or the drug trade, etc. Now though, I feel like for the poems to be true to me they have to work those ideas in, because I know to do that, I'll end up challenging myself as a writer. I'll end up figuring out how to be poetic and not dogmatic, or how to be both. So many of the decisions that writers make now seem a product of a writing community -- I mean seem a product of imagining a writing communities response to that work. I think about this more, how to avoid this and how to write, not necessarily what I want to read, but work that makes people confront real tangible things in the world, as well as the fancy, as well as that personal "I" that's about so much emotion but so little of the weight of what brings leads a young man to have downcast eyes.
RF: You are a Cave Canem Fellow who has benefitted greatly from the mentorship that is the bedrock of the organization. In speaking about Cave Canem, you said that it is a system that allows younger poets to "access the elders in African American literature in a way that allows for the emergence of a (new) generation of black writers." To what extent do you think that creative work depends upon the practice of paying-it-forward not only to younger, newer writers but laterally, to your peers? What, if any, are the most necessary forms of support that one poet or writer can give to another?
RDB: This changes so much every day. Cave Canem is great for the opportunity it affords young writers. I've met some of the greatest poets Black America has ever produced and wouldn't change that for the world. I don't know though -- this idea of paying it forward is just what you do to be human. Or to be a good man, a good woman. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the writing. It's like -- Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricote have enabled a generation of young writers to imagine themselves as great, even if they are, if we are, at best mediocre. And this is good -- a space for mediocrity to live, to become the water from what emerges something that makes the average cat who doesn't read poems on a regular basis just shudder at the sense of something. That's what paying it forward is about, I think, creating a climate where excellence can be groomed. The most necessary forms of support one poet can give another? I have no idea. I have two children. I have bills. I have rent to pay and frankly, I have come to the realization that a lot of this is a show -- so maybe for me, the most necessary forms of support a poet can give another is the truth that writing a poem doesn't remove you from the world and that the world exists, just as importantly, in the mundane steps one takes to build a house, to build a home, to build a love. At the end of the day a poem is just words that my family can't eat. And so what the world dies from the lack of those words, the world dies much more quickly from the lack of bread. So learn how to do both, without reducing the work of either.
RF: Given the realities of your daily life as a father and husband, how do you feel about the this particular affirmation from Poetry and the "class of 2012" fellowship winners?
RDB: It's always nice to win fellowships and awards. More for me it's the understanding that this work of writing doesn't always lead to financial success, and so the fellowship is Poetry saying we believe in what you're doing enough to offer financial support. I appreciate that. But then too, it's this idea of audience, having it increase and having your work be, even if only for a minute, in the conversation with other writers of your generation. So for me I think about Rickey, whose work I dig, and I think about Jacob, who I just met but whose work I also enjoy -- and I recognize that now, Poetry has offered some folks the opportunity to see all of our work together in the context of this honor.]]>Cheryl Strayed: 'Wild' and Beautifultag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16608042012-07-11T18:46:12-04:002012-09-10T05:12:03-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/novel and two decades to make sense of that decision. When her collection of advice columns, Tiny Beautiful Things(Vintage, July 2012), is picked up by readers today, it will be easy to see that Strayed is a writer mature enough to celebrate the fact that Wild (Knopf, March 2012), has reached #1 on the NYT Bestseller list, but wise enough to be able to keep it real, to know that professional success is but a part of a complex, and often imperfect, yet brilliantly lit life.
RF: I have to get the big one out of the way: you brought Oprah Winfrey herself, the undisputed Monarch-Maker of writers, out of retirement. After two years without the book club, she said, "I was on the edge of my seat reading the book and I was like, 'Where is The Oprah Winfrey Show when you need to announce and tell everybody about this book? I need the book club.' So I created Book Club 2.0 for this book, Wild by Cheryl Strayed!" Would you like to take a bow on behalf of all the writers out there who would like to thank you for persuading her to reinstate Oprah's Book Club?
CS: I've been bowing every day since Oprah called me. I'm still stunned. I've been an Oprah fan since way back. I admire her tremendously. She's a totally self-made woman who trusts her passions and works her tail off, then she uses her success to do good in the world in so many directions. I'm grateful to her for picking Wild for her book club, but I'm more grateful for what she's done for American literature for years. When I spent the day with her I got to look her in the eyes and thank her for that.
RF: Your 1,100 mile solo hike through the Pacific Crest Trail of the United States was one you undertook in the wake of an abandoned love and the defining loss of your life, the death of your mother. You were devastated and felt utterly helpless, but there is a depth to the honesty of that solitary journey that speaks to a reservoir of courage that you obviously had in reserve. Few people choose to throw themselves into the wind that way, to truly cut close to the bone of their sorrow in order to understand it. Where did that strength come from?
CS: It's impossible to say. Why am I this way and you are that way and he is the other way and she is another way still? It's the mystery of the bones. On the first day of my son's life I wrote in my journal that he was sweet and tenacious and the funny thing is eight years later I would still use those two words to describe him foremost. Whatever reservoir I drew on when I decided to take my hike on the PCT and then did was probably with me from the beginning. I think my two qualities are that I was always ambitious and always emotionally awake. Maybe my mother saw that in me on the day I was born. Maybe she nurtured those things so they'd carry me forth when she was gone.
RF: In March, 2010, you assumed the identity of Sugar, and wrote the responses on the Dear Sugar column for the Rumpus.net. Your advice to a young female writer, "write like a motherfucker," generated a legion of followers to your column, as well as a line of swag like the mug that sits on my table right now. The more critical advice in that column, however, was this: "Writing is hard for every one of us. Coal mining is harder. Do you think coal miners sit around all day thinking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig." In another column you finished with these memorable words to someone who felt that they had been signaled out for a particularly lousy set of cards: "The fuck is your life. Answer it." Despite the country being in the throes of doing rather than perseverating endlessly -- the Occupiers are a case in point -- the literati seems to be thrumming with navel-gazers rife with self-pity. In an American publishing environment that is so full of opportunities from online venues to journals to self-publishing to seven-figure deals, what do you think accounts for this epidemic of self-centeredness?
CS: I understand why writers feel despair. It takes some time to become accustomed to the fact that the world isn't going to stand up and applaud the moment you've written your novel or memoir or blog or book of poems, but the sooner you do, the better off you'll be. The market isn't an accurate gauge of success when it comes to literature. Some great writing is rewarded by the market, but most is not. I know a lot of people will discount what I have to say about this because of the success I've had lately with Wild, but I've been at this for some time. Twenty-three years. And I'm telling you the truth when I say the most successful day in Wild's existence was the day I finished writing it. It's the success that means the most to me. It's the one I remember most vividly. It's the one I hold in my heart. I get as grumpy as the next person about how we fail to support artists, but the coolest thing about art is it's made by a bunch of people who would've done it whether you paid them or not. They did it for love. If you don't think that's a good enough reason to do it, don't bother.
RF: Seven million American girls and women suffer from eating disorders, and 20% of those suffering from anorexia will eventually die from complications associated with the disease, including heart failure and suicide. You have spoken about your relationship with food, your teenaged persuit of being "the skinny cute thing," and your comfort, as an adult, with your body and your love of food. In one of your columns you refer to the "distorted eyes of the all-knowing, woman-annihilating, ruthless beauty god who has ruled and sometimes doomed significant portions of our lives." How did you come to understand that the beauty god had feet of clay?
CS: I think I always knew it. I think we all know it. How can we not? It's so empty, so ugly. And yet, the struggle is how to allow that knowledge to manifest itself in our lives. It's one thing to say looks don't matter, to say we value what's inside rather than outside, but it's another thing to live it. It's not as if I never struggle with beauty, but the way I've managed to come to grips with those self-annihilating impulses is to decide, ultimately, that I will not annihilate myself. I won't starve myself thin. I won't have surgery so my breasts sit round and high on my chest for all of eternity. And I won't do these things even though I sometimes feel crappy about my body. The shift for me happened slowly over the years and it had everything to do with power, with letting go of the paltry power beauty grants girls and women and exchanging it for something else--a deeper kind of power, one that didn't come from others.
RF: One of my personal favorites from your Dear Sugar columns was this advice to a man trying to decide whether to become a father (Dear Sugar #71). You wrote, "I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore." In your writing what comes through is a human being who has marched without foreknowledge and, if not always with complete confidence, certainly with total immersion down each alley and highway -- and trail! -- that you stood before. If you could describe a sister life that could match the one you have, what shape would it take?
CS: My sister life would have to be the one in which I was not a mother, since it's motherhood that's most profoundly altered my daily existence as well as my life in the grander scheme of things. In that other, childless life I'd do all the things I love to do a whole lot more: write, read, travel, sleep, hike, poke around in thrift stores, hang out with my friends, have sex in the afternoons. Sometimes my husband and I will be on a walk together and we'll catch a glimpse through the windows of a tidy little place where it's clear no child lives -- maybe we'll spot someone sitting with a book in hand and hear a bit of jazz filtering out into the street and we'll say, "Remember that? Oh my God, remember?" I'd rather be a pile of dust than live without my children, but for my sister life I'll admit an occasional touch of longing.
RF: You have said that our work in life is to "build a house," one composed of a moral code that tells us exactly what to do in any given moment. Has there ever been a time, as a writer, when your own "house" seemed inhospitable or when, no matter how solid it seemed, the gray areas made it difficult for you to know "the right thing to do?"
CS: Life is gray, it's true, but when I wrote about "building the house" I wasn't writing about life in general. I was writing about the internal compass we all have, which can be a clearer, truer thing than life if we allow it to be. It can lead us through the gray. Most of the time when I feel conflicted, I see upon closer examination that it's really more of a situational contortion I've put myself in. I know what the "right thing" is, but I don't want to do it because it will disappoint someone or it will interrupt some misguided sense I have about who I'm supposed to be or I'll be attempting to justify my actions to myself, even when I know damn well what's what. Having said that, I'm still lost about a quarter of the time. Hence, the phrase "we are here to build the house," rather than "we are here to lounge around the house and drink margaritas."
RF: The columns collected in Tiny Beautiful Things, draw deeply from the width and depth of your life experience. Most of the time what a reader gets is not only a specific response to a specific question, but an insight into your way of being in the world, as well as you private world, particularly the one you have built with your husband, the film-maker, Brian Lindstrom, and your children. How do you reconcile the essential quality of privacy, or even secretiveness, that are the definition of intimacy between two people, and the way you share those moments with strangers in order to shine a light for them?
CS: I choose carefully. I don't tell every story. The art of personal storytelling is an art of omission and inclusion. What to tell, what not to tell; what is necessary for the story and what isn't. Because I write so openly and intimately about my personal life people often assume I've told them everything. But I haven't. There's a difference between my writing and my life; between knowing my work and knowing me.
RF: You often quote from an array of wonderful writers -- Tomas Transtromer,Carlo Levi,Louise Erdrich -- people whose words and, perhaps, ethic, see you through your own life. How important are your contemporaries, those people whose work though sometimes well known is hardly quotable in the larger world, to the work that you are doing now? Are there any among that group that hold you up or inspire you?
CS: Other writers are my lifeblood, especially my contemporaries, because not only do I have their beautiful words, but I also have the camaraderie of their existence. There are too many to list but you are high among them, Ru.
RF: You chose a name for yourself that reflected the things you didn't have in life -- a father, a mother, a home -- as well a the passion you did have -- to go forth in search of, to depart from the direct in favor of the unknown. How does the name Strayed (which I've always pronounced as Stry-ed!), suit you now that the course is a little more circumscribed both by choice and by your stature as a writer?
CS: When I chose my name I was leaning heavily on its meaning. It reflected my life then and it still does, though of course my life has changed. Like all good surnames, Strayed tells the story of where I came from. It's my heritage. I've settled into it. I'm not making a statement with it anymore and yet it tells you something about my origins, like any name does.]]>On Forgiveness: Natalie Serber's 'Shout Her Lovely Name'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16572872012-07-10T15:12:35-04:002012-09-09T05:12:04-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/Natalie Serber's collection, Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June, 2012) describes her contrary opinion regarding a book (set in Afghanistan, hint hint), selected by her suburban book club. She says she found "the novel's perfectly balanced shape boring, as if the novel itself had been raised in a confined space, like a veal calf." She prefers "messy to symmetrical, feral to polite, because isn't feral the truth?" This final story, so full of the feral -- an unapologetic teenaged son in flagrante before his mother's eyes, a teenaged daughter saying I love you or I fuck you, we can't tell, kids talking about cutting, cross-dressing and body-piercing -- is, however, the least of the stories in this absorbing collection. It confirms the narrator's assessment, that the feral, the messy, is the truth, but not when the writer sets out in search of it. Still, if this story is too full of the kind of detail culled from life, the little observations that seem quaint and anecdotal, witty and absurd but rarely translate with as much panache into written form, it makes the previous ten stand out all the more for Serber's masterful observation of the grit of human choice and circumstance.
Serber's main characters, Ruby and Nora, don't simply love, they ache for it, second-guessing themselves even as they fling themselves off the high cliffs of certitude toward the waiting arms of their imagined lovers, listening, as Ruby does, "for her name, for love, but (hearing) only syllables," as the men expend their bodies, but rarely their hearts, upon these women. The imagery in the stories that deal with the lives -- together and apart -- of these two characters is threaded, one to the other, and never more perfectly than in the sequences relating to the chaos and beauty of their womanhood. In 'Alone As She Felt All Day,' Ruby subsists on cereal and alcohol all summer, looks at her hipbones that "flared like conch shells beneath her skin (and) liked to imagine Marco pressing his ear to her, telling her he could hear the ocean." She tries to force herself to abort a pregnancy, and freshly abandoned by Marco, she swims through a choppy ocean and watches "her blood in the private red sky behind her eyelids," and longs for some of it, just a little, to flow out from between her legs. Much later, in 'Take Your Daughter to Work,' Nora -- the daughter who would not only refuse to be aborted but also escape being given up for adoption -- watches this same woman, her mother, elevate the legs of one of her students, Elena, trying to keep that blood in her, the blood that smells "like buried nails, sharp and old," trying to save a life.
Serber is gifted at the art of understatement, everything revealed with a sentence. In 'A Whole Weekend of My Life,' Nora, trying to convince her imagined father that she had "plenty of room for lawn mowers, half sisters and a dad," contemplates the grey smudges of smoke on the fan above the beds in their hotel room which they share for one night, and while she listens to him talk to his real family, she considers that "this must be the type of conversation someone would light a cigarette for." As an adult, as she walks past houses that contain other kinds of lives, Nora imagines "the loose connections of family in the hours between dinner and bed," in the smell of cooking onions, the flashes of blue light, the calls of "I'm in the kitchen," and the reader, knowing the highs and the much more numerous lows of Nora's life, yearns right along with her for such mundane normality, the kind of normalcy enjoyed, perhaps, by a father who has a new German wife, twin daughters and two basset hounds named Captian and Tennille, all packed into a ranch house in Fort Lauderdale.
In 'Plum Tree,' Ruby asks Nora "Are you happy?" And Nora (or is it Serber?) reflect thus: It was such a weird thing for a mother to ask. Therein lies the tension in these stories. It is what a mother who has not struggled as Ruby has -- with a drunken and abusive father, a mother who has embraced her victimhood, an unwanted pregnancy, errant lovers, single-parenthood, tough students with their own litany of woes -- may never need to ask, convinced that they have done all they can to be assured of an answer in the affirmative. Yet it is the question that outlasts every other question that a mother asks, not of her daughter, but of herself: Is she happy? (And, if not, am I to blame? Could I make her happy?) It is the question that a daughter often answers, often wordlessly, with a yes, as grown up Nora does to an aging alcoholic Ruby who dislikes Nora's choice of partner, the steady, loving older man, the daddy-finally-found.
There is an element of the miraculous in a collection of stories whose characters reveal the fundamental predicament of all parents and children: to make new mistakes that, inevitably, leave us with few joys and deep regrets. To swear, as Ruby does, to defy her mother's manthra, to "learn to shift my expectations, to learn that some things in life you just have to put up with," and, decades later, end up with a daughter her own age who looks at Ruby, her "mother with a terrible sense of direction" -- in all possible iterations of that word, we've come to learn -- and says "I've never been young, Mom." Five simple words more damning than any speech full of reference to specific incident could ever be. At the end of that particular story, 'Rate My Life,' Nora sets out to dismantle her 'good' life such that the next day, when she returns to the man who is willing to do for her what Marco had never been willing to do for her mother, "she would be unforgivable." As is every character in this collection including the first, the title story, a stand-alone meditation of a mother observing her daughter sinking into the quick-sand of anorexia, within sight but out of reach. That story is also the one that gives us the texture of forgiveness that every flawed character in this collection ultimately receives from the people who love them. It ends with these words: " Open your arms wide. Your daughter is getting nearer. Know that it is up to her. Say her lovely name. Know that it is up to her. Shout her lovely name."
Serber, a mindful, competent writer, one clearly writing not from some high plane of solitude but from within the mess of life, guides us lightly to the end of this collection and leaves us there, holding on to a single, profound truth: nothing that anybody does is traceable entirely to the people who raised them; it is up to them to live, to evolve, to hurt and be hurt. To be as unforgivable as they are -- as we all are -- deserving of forgiveness.]]>Ted Conover: On Traveling and Being Free Behind Barstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15428562012-05-24T13:53:46-04:002012-07-24T05:12:07-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/Ted Conover's book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random House, 2000), came out, a Pew report found that 1 in 100 Americans were behind bars. Although the overall prison population has declined in each of the last three years under the Obama Administration, time has not improved conditions for individuals incarcerated behind particular or general prison walls. Just yesterday, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), filed a complaint about the abuse of female prisoners at Wetumpka, Alabama. According to the EJI, there are close to 2.3 million prisoners in the country today, and the statistics for African American men in particular are grim, being jailed at six times the rate of white alleged perpetrators of crimes and one third of them likely to spend time in prison.
What, exactly, could a writer of non-fiction bring to this equation that highlights injustice far more than it serves fairness? First, it seems, a long history of immersing himself in the lives of those who people his books. Born in 1958 in Okinawa, Japan, Conover grew up in an affluent Denver neighborhood, but in 1980, after three years of studying anthropology at Amherst, he took a leave from college and rode the rails as a hobo for his senior thesis. The result was Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America's Hoboes (Viking, 1984). Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America's Illegal Aliens, (Vintage Books, 1987) a book that grew out of his understanding that Mexican farm workers were the "new American hoboes," followed to critical acclaim. In describing his work, Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review of Coyotes for the New York Times, that Conover combines "a sociologist's eye for detail with a novelist's sense of drama and compassion." It is a mix of journalistic integrity and personal generosity that has served him well and brought Conover much attention for his in-depth reporting about the issues of our times in articles for The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker,National Geographicand VQRamong others. Conover went on to write about the lives of the priviledged at Aspen, in Whiteout: Lost in Aspen (Random House, 1991) and, nearly nine years later, after having been denied access to research the lives of the guards at Sing Sing, he applied for and obtained employment at the prison. This past week, Conover returned to Sing Sing as a guest.
RF: In order to write Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, you served as a guard at New York's Sing Sing, a maximum security prison. You have spoken about the fact that although you couldn't help sometimes seeing things the way your fellow guards did, a terrible version of us v. them where you were the good guys, you returned home to your family after most shifts, a journey which brought back nuance to your world view. What was it like to return to Sing Sing as a visitor this time around?
TC: I never expected to go back -- Newjack is still considered contraband, until authorities redact the pages they don't like. It's pretty much been radio silence since the Department told factcheckers from the New Yorker, "He didn't get our permission to write his book and so we're not going to help make sure it's factual." That said, I spent a lot of time there, and have been curious.
The first familiar face I saw was that of Tawana Ellerbe, the darling of my class at corrections academy, who supervised the guests passing through security. She was glad to see me, and vice versa -- there has never been bad blood between me and most officers. And I must say, though the prison remains a horrible place in my memory, the occasion was a good one. The play I saw, an adaptation of Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men, was acted almost entirely by prisoners. It was well-done, and moving. I blogged about the ten minutes afterwards when the actors were allowed to approach the edge of the stage and shake hands and otherwise meet members of the audience. It was the most joy I've ever felt in a prison setting.
RF: As a writer of non-fiction, your credibility is based on your deep and often difficult commitment to living the story you are trying to write. To what extent, then, can the writer of fiction who is addressing similar themes of war and change, who is intentionally fictionalizing history and has often not "lived through" the events about which he or she is writing about, contribute to our understanding of "how things really were/are?" Is there a real divide between the two forms when they address past or current historical events, or does each contribute something different to our news of the world?
TC: That's a hard question. To me there's no substitute for actually being in a place -- eating, speaking, walking, breathing there. On the other hand, there's no guarantee that by merely visiting you'll "get it." And there's no substitute for the kind of deep engagement from afar that (for instance), you've had with Palestine.
When Newjack came out I was invited to a television game show called To Tell The Truth. Four celebrity panelists and the studio audience listened to opening statements and then asked questions to suss out who was "the real undercover prison guard" -- me or two impostors. I spent nearly three hours before the show in a room with my impostors, waiting our turn in the studio. (Ahead of us were a tour guide from tornado country, the dog trainer from the TV show Frazier, and the president of the National Nerd Society.) I was intrigued by my impostors' opposing strategies. One wanted to know everything about me (in exhaustive detail!). The other, who eventually had to leave the room, wanted to know nothing -- he thought that he could make up a convincing, coherent story of his own and that the fewer of "the facts" he knew, the less vulnerable he would be to contradicting himself. Both seemed to me reasonable approaches -- one was nonfiction, and the other was fiction. (As it turned out, the first impostor received the most votes -- but that may also be because he just looked more like people's ideas of a prison guard!)
RF: In an essay titled, 'My Life as a Guard' (New York Times, May 7th, 2007), you reflected on the implications of the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib. You wrote that, "... the true test of the officer, the system and indeed the nation (is): how will you treat those who are helpless before you?" and you go on to make a very clear connection between the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and those at Abu Ghraib as well as the culpability of the president under whose watch these events happened. Do you often find yourself compelled to use what the knowledge that you have gained through your research, (essentially "insider information"), to speak out against the apparent injustices of our time?
TC: I worked as a guard at the close of the 20th century. The 9/11 attacks took place at the dawn of the 21st, and I was struck by the way incarceration issues loomed so large in their aftermath. Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, "black sites" and "extraordinary rendition" -- all are key to the so-called war on terror and all have to do with incarceration. So yes, my life as a guard gave me some unexpected authority when it comes to assessing my country's conduct of this war.
RF: While researching Rolling Nowhere, you jumped the freight trains, going from being distrusted and robbed by the hoboes you were writing about to making a place for yourself in their lives. In Coyotes, you had yourself smuggled across the Mexican/American border and worked on a ranch to experience life as an undocumented worker. In Newjack, you learned what it was like to be part of a mostly white corps of guards simultaneously in charge and in fear of a mostly black prison population. You cross the line between anthropologist/observer and active creator of narrative. How do you reconcile the tension between being an investigative journalist, a compassionate humanist and an ordinary guy with an exit-route built into the adventure?
TC: The tensions are part of what makes it interesting, and they don't always get reconciled. My first-person character is very important to the story -- I want readers to experience vicariously what I felt, whether it's doing push-ups as punishment in the training academy, frisking a prisoner outside the mess hall or driving home on the day I got punched in the head. I studied anthropology and I practice ethnography; they inform much of my writing. But they take a back seat to the storytelling, to communicating with my readers. I try to be evenhanded in my descriptions -- but participation lends a subjectivity that I think is important, that "keeps it real."
RF: In your new book The Routes of Man (Knopf, 2010), you visit six roads that have changed the place and culture into which they've been set: Peru, the West Bank, East Africa, China, Nigeria and East Africa. You lay out your themes by way of introduction: "development vs. the environment, isolation vs. progress, military occupation, transmission of disease, social transformation, and the future of the city." In every instance, the road itself becomes a character, imbued with the motives of those who paved it (those who support the harvesting of mahogany in Peru), those who are permitted to use it (Israelis but not Palestinians), and those whose lives will be absorbed more swiftly into the not-usually-equitable global give and take (the teenagers of Jammu and Kashmir). In what way has your own traversing of these and other roads transformed the conduct of your life? Do you find yourself in possession of a greater understanding of the political events in the places where you've visited and written about, or drawn to deeper research about some aspect that was revealed while you were there?
TC: I like to think I'm a bit wiser and more worldly than before I began the book. I'm also, strange though it sounds to say it, less fearful; I saw some scary things but many more that inspired me. As for one thing leading to another-that happens all the time. Riding the rails, for example, I kept meeting Mexicans doing the same thing. The American hoboes said they weren't hoboes at all ("they're just Mexicans") but clearly they had everything in common with an earlier generation of tramps, recent immigrants riding freights in search of work. Mexican immigration, of course, is a big story in the U.S. and when I realized Mexicans would talk to me, I felt as if I had opened a door in my modest house and discovered a huge new room. My book Coyotes was the eventual result.
An experience I had while working at Sing Sing was similarly behind The Routes of Man. I'd been assigned to a transportation detail -- driving an inmate, a gang member, to a new prison after he'd gotten in a fight. The new place was several hours away and we stopped for a meal when it got dark. He'd been silent until then but over our fast food he started talking about the big trucks parked all around us. That's what he wanted to do when he got out of prison, he said -- get a job driving one of those, and just keep going. It immediately made sense to me, travel as the opposite of incarceration, as a corrective.
RF: Writer and one-time editor of the New York Herald TribuneBurton Rascoe once said that, "a news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life -- what people are interested in. That's journalism." What people are interested in, however, is often defined by the breadth of their own personal experence, their reading, and their intellect and, therefore, the journalist/essayist must balance that reality with the desire to be true to their subject when they write. Your essays have appeared in most of the publications that a politically conscious and literary readership holds in high esteem and you have taught at America's premier graduate programs in journalism. What rule/s do you feel should govern the reporter who finds himself writing a story that has not been told by a native of the place, and yet holds greater currency in the minds of the American public and, therefore, the ability to color the impression of a place/event?
TC: The great strength of the ethnographic approach is the importance it places on local meanings. A journalist who embraces it learns to ask: how does this matter to you? What do outsiders fail to grasp about this place? She makes the local people her teacher.
The challenge for me, of course, is that the American public is not always hungering for the perspective of powerless people far away. So the journalist must engage in the art of the possible. How to write about AIDS in Africa? Take a long trip with somebody who has been implicated in the spread of the disease -- and who has an analog in the USA. Long-distance truckers, for instance. See how they live. See what they know. Learn why they would engage in risky behavior. Try to make sense of it, and try to depict them as people a reader might feel he can know. It takes time, which is a luxury in journalism, and it takes space in a publication, which is seldom abundant, and it can take money. But it's what we should aspire to.]]>Poetry for the 99 Percenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15256192012-05-17T17:53:25-04:002012-07-17T05:12:20-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/National Poetry Month. The month usually dawns with the usual list of celebrations by the usual list of suspects: events scheduled by the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets and, of course, mayoral proclamations regarding the value of poetry. In this era when we have our numerical abbreviation for our common predicament, the 1% v. the 99%, it seems fitting that the good folk over at the Y/A Review Network (YARN), decided to take their effort to a new audience, a range of mostly unsung citizen-poets, each bound to the other by the ties that make or break a movement. I talked with Colleen Oakley about their initiative.
Freeman: First of all, what, exactly, is YARN?
Oakley: YARN, is an online literary journal that publishes the short fiction, poetry, and essays of aspiring teens and adults alongside established writers like Alisa Libby,Mitali Perkins, and Tomas Mournian. We also interview luminaries like Barry Lyga and Meg Cabot about their approaches to the writing process. We offer classroom lesson plans and cultivate a reading and writing community through our editors' blogs and annual writing projects, including our National Poetry Month series. In 2011, YARN was honored for these efforts with an Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation.
The Founding Editor of YARN, Kerri Majors, was writing a Y/A short story and discovered there weren't any venues where adults could publish short-form Y/A, and teens had only a handful of options. A digital magazine seemed the perfect fit for the Y/A demographic, so Kerri founded YARN with the help of Shannon Marshall, a high school English teacher. I taught with Kerri at Fairleigh Dickinson University at the time, so they brought me on board as the poetry editor.
Freeman: How did this particular project get started?
Oakley:YARN has a tradition of developing projects that get our readers involved as writers, from our lighthearted "cookie and candy poem drive" to our co-contest with Figment. We've also had poets like Nikki Grimes and Samantha Schutz write fresh pieces for previous YARN's NPM events, and readers loved them.
So for this year's NPM project, I decided to combine the two: We'd commission notable poets to write poems exclusively for YARN, and then ask those poets to solicit new work from their own writing networks. I invited a handful of writers I knew -- starting in Maine and Alaska, with several states in between -- to write a poem inspired by Donald Justice's "Crossing Kansas by Train" and Ravi Shankar's :Crossings." Those writers then "commissioned" poets across state lines to write a poem in response to their own. The goal was to create a genetic and geographic lineage of poems crisscrossing country through poet-sourcing.
Freeman: Did things turn out as you hoped?
Oakley:The project took on a life of its own. We were hoping to reach all 50 states. We made it to almost 40 poets with a few repeat states. I'm glad it wasn't the perfect 50. I didn't want to micromanage the chain mail of poems; the joyful chaos of poets creating their own online community became more interesting. If I had really needed 50, I could have individually commissioned 50 poets. But I find it more satisfying that the poets commissioned themselves and we followed (literally, on a Google map) the trail of poems as they crisscrossed the nation.
We gathered -- well, the poets themselves gathered -- an incredible array of talent, diversity and writing styles, including a visual poet (Leila Monaghan). It turns out that friends-of-poets are a safe bet for quality and craft. They were also incredibly gracious, generous with their time, and easy to work with, to boot.
I am amazed by the quality of craft we saw coming in. We took every poem exactly as it was submitted -- and each one felt finished, needing no editing. This is remarkable given that the entire project took place in fewer than six weeks; many of these poets wrote the poems in a few days or less. I think you can sense the urgency and energy in these poems. I don't know if that came from the quick deadlines, the desire to please the friends who requested the poems or the adventure of producing something half-blind... these poets had seen only their preceding poem, not the whole chain of poems to which their work belonged.
Freeman: Were they linked thematically or by style?
Oakley: The resulting poems cover a vast landscape stylistically, and yet shared themes thread through them all. All the poets at the beginning of each chain used the theme of "crossings" and beyond that our only criteria for each poem was that it be a response to the one before it. I expected the themes to fan out from there, but I was genuinely surprised to see crossing remain strong throughout entire chains of poems. Coming of age, traditions and objects passing through generations, loss and love -- these threads of themes were great for our Y/A audience.
Stylistically, some poets used syntax and sounds of their predecessors (Sara Taddeo, a Maine-based writer, honored both Donald Justice's and Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's "oohs") while many in the Alaska chain took exact lines from their preceding poems. As each new chain was published, we also discovered that poets from one chain knew poets in others from contexts outside of YARN. This became a six-degrees of separation game for poets.
Freeman: Almost everybody who writes, whether or not they consider themselves to be poets, yearn for community. Do you have any thoughts to share about how your work with this project may hold some lessons for them?
Oakley: Considering that we did not know who might be invited to join the project, we really trusted our first poets. And they and their poet friends, in turn, trusted us. Many of them admitted to me that it was not easy to write a poem for a large project in which they were just one piece of the puzzle. For many, this was their first foray into writing for a Y/A audience, as well. They took enormous creative leaps.
So my take-aways were, first, that it was important to have an original prompt to get things started, and then to let the participants generate forward momentum. Secondly, that being able to have a light touch, to be able to let go of almost all control, generates solid work from the widest and most diverse range of poets possible, in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds (an electrician in North Carolina to the usual academics), to their ethnicity: a Tagalog interpreter in San Francisco (in fact, three Filipinas, who could have arranged that by trying?!), two Eskimo natives, and on and on. Just look at the bios/photos. Not a bad reflection of America. Third, it is important to trust each others' networks and poetic karma. Our poet friends have very talented poet friends. Among those who happened along was a Donald Justice Prize Winner, Ned Balbo, very appropriate considering we started the whole thing with a Justice poem, a Philip Levine Prize winner, Angela Narciso Torres, and a Vassar Miller Prize winner, Gibson Fay Le-Blanc, as well as Fellows from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Freeman: Final thoughts?
Oakley: The creative results of the NPM project became a collective AND independent work of art. The work on this project was both collaborative and one-one-one on all levels, from creating the prompt, commissioning the poets and generating new work, one poet to another. We're planning to show-case the project and some of the poets at an AWP event in Boston, in 2013.]]>Tayari Jones Knows Why She Singstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14960282012-05-09T15:37:59-04:002012-07-09T05:12:04-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/Tayari Jones. That is when her third novel, Silver Sparrow (Algonquin, 2011), which deals with the two families created by a single man, came out in paperback. To kick-off the whirlwind of reading and speaking engagements, her publisher has released the first chapter, which can be read online here. An NEA fellow and a winner of a United States Artists Foundation grant, Jones is no stranger to the publishing world. Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, (Warner Books, 2002), about the child murders of 1979-81, won the Hurston/Wright Award for debut fiction, and her second, The Untelling (Grand Central Publishing, 2006), about a family that suffers a car accident which kills the father and one of the three daughters, won the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices. Silver Sparrow is blazing a new path for Jones, who took some time to talk about her work, the writing life and future plans.
RF: Silver Sparrow was nominated for a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work: Fiction. What did it mean to be recognized by the NAACP in this manner?
TJ: This meant quite a lot to me personally because my parents actually met at an NAACP meeting in Urbana Illinois in 1962. It was a wonderful full-circle moment for me. I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight. I am proud to be a member. It was also a kind of topsy-turvy experience to be honored at a Hollywood awards show. It was like opposite day. Writers on the red carpet? Flashbulbs popping in my eyes? It was a lot of fun, and an honor to be nominated. (As a novelist, who would think I would have occasion to ever say that?)
RF: Many writers find their inspiration comes from looking toward the home of their hearts, as yours does, an effort that Salmon Rushdie once describes as "looking into a broken mirror," because the picture cannot be entirely accurate. How do you travel that emotional distance, between where you are and where you once were, when you write?
TJ: Honestly, the "how" of this is very mysterious. When I write, I don't feel that the mirror is broken. When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess. A hallucination. It's only when I am reading over what I have written, after it has a chance to sit, that I see the ways that it is art, or artifice.I often say that I like to write about characters who feel like they live in the world, not like they live in a book. I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names, or places I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest. The way that a reader likes to get "lost in a book," blurring the experience between the story and reality -- that's how I like to feel when I am writing. I don't know how I do it exactly, but I am very grateful when it happens. Each time feels like a gift.
RF: You say -- and I agree -- that it is the personal stories that determine the "unofficial history of a neighborhood, community and nation." We could argue that both, the re-imagination of historical events (as in your first book), and the imagining of a fictional cast of characters (as in your second), by a writer who is sensitive to her role as a translator (to the world outside the place/events), give us a portrait of a culture and a nation. Did you feel that your approach to the first was markedly different from your approach to the second?
TJ: My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African American children dead. Two of these were students from my elementary school. People often think of me as reimagining history -- but I was there. To me, it doesn't feel like recreating. It feels like memory, like bearing witness. So the process of writing both books felt the same to me. The challenge for me is to remember that relationship between the characters is why I'm here, not to use the characters as a way to express my worldview. It requires a lot of restraint. I have to almost forget that anyone is going to read the books, or that I have any obligation to anyone or anything but the story. I have to trust the characters to do the ideological heavy lifting by themselves. At a conference, I once heard Katharine Dunn say, "What you know doesn't mean write what you already know." I look at a story as a way of deepening my understanding of a subject. I have gone into a project with one opinion and come out of it with a new way of thinking.
RF: In 2010 you joined the boycott of Arizona, in protest against SB1070 which penalizes non-Whites. In your letter you wrote, "That people should be legally required to show proof of citizenship is similar to the antebellum mandate that black people produce 'free papers' proving themselves not to be slaves." Recently, after the Trayvon Martin murder, you were on NPR speaking to the fact that young Black girls watch as "our mothers groom our brothers to live in a world that feared them... We, too, were in training, learning to protect the men we loved." Many writers avoid the activist role despite having one of the best tools -- words -- at their disposal. What makes you different? What gives you the courage to raise your voice against social injustice?
TJ: I think all artists are activists, whether they know it or not. The ones who think they are avoiding it, are activists for the status quo. I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated. I never made a decision. It was how I was brought up. It's what I believe. I don't think it takes courage to stand up. If I fear anything, I fear being silent, because I fear the consequences of that silence.
RF: You maintain a very thorough blog in which you comment on a range of issues including the craft of fiction. Right now you are in the midst of writing your fourth and one of the pieces of advice you give is to ignore bad writing in a first draft, to remember that it is "a place holder" until you come up with something better in revision. What is the best writing advice you have ever received?
TJ: The best advice I ever received was to "do whatever you have to do to survive the draft." The same person said, "Once you write it, you can fix it." So often fear can keep a person from putting the pen to the paper. And if the fear chokes you before you have drawn your first breath, all is lost.
RF: Back to Silver Sparrow, where you give us a story that has, at its heart, a secret -- the two lives of a bigamist -- but whose story is revealed through its daughters. What made you choose to tell this story from their perspective rather than their mothers who were, themselves, victims of both the honor code the man imposed upon himself (you get a girl pregnant, you marry her), and their social milieu (with no access to birth control).
TJ: I chose to narrate the story through the eyes of the daughters because they are my generational peers. I am very interested in the mentality of my generation of African-American women. We are the heirs to so much change -- the gains of civil rights and the gains of the women's movement. We are living unprecedented lives and we must draw our own maps. Each novel I have written is such a map.That said, I want to add that just because I didn't choose to use the mother's point of view, it doesn't mean that I wasn't interested in their stories. I suppose I was just as interested in the girls as daughters of their mother's trauma. Look at how the mother views the Pill as a panacea that will solve the problem of their daughters' sexuality. And no doubt, access to contraception does save the girls from their mothers' fate, but there is more to healthy sexuality than avoiding pregnancy. It's almost like the girls have the 2.0 version of their mothers' problems.
RF: Do you think you will remain in the immeasurably complex environs of the South, Atlanta in particular, for your new novel?
TJ: I love writing about Atlanta, Georgia. I was born there and it delights me that upon meeting me, people sometimes say, "Are you from Atlanta?" I know a lot of writers fear being "pigeonholed" by region and fear the label "Southern writer," but for me, it feels like an apt description. I actually think fear of labels can make a person write a book that's less interesting, shooting for that holy grail of "universal," which is really just a marketing conceit. I like to write a story that could not have happened in any other place, but where it is set. In Silver Sparrow, on more than one occasion in the book, someone says, "Atlanta ain't nothing but a country town, and everybody knows everyone." I like the idea that Atlanta, one of the country's largest cities, only has about two and a half degrees of separation between its citizens. I also find the setting of Atlanta to be incredibly rich. Like many Southern cities, it wears its history on its sleeve. For me, stories exists in the place where present and past collide. In Atlanta, this happens on every street corner.
I am starting to feel a bit of the distance these days. I have been living in the New York area for several years now. I am working on a new novel, and the characters are staying quite close to home. I wonder if it is because the story is set in current-day Atlanta and I need to go back there for a long visit -- a year or more -- to relearn the lay of the land.
Tayari Jones was born in Atlanta and is currently a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University, where she is researching her fourth novel. She is a graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University. ]]>Chang-rae Lee on War, Alienation, and the Power of Readingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13463742012-03-15T13:36:47-04:002012-05-15T05:12:01-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/Man Asian Literary Prize, until Thursday evening, March 15th, when the name will be announced at a ceremony in Hong Kong, so here's the next best thing: an interview with one of the judges, Pulitzer Prize-nominated fiction writer, Chang-rae Lee.
Five of the seven books that made the shortlist for this year's are noted for themes that are deeply political: the first Pakistani novel to have been nominated, 80-year-old Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon (Riverhead), a novel that was written 30 years ago in what has been deemed a pre-Taliban era, and which has been noted for its relevance to our present moment; Amitav Ghoush's River of Smoke, which takes on the Opium Wars of 1840 and the secession of Hong Kong to British rule; Lang Yianke's Dream of Ding Village (Grove, Atlantic), which offers a scathing criticism of single-party rule, free-market forces informed by the Chinese communist machine and its culture all manifested in the unintended infliction of HIV in small communities; Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mom (Knopf), which, whether by design or chance, raises the question of whether progress in South Korea carries a price that is too high as well as a version of rural life in that country; Rahul Bhattachary's The Sly Company of People Who Care (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which brings us a rare vision of Guayana's colonial past and present, with the influx of Indian 'coolies' and emancipated slaves keeping step with his diamond-seeking protagnoist.
Politics, it seems, is inescapable for a the best writers of our time, the ones whose work we read not only for the beauty of their stories but for the social commentary that underlies the work. And, appropriately, the politics of life, of war and violence, form the backbone of much of the writing of Chang-rae Lee.
RF: You often return to the themes of war and its dislocations in your novels, for example,A Gesture Life (1999) where, among other events, your protagonist, the Korean-born "Dr. Hata" who lives in the US, is haunted by the memory of his service with the Japanese Army in Burma, and, most recently, The Surrendered (2010) where June Singer, a Korean orphaned by the war, and forever defined by it, sets out with the father of her son, Hector Brennan, an American, ex-G.I., to look for her son. You write about violence the way some other writers write about sex, with unflinching attention to the details. To what do you attribute your skill in handling the painful subjects or war and violence?
CRL: I think your use of the word 'dislocations' pretty well describes my approach to writing such scenes. For I don't conceive of violence as possessing its own life or character. We all know that violence has no such presence, that it exists solely as a reflection of who we are. It's the enacted mirror, if a deforming one, and as such I try to focus on the psyche's engagement of the act, whether in commission or witness, and how this engagement takes us out of time and place, and ultimately, perhaps, far beyond who we believe we are as moral beings.
RF: You have said that you are "fascinated by people who find themselves in positions of alienation or some kind of cultural dissonance... people who are thinking about the culture and how they fit or don't fit into it." Indeed, in Native Speaker, your protagonist Henry Park, the son of Korean immigrants, spies on the community from which he hails, a voyeur who "translates" the culture in a sense, for his employers. You moved to the U.S. when you were three and having lived here since, it seems impossible to imagine that you are anything other than wholly American. Do you feel that complete assimilation is ever possible, or are we always tied to the people who look and act and think like us because we share a cultural legacy?
CRL: I don't believe complete assimilation is possible, at least not for anyone who has an active, open mind. Every step, every entry into the flows of existence can be seen as a beginning, a commencement of a brand new way of seeing oneself in the world. This is the case for everyone. Of course those of us who grew up on the threshold of cultures perhaps have a more developed sense of this 'being in a world' as opposed to simply 'being'; we are more conscious of the character of the realm, more skeptical of its sway, we have private quarrels with it and ourselves, and all this adds up to, I think, a special form of solitude. We would, like anyone, wish to belong truly and deeply but we know we can't, not wholly, not ever. It's when we try to fix our positions vis-à-vis the culture, when we try to deny the unceasing, dynamic nature of the exchange, that tragedies arise, whether it's in the soul of one person or an entire nation.
RF: The novel you are working on now is set in the future in "B-mor," which refers to the place that used to be Baltimore, where, in your novel, the descendants of Chinese nationals have been resettled. (Readers can listen to the opening pages here. Scroll to the Lectures & Readings, 2011, and click on the 8th choice; Chang-rae Lee's reading is at around the 30:13 mark). You write fiction and, obviously, the stories you have written so far are imagined; nonetheless, they are "recognizable" to your readers. What made you want to shift away from the places and times that are familiar to you and create wholly fictional ones?
CRL: I don't actually think that I'm writing about the unfamiliar in this new novel. Sure, what's different is that it's set in a time and place that has not yet been, but aside from that the novel addresses quite familiar concerns, at least to me: the relationship between communal and individual identity, the nature of work and class, the legacies of race and culture. That said, I'm quite enjoying the different kinds of inventing that this story requires, as one can engineer whatever set of circumstances necessary for pushing story and character, which is of course what one does in any fiction; but in this one I find myself dreaming more widely about the realm, and feeling kind of unmoored, if in a peculiar and wonderful way, which only heightens the dreaming.
RF: The Surrendered was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and, also, the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011. Upon receiving the award you said, "... literature endures because in order to thrive... we (need to) make ourselves vulnerable to the difficult and beautiful truths of our humanity, to remind us we are one." America has a strong tradition of publishing work that deals with these topics as well as those that are bring other lands and other realities into focus and yet as a nation it has waged more war than the entire world combined. Is that a reflection of a non-reading, TV-focussed culture or the reflection of a culture whose domestic and foreign bias is toward aggression or something else entirely?
CRL: We are a bipolar society, at once capable of such far-reaching vision and impossible blindness, of such grand idealism and rank bigotry and callousness, and I think in great part this 'state of being' is a function of our power and position in the world, unprecedented in history, which may in essence be untenable, and certainly one given to hubris. And while I would like to think that 'reading-oriented' cultures (certainly ours is not) would tend to be more knowing, sensitive, and constructively engaged with the Other, the record of world history, its perennial cycles of colonialism and racism and even genocide, shows this not to be the case. So what are we Americans to do? I sometimes fear that we won't change until our position in the world significantly changes, that only when we're more vulnerable and subject to outside powers will our influence be more moderate, more consistently humane and aligned with our stated ideals.
RF: You are the director of the creative writing program at Princeton University and you have taught for most of your adult life. What do you feel is your greatest responsibility as a teacher? Your greatest challenge?
CRL: I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm. This is not to say that I'm not tough on my students sometimes, especially the talented ones. I try to be as honest as possible, not by berating or humiliating them, but by calling it as I see it, as it were, with the understanding that I don't consider myself any kind of final authority, that my word is not the last. I think they get a clear picture of my opinions, and then it's up to them to do with them what they wish. As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately. They're so focused on the writing, and too often just work intensely at that, when in fact they should write less and read much, much more than they have been accustomed to in this e-culture of ours.]]>Notes From AWP 2012tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13197552012-03-05T13:12:13-05:002012-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Annual Conference in any year is an unwieldy, slippery beast that grows tentacles and Gorgon heads before ones eyes. You arrive intending to do X, Y and Z and you end up discovering an alphabet in Chinese characters. You dress up to attend the kickiest party of the conference, the VIDA fundraiser, you end up foraging for bar-stools in a pub where talk turns to book deals won and lost, houses burning down and the complications of unexpected surgeries. You say you're done, you're off to bed at ten and somehow you don't make it there until 3:30 a.m. by which point you shower for the next day since you have a meeting at 7:45 a.m. with a lady you don't want to piss off. And yet, somehow, you do see everybody you intended to except for one or two or three. Best of all, with each succeeding year, you learn how to navigate the conference. You don't dart from panel to panel like a deranged bat trapped at a raquetball tournament, you set time aside to talk to human beings (not their iterations as editors and publishers and sellers of broadsides), and, when in doubt, err on the side of watching out for your friends. So, fresh from AWP, here are a few lessons learned and cool words from people who know these things:
On Writing Evil (from The Center for Fiction reading)
1. To issue evil to others while denying it in ourselves is to imagine that evil is "solvable." (Paul Harding)
2. If you delineate notions of good and evil you do the work of the devil, so to speak. (Marilynne Robinson)
3. You do not write about evil so much as you write about the management of evil. (Ha Jin)
On Writing (from the Asian American Writers' Workshop panel)
1. Being the owner of a cat with no tail named Ziggy is the hall mark of a fabulous writer. If you do not own this cat, you may try some other routes to greatness. Break down the sentences of a paragraph into an excel spread-sheet, work on each one to make it perfect, then bring them back into a word document and read it for flow. Repeat. Never let a horrific sentence exist in the world, even if it only exists on your own computer. Most of all, do not "try to write a novel," but rather, practice being a writer who happens to be working on a novel. (Nami Mun)
2. Try to write the anti-novel with no setting, no race, no plot, no story. Realize that this is not going to work. Distract yourself with celebrity blogs and 'The Singing Detective,' and, of course, The Battle for Wesnoth. If the distraction is pleasurable, abandon it. The internet is the new alcoholism. Go back to figuring out how to move a character from one room to another. Understand that this movement is unimportant. Don't let the way we use words to protect ourselves get in the way of vulnerability and urgency. (Ken Chen)
3. If you have just completed an MFA, you need to un-insert the rod in your rear (okay, fine! he didn't use those very words!), by rediscovering ordinary life. If you don't remember how to do this, watch baseball. Write a complete story while watching baseball. This is the first story you will write that has a sense of humor in it. Remember that you can't have an aggressive relationship with your novel. It is a psychological and spiritual process. Having a desk arranged in geometric precision, however, will surely help. (Don Lee)
On Non-Fiction
1. In writing an essay, one is continuously in a process of discovery, finding the connections and pursuing the leads. The writer's particular eye, her uniqueness, these things create the form that is chosen when fashioning the non-fiction material that has been collected. It is that particularity that makes the project creative. (Sven Birkerts)
2. If a project takes a great deal of time, the person you are shifts and, therefore, the creative vision that you bring to the material will also shift. (Eula Biss)
3. Read these authors: Sarah Manguso, (The Two Kinds of Decay), D. H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature), Ann Carson (Glass, Irony and God), Eula Biss (Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays), Kevin Young (The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness), and, when it is published, Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams:Essays in Pain) These recommendations came from Robert Polito.
4. Arrow is a great word. Slant is better. (Fiona McCrae)
5. If you do not know why someone is "the way they are," dig deeper. Erase yourself in order to learn about what you are writing. If you immerse yourself in the lives of people who become your friends, show them your work before it goes to print. Sharing this work does not mean handing over editorial decision, it is simply a matter of respect. (Robin Hemley, Melissa Pritchard,Joe Mackall, Christopher Merrill)
If you have the priviledge of writing, grip it like a baseball bat and swing it at social injustice as hard as you can. (Stephanie Elizondo Griest)
On Life
The answer is yes! Nikki Giovanni, in conversation with Thomas Sayers Ellis, reflecting on the path and detours of her life. Whenever someone asks you to do something, just say yes.
On AWP
The organizers move ever closer to Philadelphia. The Pennyslvania Convention Center has over 1 million sq. feet of space, 528,000 contiguous exhibit hall space plus 7 other exhibit halls, 2 ballrooms, 79 meeting rooms, 34,960 sq. foot grand hall, 23,400 sq. foot atrium overlooking the Avenue of the Arts, 3,963 hotel rooms within a four minute walk from the center, 6,402 hotel rooms within a ten minute walk, 8,924 within a 15 minute walk, steps from America's most historic square mile, 2nd largest city on the East Coast, 22 theaters, music, sports and recreation venues, 605 restaurants and nightlife locations, an airport linked directly to the city by rail, fabulous public transit and in a location not generally affected by extreme weather events. Best of all? It is friendly, inexpensive, accessible and artist-friendly with several possible partners including the creative writing programs at Rosemont College (already a benefactor), Temple University,Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania. Bring it!
In an earlier version of this post Robin Hemley was incorrectly referred to as Robert.]]>Eugene Cross: Stories for Our Timetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13107222012-02-29T14:10:22-05:002012-04-30T05:12:01-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/
Recently, however, there have been a cluster of debut collections whose authors are set apart from the pack. Instead of squandering their talents with ostentatious displays of the scaffoldings of craft, they have stuck to the fundamental importance of telling a good story.
Eugene Cross' collection,Fires of Our Choosing (Dzanc Books, March 2012), takes its place among these with a particularly brilliant twist: relentlessly macho characters, a man's idea of men, given life on the page by a writer who understands the vulnerabilities that lie beneath the facade. (Those at AWP, Chicago February 29th - March 4th will have a chance to hear Cross read and pick up a copy of his book at the Dzanc table)
The collection is, by and large, thematically arranged around the environs of Erie, Pennsylvania. In this place people cling not so much to guns and religion but rather to their accessories, violence (against themselves, mostly), and desperation. If there is redemption, it is a faraway cathedral to which these people will never be admitted if they even choose to brave the journey. Only a single person in these stories, and the only female in a lead role, a young girl we meet in the summer before her departure for college in Michigan, has decided "what (she) will take and what (she) will leave behind," by which she means the usual baggage of an incoming freshman; and even those are sullied forever by a single lapse, one as simple as falling into a deeper sleep than was permissible.
Cross' stories reverberate with the idea that there was once, in each of these characters' lives, a moment when things may have gone differently, where youthful bravado and indifference could have matured into responsibility and self-worth. Yet just one, Ron, in 'Only the Strong Will Survive,' achieves it. The rest confess to and mourn their weaknesses in silence; the people they have hurt, or will, are left with their pain and, like the painter who in 'The Brother,' stands on one side of the glass while the people who have robbed him drive away, there is no way to say which one is imprisoned, which one free. These men know that they should bet "only what they could afford to lose," and if there is little left to lose, why not take all the risks? Why not drive around aimlessly, "making turns for no other reason than how the road was banked?" Why not take comfort in the fact that, "in the end it was all beyond our control?"
Fire and heat wrap around the personal histories of Cross' characters. The title story begins with a house burning down to the ground and in 'This Too,' a sister remembers her brother as a child, "falling through a sea of smoke, disappearing finally into the flames." In 'Come August,' two little girls, "as relentless as the heat," beg for the touch of cool water, one of them running, "arms flailing like she's on fire." Smoke billows out from between the slot machines in 'The Gambler.' In 'The Brother,' a man hiding his own demons takes his girlfriend and her brother to watch the sunsets ignite the clouds, Lake Erie itself on fire, "a giant all-consuming blaze far out on the horizon," and in 'Harvesters,' we have the awe-inspiring image of a farmer taking a match to his fields, the same ones on which the wheat had waved "like a shimmer of heat," and sets them burning in "a rolling wave of fire." In the hands of a less skillful writer, it may seem contrived; not here. The setting of these stories is dark, gray, bitter, working class and troubled. It stands to reason its people would come to see themselves the same way, and that the only illumination possible is to fan the ashes within and watch the outside blaze.
As Eric says in the title story, "Dignity was a faraway country from which I had been exiled years before, a place I could hardly recall." Indeed, very little of it is permitted the underclass of this nation, a fact that creeps up on the reader as these stories unfold, one after another, bringing news of realities so rarely addressed by contemporary writers. How noteworthy is it, then, that Cross offers no apologies for his characters: their poor choices, their lack of moral fortitude, their betrayals of each other and the poverty of their surroundings and, often, themselves; he leaves these things alone. They are who they are, and if dignity has been denied them by the rest of us, including us story-tellers, it is restored by this collection. That he has undertaken to serve as their raconteur should place Cross on the radar of all the big prizes that gift those blessed with talent, compassion and fearlessness, particularly during this present moment in our history. ]]>Tomás Q. Morín: On Finding His Voice and Winning the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prizetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11988882012-01-11T12:00:57-05:002012-03-12T05:12:01-04:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/will it sell? Untethered by such considerations, it seems, they are free to be true to their particular aesthetic, focussing on writing good poetry rather than what might appeal to the largest audience. And yet, this purity of purpose comes with a price: who will publish them? For most debut poets, the first and often only way to see their work move into the world as a cohesive collection is to win a prize. While there are, certainly, prizes given to established poets, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, for instance, or the Wallace Stevens Prize, awards for the unknown poet are harder to come by. Among the latter, the Walt Whitman Award (Academy of American Poets/Louisiana State University Press), The Bakeless Prize for Poetry (Bread Loaf Writers' Conference/Graywolf Press), The Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press) and The Honickman Prize (American Poetry Review/Copper Canyon Press), stand out.
Tomás Q. Morín is the latest winner of the 2011 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and his collection, A Larger Country, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in the Fall of 2012.
TQM: I've long felt I didn't possess the kind of luck needed to win a contest. I'm not trying to discount the amount of work that goes into researching and entering a contest, it's just once it leaves your hand you have no way of knowing if it'll land in the hands of screeners that will like your work enough to pass it along to the next round of winnowing. Winning the APR prize is thrilling not just because I'll be humbly joining the list of previous winners whose work I admire. And if that isn't enough, the wonderful Copper Canyon will be putting the book out. What more could a guy ask for?
RF: You have said that poetry anchored you when you found yourself adrift among strangers. Do you think all writing is an effort on the part of the writer to hold steady? And, if so, does the "outsider" have a head start on writing about the world, one that the complacent or the person who fits the norm, lacks?
TQM: When I started graduate school 1,500 miles away from home, I felt lost and adrift. Poetry and its traditions steadied me because as soon as I fell in love with a poet's work, I would discover the poets that had influenced him and hunt them down. Writing made me feel part of a family that I was just discovering. Now, for other writers poetry might not be an anchor, so much as a rudder or mast or compass. I think it depends on the person. At this point in my life poetry is the sail.
As for outsiders having a head start, I think their advantage is in having spent a lot of time observing the world in detail because let's face it, if you never get invited to a party you're going to have a lot of time to contemplate why no one wants to see you dance or drink lousy beer with them. Of course, transforming this self-reflection into art is another matter.
RF: You reached out to one of America's best-known poets, and her current poet laureate, Philip Levine, to ask him if the poems you had been writing were worth anything. His response (one poem was good, all three show you don't know the first thing about writing poems!) convinced you to enroll in an MFA program to study the craft. Obviously, though, you already had a poet's disposition toward the world. Can you share the most significant thing you learned about the craft through the program?
TQM: One of the most significant things I learned was to trust my vision. By vision I don't mean anything grand like what Einstein or Gandhi had. What I mean is the unique way each of us sees the world around us. Because I was overly sensitive to criticism as a graduate student, this was a lesson I ended up learning the hard way. One day a classmate innocently commented, "You know, your poems are very male." The feminist in me immediately balked and thought, hmm, I can fix that. I then devoted all my energy into making my voice as gender neutral as possible. I was for all intents and purposes castrating my poems!
After about a year of writing god-awful poetry, it dawned on me that of course my poems were going to sound very male for the very simple reason that I was a man! After that realization I was happily back to writing poems that fully represented me. Since then I've tried not to think about the various parts that make up who I am. The moment you start privileging gender, race, culture, etc., over all the other elements that form a part of who you are, I think as an artist you run the risk of creating a caricature of yourself. If you just write and don't think about it, then often as not the authentic you will be who shows up for work at the page.
RF: Your grandparents looked after you when you were very young, something that is increasingly rare in mainstream America. From them you learned to become comfortable with surrealism, the fantastic, acknowledging their right to exist beside the linear, the ordinary. To what extent do you think the stories of the past (generations, histories, battles), are relevant to your poetry and your understanding of the present?
TQM: The stories my grandparents told me about the supernatural are important to me because those stories, not to mention the Old Testament, expanded my concept of what a story could contain. They would not have thought twice about Gregor Samsa awakening as a beetle. There would have been no disbelief to suspend. Their first thought would likely have been the same as mine when I first read the "Metamorphosis": "Poor guy. That's rough." Consequently, if you grow up hearing about ghosts and burning bushes, then you won't think twice about putting a yeti in a poem or transforming Miles Davis into a reaper of souls. My grandparents taught me that we live in a world of mystery we will never fully understand. That's a troubling concept for some people. As for me, not only am I ok with that, but I rather like it. I mean, who would want to know everything? How boring would that be?
RF: You say you don't write political poetry and yet your poem, "112th Congress Blues" is one of the best I've read, its musicality and syntax perfectly fitted to your topic. And your poem for Laika (the dog that was launched into space and died), takes on human presumption and cruelty head on and again it is done beautifully. As an artist do you feel that blending politics into art is detrimental to the latter?
TQM: Thanks for the kind words about the poems. It's funny, I don't see the poems as political; at least not in the same way that propaganda is. And yet, both poems clearly express my stances toward stupidity and cruelty: I despise them. This is certainly political, though not in the two-party, electoral way that people tend to think of politics. Before that important lesson I learned during my MFA program about being true to my vision, I would have worried about offending people by allowing too much of myself into these poems. The result would have been terrible. Luckily, I wised up and saved us all from wasting our time reading one more stale, passionless poem without a backbone.
RF: To come back to your award, to what extent do you think a judge's sensibility affects their choices in a contest? Does it matter at all or does good writing rise to the top regardless of who is reading it?
TQM: I could be dead wrong, but I think the aesthetic of a writer judging a contest matters immensely. For some your style might be too formal while for others it could be too experimental. Every year since I started entering contests I've researched the work of each judge to determine if my style and sensibilities might appeal to him or her when it came down to picking a favorite. For this reason I haven't entered the contests that have been judged by writers I admire immensely like D.A. Powell, Fanny Howe, C.D. Wright, etc. Over the last few years they've judged many contests which I've stayed away from. Also, it's incredibly expensive. The contest fees add up quickly so it's also just practical when you're thinking about your wallet to only target the contests where you feel you might have a real chance. I joked recently about how I wished Joseph Brodsky would hurry up and judge a contest because I thought he'd really dig my aesthetic. The punchline is that Brodsky's been dead for 16 years now!
Tomás Q. Morín teaches literature and writing at Texas State University and his poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, Slate, Boulevard, New England Review, and Narrative magazine. ]]>A Voice for Palestine Is a Voice for Israeltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9722722011-09-22T15:30:40-04:002011-11-22T05:12:01-05:00Ru Freemanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/Mamilla cemetery, located just inside West Jerusalem, contains the remains of several prominent Islamic leaders, including those who fought alongside Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders. It is visited also by the descendants of the less illustrious, like Mohammed al-Dejani, whose great-grandfather is buried there. The Israeli Supreme Court has, however, has approved the move to bulldoze it and construct a $250 million complex to be built upon those graves by the Los Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Center. The gigantic complex designed by Frank Gehry is, according to the Rabbi Marvin Hier from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to be built on derelict land. And what will it house? Well, obviously, the Museum of Tolerance.
It is an irony that exemplifies the conundrum that faces President Barack Obama this week. In the months after assuming office, in the speech in Cairo that we imagined signaled his position on Palestine, the President said, "America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own." On September 23, 2010 addressing the UN, the President called for the creation of a Palestinian State, an event he felt was possible in the course of a year. That year ends this week when Mahmoud Abbas takes his plea for statehood to the United Nations and Barack Obama goes to bat for America and for Israel, veto in hand. Perhaps the fault lies not in the faith that we placed in those two speeches but in the stone-faced response that the President-elect presented on the day before his inauguration when during the 'We Are One' celebration, Bono, that modern-day champion of desperate causes looked directly at Barack Obama and said these words: "(your election is) not just an American dream but also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream and also a Palestinian dream."
Why now? reasonable people keep asking. Because of history, my friends. The people of Palestine have undergone centuries of external pressure if not always occupation -- from the Israelite, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Iraqi, Egyptian, Turkish and British forces to name a few -- and history has proved that, when push came to shove, the Palestinian voice was repeatedly silenced. Nobody asked them for their thoughts when Theodor Hertzl advocated for a Jewish State with his publication, The Jewish State, and nobody asked them for an opinion when the World Zionist Organization was set up in Switzerland in 1897 or the Jewish National Fund was set up in 1901 to help in the creation of Israel. They were absent from the room when the Sykes-Picot agreement was signed in 1916, dividing the Arab countries between toady's on-the-fence members of the Security Council, Britain and France. The Balfour Declaration was made without in-put from the Palestinians.
When Lord Peel released his report in 1937, the silenced Palestinians were expected to go along with his recommendation that 33 percent of the best land available should go toward the Jewish State and the rest for Palestinian Arabs and that the latter should also be "forcibly transferred" from what are euphemistically termed "the Jewish sections." In that same year when the Arab Higher Committee rejected these recommendation and called for an independent Palestine with protection for the rights of all, Britain dismantled the Committee and all Palestinian political organizations thereby silencing them altogether. In 1942, the Biltmore Conference for Zionist leaders convened in NY calling for making Palestine a Jewish Homeland and no, they did not invite the Palestinians to the discussion. Indeed, as far back as 1947, the UN only calls for 43 percent of their own land for Palestine and 56.5 percent of Palestine for a Jewish state.
Rhetorical Question: How many Americans would tolerate over a century of systematic occupation, suffer the silencing of their voices, ignore the dismantling of their political institutions and then take it lying down when a motley gang of third parties hand over the more desirable parts of their land to, say, the Burmese Buddhists? Today, the Palestinians do not occupy even a quarter of their own country.
Those who would like to discredit this latest Palestinian effort will bring up terrorism. In fact, by the time that the Palestinian political movement got under way in 1935, Haganah billed as a Jewish neighborhood watch but actually a group of militants who supported illegal immigration and the building of settlements in new areas, had already been operating for fourteen years! And Britain's White Paper on terrorism in 1946 made no mention of any Palestinian terrorist organizations yet names the two extremist Jewish organizations, Haganah and Irgun. In July 22, of 1946, it is Irgun that blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people including British, Palestinian and Jewish employees. How easy it has been to forget the origins of terrorism in that part of the world.
By 1948, America had joined forces with the Zionists, with Truman's pledge to Chaim Weizman to support the declaration of the Jewish State on May 15. By April the U.S. had begun its unceasing and unconditional shipments of arms to Jewish organizations. By May there were almost 200,000 Palestinian refugees, the battles that will involve Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians and Egyptians commenced, and over the next several years we were treated to the Israeli massacres in Gaza, Qalqilya, Kafr Qaasim, Khan Yunis, As-Sammu', arson attacks on the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the diversion of the Jordan river. In 1963 the PLO constitution was drafted at a summit of Arab states in Cairo, although it took another 11 years for the UN and the Arab League to recognize the PLO as the sole representative of the people of Palestine. In 1967 the work of the Zionists was done with the complete occupation of the rest of Palestine.
Whatever escalations have taken place on the part of the Palestinians must be seen against this historical background. It has been 36 years since the UN adopted General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as a form of racism. It has been 30 since UN Resolution 36/226 was passed declaring opposition to the Israeli policy of settlement in Palestine. It has been 18 years since three leaders, Presidents Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Arafat began discussions that could have led to the cessation of hostilities and a modicum of redress for the people of Palestine. It has been 16 years since President Rabin was assassinated by one of his own people. For the record, the PLO agreed to the conditions negotiated by President Clinton pending clarifications. With Sharon's visit to Al-Aqsa mosque and his election, that agreement was called off by both sides. It was Sharon, after all, who was responsible for the massacre of more than 800 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside Beirut in 1982. An act which prompted his resignation as minister of Defense after an Israeli commission held him responsible. And it was Sharon who re-ignited the flames of hatred in Israel during a fragile moment when the prospect for peace had come into an albeit distant view.
Israel has a right to exist. Not because there is agreement that the foundation of that nation was right, but because time moves forward, not backwards. Unless we are thinking about returning all the national treasures plundered by the British Commonwealth from all the countries it colonized, unless we are talking about taking the influence of France out of the continent of Africa, unless we are discussing the return to pride of place for the Native Americans in the United States, unless we are at the table to discuss all these and more.......we cannot talk about an absence of the nation of Israel. What has been done, has been done. The task at hand is figuring out how close we can come to rectifying the injustices that have been perpetrated against the people of Palestine. How compensate them for the loss of land, homes, livelihood and children? For the very absence of what people in other countries call "childhood"? And how to accomplish all this while allowing Israelis the safe-conduct of their own lives.
Contrary to popular belief here in America, "the world" made no agreements with the Arab nations. Astonishing as it might seem, a collection of short-sighted officials from the United States, Britain and France, do not constitute the world. This moment is about Palestine and Israel. There are no "rebels" here. There are people who have been crushed by superior force and who must now figure out how to live beside and despite that force. This moment is about the inalienable right of the people of Palestine to self-determination, to freedom, and the re-establishment of normalcy to the lives of their children, within the context of reconstruction and reconciliation with a powerful, powerfully supported and certainly well-armed neighbor. This moment is also about laying the groundwork for allaying the fears of Israelis
Thirty-seven years ago, another Palestinian leader stood before the United Nations and stated the circumstances under which Palestinians were living and asserted the rights of the people whom he represented. That man, Yasser Arafat,who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Peace along with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, is not recorded as having threatened anybody with kryptonite, cyanide capsules or suicide bombers. On Friday, another Palestinian leader, President Mahmoud Abbas will ask that, in the face of repeated failure to get any agreement from Israel for the basis of talks, and the failure of the Quartet to come up with a plan that is acceptable to all sides, the only non-violent move left to his people is to go the United Nations and ask that his country be recognized. 193 people who represent the world come to vote on a matter that has blighted history for more than a century. Barack Obama has the opportunity to be a one-term president who, nonetheless, gave his all for peace. Or, he can be a two-term president who pissed away his one chance at it for the sake of domestic policies that are inextricably bound to the foreign policy he has never controlled.
Yes, America has a seat on the Security Council and yes, the U.S. Congress has threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority and to any UN agency that treats Palestine as a state with voting privileges in that agency. It sounds frightening but only when we fail to consider the numbers. Out of a world population of 6,830,586,985, the three permanent members of the Security Council who have either indicated that they would use their veto against Palestine (U.S.) or have not yet declared (France and the UK), represent 469,467,118 people. That leaves us with roughly 6,361,119,867 people represented by the member countries (including the Russian Federation and China), who, to a greater or lesser extent, support the recognition of Palestine. The numbers, then, are on the side of Palestine.
In 2009, a small island nation called Sri Lanka told the United States where it could put its money and its rhetoric, ended 30 years of war and now, in a state of peace, and with the aid of China, boasts a thriving economy that rivals that of America. Palestine, too, has friends in other places. It can and will do the same. It will achieve statehood and, in time, peace with Israel. And people around the world will no longer care who wins the American presidential elections. ]]>