Drown-ing

Hello, all!  I'm happy to be back from a wonderful AWP conference, at which I got to catch up with the lovely Camille Dungy, Meg Kearney, Amina McIntyre, Susan Ito, and Faye Snider, among other luminaries and soon-to-be luminaries.  (I got to sit next to Cornelius Eady at one dinner, and he was much friendlier than he had any need to be.  I love it when people are both insanely talented and also just plain nice.)

Our panel about trauma, memoir, and invention went beautifully, with a packed room and great papers by all.  My favorite was one by Kelly Grey Carlisle about the high cost to the writer of inventing material, which I basically want to get put on a t-shirt and wear around all the time.  She managed to articulate what I could only mutter inchoately to my husband and finally give up on.  As soon as it's published--and I'm sure it will be--I'll link to it on here so you can see the shiny brilliant clarity of her thought.

I also went to a panel called "Women of a Certain Age" (figuring that I'll get there all too soon, and thus might as well be prepared), about writing and publishing after, I don't know, 55?  60?  It was hard to tell; they all looked pretty fresh up there, but maybe it was the glow of the multiple chandeliers.  I'd gone to see my UNL colleague Hilda Raz, who was great, and I came away enchanted by the wry, moving poetry of Linda Pastan, which I had not known before, and fired up by the position paper of Janet Burroway.  Two of the several bracing things she said were these:

In a totalitarian society it's easy to see how writers are silenced.  They are jailed, tortured, killed.  In a capitalist or "free" society it is not easy to see how writers are silenced.  But they are silenced, under the shadow of the slogan, "If it's any good, it will sell."  Such a society promotes celebrity, stardom, schlock, and a great deal of money.  It does no favors for literature.

and

We need all the writers we can get. . . .  When the 9/11 commission produced its report, its first and overarching conclusion was that the terrorist attacks had occurred because of a--their words--"major failure of imagination."  The neocons in their suits in the Oval office could not imagine that a mission of this magnitude could be carried out by a bunch of bearded guys living in caves.  For a generation and a half now we have stripped our schools of music, drama, art, and all such "soft subjects," so we have not just failed to train our children in reading and writing, we have failed to train their imaginations. 

Go, Janet!  She also talked about how getting older has made her less concerned about being a "good girl" or being liked and/or approved by men.  She's more willing to speak her mind.  Hurray for age!

It was a lovely, fruitful, semi-exhausting conference all around.  Now I'm back and breathlessly playing catch-up.  (Brilliant students everywhere, stop applying to the graduate creative writing program at UNL!  Reading all these  application files is killing me!)

We had a wonderful time in Latina/o Studies today analyzing Junot Diaz's "Edison, New Jersey" (from Drown) and connecting it to census statistics about patterns among the Dominican-American population.  It's a beautiful, subtle, intricately patterned, heartbreaking story, and it was great to hear how different students reacted to it.  (When I asked them what Diaz was doing with the ducks, they looked at me like I'd lost my mind.  English teachers.  They see symbols everywhere, they seemed to be thinking pityingly.)  Some really identified with the working-class narrator, while others sided more with the wealthy homeowners reluctant to leave him and his partner alone in their houses.  Discussion was just starting to get truly lively when the class ended--I only wish we had more than an hour and fifteen minutes!