Results matching “tayari” from Joycastro.com

Many thanks to Faye for pointing out the gender of all of the editorial gatekeepers of the 2010 Best American collections in this literary news I completely missed.  Father Knows Best, anyone?

Another essential gem for writers by Tayari.

Congratulations to my cool friend Naca for having her first, gorgeous book of poetry, Bird Eating Bird, nominated for a Lambda award.  I still remember reading it in manuscript and being quietly blown away--before Yusef Komunyaaka picked it for the National Poetry Series.  Good luck, Naca!  Amelia blogs about the Lammys here.

Big abrazos to Belinda Acosta, who was interviewed here on this blog, for winning the International Latino Book Award for Best First Book for Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, her debut novel.  The sequel, Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over, is due out this July, and it's already making lists of recommended books and getting good press.  Watch for it.

To see all the winners of the International Latino Book Awards, go here.  Marjorie Agosín, whose work I have long loved, took home the award for best biography for Of Earth and Sea:  A Chilean Memoir.

Good things happening for good people!  ¡Órale!

Gentle readers, on Monday I FedExed the new and improved (and improved, and improved) manuscript of THE DESIRE PROJECTS, a literary noir novel, to my agent.  My fingers are crossed!

Here's the elevator blurb for it:

During and after the chaos of Katrina, over a thousand released sex offenders (required by Megan's Law to register their whereabouts with law enforcement) went off the grid.  Nola Céspedes*, a mouthy young cubana cub reporter for the Times-Picayune who grew up in the Desire Projects of New Orleans, gets assigned a feature story she doesn't want:  to explore the human realities behind the statistics on child molesters' rates of recidivism, their rehabilitation, their reception back into the community--just as a seven-year-old girl disappears from the French Quarter.

And then things get personal.

The blurb still sounds a little wonky to me, but you get the picture.  If you can think of ways to make it more inviting, let me know. 

When I first conceived the project, I thought it would be cool to try to blend literary writing with the suspense of a thriller and the fun conventions of chica lit.  However, no such blending occurred.  What has finally emerged is more like a collision between noir and chick lit.  A five-car pile-up.  Nola, the protagonist, just took over (with nods to Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Kate Atkinson . . .).  We'll see.  It wants to be a beach read for smart people.  Or a smart read for beach people.  I don't know.

Many, many thanks to the good friends who read early versions of the book as it struggled to find its feet:  Sandra Scofield, Barbara Brandt, Bryn Chancellor (third one down), Grey Castro, and the Handsome Husband.  THE DESIRE PROJECTS has changed so much, you'll barely recognize it!

Speaking of Baby Greyby, we fly out tomorrow to see him graduate from Oberlin.  I'm todo excited & Mama-giddy. 

Graduation may not be the biggest achievement of his life thus far, but it is by far the biggest achievement of mine--bigger than writing books, or tenure, or anything.  Here's why.  Grey is a sweethearted, artsy, slacker guy who would much rather skateboard than study, bless his heart (as we say in the South).  On the up-side, he breathes, he lives in his body, he's kind and open and thoughtful and non-judgmental--not to mention a great songwriter.  All amazing, wonderful things.

For me, as someone who's always been academically driven and ambitious by nature (or perhaps by necessity)--and who's truly had to fight her own judgmental, impatient inclinations--this has been a tough personal challenge.  How to accept and support who Grey really is, at heart, while still equipping him responsibly for his future? 

If he ends up being able to skateboard and write songs for a living, great.  But if not, he'll need a fallback position.  It's a parent's job to think about that, however uncool or un-fun it makes us.  (And I say this even as a devoted artist.  Publishing stories in little magazines was hardly gonna pay the rent.)

Seeing him graduate from a good school at 21, debt-free, with good grades, has been a long haul, people, but he has done great, and we couldn't be prouder.

Or more relieved.  At the graduation ceremony, I may faint.

So at the tail end of this graduation season, here's to all the parents.  Respect.  Solidarity.  You've worked so hard, and you've made sacrifices no one will ever see.  A good education is probably the second-best gift you can give your children, and it's huge.

Moreover, an ethical, kind, well educated young adult is one of the best gifts you can give to our shared community.  So thank you.




*Yes, Cuban history buffs, her last name is no accident.

Thanks to Maureen Dowd for today's quotable quote:

If roughly one out of nine Americans is gay, why shouldn’t one out of nine Supreme Court justices be?

Rock 'n' roll, Maureen.  Thanks for having more guts than the White House's PR machine.

Onto more literary issues:  I love this post about writerly self-censorship by Tayari Jones so much, I'm going to link to it from my syllabus.  It's a classic:  sane, sound, humane.  If you're a writer, read it.  If you teach aspiring writers, send them there.

And in terms of dishing too-much-information in your memoir, I had to laugh out loud when I read this interview with Sarah Silverman about her new book The Bedwetter:

Q:  Your former boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel is barely mentioned.  Why did you refrain from spilling your secrets?

SS:  I guess mostly because I'm not a desperate douchey scumbag.

And on that note, gentle readers, I'm back to work.

My beautiful, funny, and generous friend Lorraine López, about whom you've read on here before (multiple times), has just been catapulted into the national limelight!  Her latest book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, a collection of short fiction, has been named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.   The other finalists are Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead, and Lorrie Moore.   (Thanks to Tayari's blog for the heads-up.)

Always modest, Lorraine says she's still stunned and ecstatic.  It's going to be a whirlwind until March 23, when the winner is announced.  Wow!

Regarding the issue of representing latinidad, Lorraine says that she "intended to produce stories for [the colllection] that would shift the focus from the performance of ethnicity that essentializes cultural experience. . . ."  The L.A. Times includes a lengthy passage from a lovely 2-page interview, which you can access in full at BkMk's webpage for the book:

Q: Your collection has many Latino characters, and they all interact with characters from other backgrounds. Did you intend this bicultural or multicultural dimension of the book from the start, and do you think Latino writers face any special challenges in writing about Latino characters and culture for today’s varied literary audiences?

Lopez: This is a complicated question, and I thank you for asking it. For me, I did not set out to do more than explore characters beyond their cultural definition. As mentioned, I wanted to avoid that performance of identity that essentializes cultural experience. I am not interested in providing the usual themes, characters, and props that many associate with Latino literature. These do not characterize my experience as a Latina, so why should I artificially simulate such things to validate stereotypic notions? I can think of no reason to do this, except to gratify expectations of others....

I am not out to give anyone (including myself) what he or she might be expecting. In speaking to other Latino writers, I find that we similarly resist gratifying expectations that our characters perform in culturally expected ways, say, rolling tortillas, bopping around the barrio, or gathering wisdom from a sweet abuela. More and more, Latino literature is evolving away from such stereotypes, and becoming more interesting and challenging in the process.

Lorraine's also co-editing a new collection, The Other Latino, that addresses this very issue--the expected performance of Latina/o ethnicity--from multiple perspectives.  It's due out next year from University of Arizona Press. 

In the meantime, lift a glass to Lorraine! 

If you have only five minutes for a quick overview, Tracy Kidder offers this rundown of the centuries of political and economic injustices against Haiti that have placed the nation in this extremely tenuous position.  As Kidder writes, "while earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade."

Avaaz, a terrific worldwide peace-and-justice organization, offers a secure and reliable way to donate.  President Obama's take on the situation and call for donations are here.  For a way to donate $5--immediately, from your phone--Tayari can hook you up.

Love going out to Irma, Enek, Luke, and Jennifer in Texas.

First of all, many thanks to all y'all who've posted kind things about my leaving Pine Manor.  I will miss you, too.

Secondly, fans of Tayari Jones--friend of the blog and friend to my life--will be thrilled to know that her eagerly awaited third novel, THE SILVER GIRL, has found a home at Algonquin. 

Thirdly, Lorraine López's edited collection, An Angle of Vision:  Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots, is now available in paperback from University of Michigan.  Congratulations, Lorraine!  Full disclosure:  the title essay is by yours truly, and the book grew out of a raucous panel at the AWP a couple of years ago called "Trashy Women," which some of y'all kindly attended, thank you much.   (When over 400 people showed up, Lorraine knew she had a racehorse of a topic on her hands.)  The book includes work by Dorothy Allison, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Bich Minh Nguyen, Karen McElmurray, Heather Sellers, and other wonderful writers, including Lorraine herself and my own UNL colleague and friend Amelia Montes.  If you've ever been struck by the weird dissonance of class friction--even if you're not a woman or a writer, and even if you didn't end up in academia or publishing--then this book will move you and make you laugh.

Lastly but not leastly--and this is strictly personal--my sweet husband James and I made an offer on a home here in Lincoln.  It's a small condominium downtown, near where we've been renting for the past 2 and a half years, and it's definitely a fixer-upper, which is why we could afford to spring for it.  We're very excited (or is that panic?); I'm not sure if the fluttery feeling is a product of my profound (post-Wabash) commitment-phobia, or due to the hideous old turquoise carpet and popcorn ceiling.  (Alas, the decor is neither retro chic nor dazzlingly of-the-moment, but more like a pathetic from-the-land-time-forgot melange.  But the location is killer.) 

We should be in it by Christmas--the closing is during exam week.   Help!  If you have advice about moving, renovating, contractors, or anything related, please post!

And when isn't it?  I meet a lot of memoirists, published and un-, and most of us agonize over that question.

And for good reason, as Julie Myerson found out when her memoir about her son's drug addiction appeared in the UK:  "A bit of a witch burning was what it felt like," she says.  Now it will be released in the US, and she's braced for further controversy. 

As today's New York Times piece about Myerson asks, "Are there limits to writing about loved ones, particularly one's children?"  Among the memoirists canvassed, David Sheff feels that "the imperative to protect a loved one, particularly a child, outweighs the responsibility to tell the truth," while Susan Cheever, who tried to buy off her 5- and 12-year-old to get their approval to write about them, disagrees:  "I strongly believe everybody has the right to their own story," she says, and she sees this as including other people's stories that intersect with the writer's own. 

Writing about children, whom one has the obligation to protect, is one thing, while writing about parents and older relatives--as Beatriz Terrazas did, in the great piece below--is another.  Tayari Jones, a novelist, blogged recently about shying away from the genre due to her parents' responses when she floated the idea of writing a memoir.  As she writes, "the notion of parental displeasure is a real creativity killer."  So true. 

This whole question has fascinated me since The Truth Book came out, and I've spent the last couple of years collecting essays by writers who've lived the question, who've published about their families and lived to tell about the fallout.   Now it's an edited collection tentatively titled Family Trouble:  Writers on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, currently biding its time on an editor's desk at a good university press--and I sure wish they'd hurry up, because I think you'll be fascinated by the surprises, good and bad, that people have encountered when they've published work about their family members:  their alcoholic cousins, abusive parents, troubled or long-suffering spouses, adopted children, biological mothers. 

Long story short?  Ethical consensus does not emerge, but it's definitely a lively read.  Writers hold strong views on all sides of the issue.  Some of the essays in Family Trouble offer useful principles about where to draw lines, while others share painful cautionary tales.  The pieces are funny, blistering, moving, selfish, smart, humble, and warm by turns.  I can't wait for them to see the light of print! 

If you have an experience in this regard, please leave a comment (or email me privately) and let me know.  I would love to hear about it.

Tayari Jones's blog had a link to this piece by Walter Mosley on why people like crime stories.  His thoughts on guilt and salvation are not startlingly new, but I like his insight about the feelings of powerlessness and distrust that motivate readers/watchers of crime narratives. 

"Crime shows, mysteries, and films speak to the bystander in a dangerous world," writes Mosley.  "[M]ost of us see ourselves as powerless cogs in a greater machine; as potential victims of a society so large and insensitive that we, innocent bystanders in the crowd, might be caught at any time in the crossfire between the forces of so-called good and evil."

We want to identify with the heroic character who does the right thing, who blows the whistle, tracks down the bad guy, or solves the puzzle just in time to save innocents.  Or, as in Mosley's formulation, we want to believe that someone would do that for us. 

What motivates people to write crime stories, I wonder?  The desire to invent such do-righters?  The urge to avenge ourselves on paper on the type of person ("Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental," wink, wink) who wronged us or someone we loved?  The need to make a tidy clockwork narrative, beginning-middle-end, out of the tentacled, massy sprawl of real-life violations?

I don't know.  And I don't know that I want to cater to or foster feelings of powerlessness and distrust, if Mosley's right. 

I just know that I woke up on Friday with a rare morning of nothing to do, and instead of enjoying some of that nothing, like a sane person, I wrote chapter one of the sequel to THE DESIRE PROJECTS. 

And then I sat there, staring at my notebook, with that feeling like you're going to cry, but you don't.  I'd thought Nola, my protagonist, was done with me.  I thought she'd said her piece, done her deeds, and moved on.  Ridden into the sunset and all that. 

Yet there she was, full of trouble and ready to go.

Because I owe some feedback to one of my graduate students, I'm just going to post a lightning round here.  First of all, many thanks to all my students over the years, who've helped me learn--the hard way!--what works and what doesn't.  Your feedback is helping me put the finishing touches on the workshop I'll be teaching this weekend at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference. 

But can creative writing be taught at all?  Should it be?  Louis Menand goes there.

Here's why I keep loving the work of Tayari Jones.  When it comes to the humanity of her characters, she never settles for less.  (Writers and aspiring writers, definitely read this.)  Plus, her latest blog entry says that, after a hectic and tumultuous time, she has finished a draft of her latest novel, THE SILVER GIRL.  Hurray!  The excerpts I've seen have been beautiful and moving.  We'll be looking forward....

Mystery novelist (and fellow West Virginian) Craig Johnson's first novel came out in 2005, and Viking's now publishing his fifth.  (Is that humanly possible?)  Having just handed off my global revision of THE DESIRE PROJECTS to a reader today, I love what he has to say on the issue of work ethic: 

I kind of think of it as the blue-collar school of literature. . . .  Never have I met a ditch digger who said, 'I'm just not feeling the ditch today, the ditch muse is not with me, I have to put my shovel down now.' 

But alas, it looks like he may have been using that shovel just a shade too often, stretching his bio to include a stint with the N.Y.P.D.  Oops.  Writers beware:  Viking/Penguin may not fact-check you, but the New York Times will, even if they're just doing a puff piece on your cool house.  (And do me a favor:  when they do, try not to respond "petulantly," okay?)

This new exhibit of art by U.S. Islamic women looks fascinating; I especially love the idea of the Persian nesting dolls, above.  Me encanta.  Our visible image can look so different from who we are inside.

Lastly, for those of you worn out by explaining minority standpoints--re:  gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, ability, religion, class, and/or you name it--to clueless members of groups on which you serve, take heart.  When you're exhausted and/or fed up, know that you don't always have to argue your position to make a positive difference.  You change the dynamic and the awareness just by being in the room.  It may not achieve perfect results, but it's something.  So take a breath, relax, and just show up. 

And many thanks to those of you who wrote in privately to say how much you appreciated my recent post on Sonia Sotomayor.   I'm helped by knowing it was useful.  Sometimes I think political commentary isn't really the appropriate purview for a literary blog (so many people do it better than I can!), so it's good to know I'm saying something you value.  ¡Gracias!

Let me get a little woo-woo on y'all for a second and just say that, according to the Ayurvedic calendar, the seasonal juncture ended yesterday.  We're now officially in summer, the season of lightness, play, sweetness, and living out what the deep, introspective shake-up of spring helped us see.  If you've been experiencing personal turbulence--and paying attention--now's the time for fruition.  I hope you enjoy it!   

Till soon!

Below is my take on AWP, but after reading friend-of-the-blog Tayari's view this year, I confess I feel a little naive.  Check it out--you should hear all sides!

Here's hoping the conference turns out to be a good, warm, real time for everyone involved--even the folks who think they're only intending to schmooze.

Milk!  Wow, was it great.  All those rhapsodic reviews?  They're true.  Milk was a fantastic film--it felt like life, not a movie (I mean, I know it was based on life, but the movie also managed to evoke the texture of life, of real people interacting, and some biopics don't), and it flew by all too quickly, and ended (even though we knew what was coming) all too wrenchingly.  Sean Penn's a miracle, too.  Thanks, Gus Van Sant!  A terrific job of bringing this pivotal historical struggle to the screen.

And if you want to avoid lining the pockets of Alan Stock, CEO of Cinemark, who donated $9,999 to the Yes on 8 campaign (oh, irony) with your movie ticket fee, you can go to No Milk for Cinemark to find a theater alternative.  

Baby, it's cold outside.  In Lincoln, Nebraska, it's ten degrees, with a wind chill factor of eleven below.  I hope you're warm, wherever you are (and here's a shout-out of general envy to you folks down in Texas), and if you're in a chilly spot, here's some stuff to jump-start your battery.

•  Chica-lit juggernaut and general bad-ass Alisa Valdes Rodriguez calls out popular novelist Jodi Picoult for her racist stereotypes, not once but twice.  Thanks, Alisa!  With thanks to Tayari's blog for the heads-up.

•  And speaking of Tayari Jones, if you're female and you've got some fine fiction languishing in your drawer, send it into the chapbook contest Tayari's judging at Kore Press, a women's small press that produces beautiful books.  Win the contest; get an extra thousand bucks to spend.  (And if you feel like supporting small presses by purchasing books as your gifts this holiday season, Kore has gorgeous fine-press editions of Audre Lorde's essay Uses of the Erotic:  The Erotic as Power, Mary Gordon's The Fascination Begins in the Mouth:  Anger, and Brenda Ueland's gentle, teacherly Tell Me More:  On the Fine Art of Listening.  They're only $10 each, and each comes in its own envelope.)

•  And speaking of holiday seasons, if you're in the mood to listen to some Hanukkah stories, "moving tales of discovery and reconciliation, the persistence of hope and the promise of undimmed light," NPR's serving up four new ones, including one by my charming friend and UNL colleague Gerry Shapiro (left).

•  And speaking of contests, the estimable and inimitable Fourth Genre is running its annual essay contest.  Again, you stand to win $1,000, and the nice thing is that all entrants will be considered for publication, which is no small thing, given Fourth Genre's wow factor.

Founding editor Mike Steinberg is one of the sweetest, most generous guys on the planet, and I'm excited that Fourth Genre will be running my essay, "Grip" (which the Pine Manor MFA community heard last summer in Boston), in 2009, and my lovely student Tom Coakley's "How to Speak About the Secret Desert Wars," in 2010. 

Tom's piece isn't just playing bubbles in the bath, either (to borrow one of Sandra Cisneros's favorite expressions for writing lite, writing that's just fooling around):  he has worked in special operations for years, and the essay's whole raison d'être is finding a way to discuss that morally murky and emotionally agonizing territory.  Um, without getting court-martialed.   (And we think we have issues when we publish CNF.)

•  And speaking of wonderful students and their wonderful work, Madeline Wiseman's wrenching personal essay "How to Kill Butterflies" in the most recent issue of Grasslands Review has just been nominated for a Pushcart.  Laaa!   Yey, Madeline!  Here's a characteristically unsentimental taste:

You, the insect inside your mother, clinging to the stem of her.  You, throbbing, twitching, doubling in size, like a spider egg suspended in the corner of an ill-used window.  You undetected for weeks, months.  Then the calls out for the specialists with their gadgets and chemicals, their advice, their insistence on marriage.  And your mother, where is she in this?  Prone on the bathroom floor, not gaining weight . . .

I have a piece of fiction in the issue, too, which I'll link to on my uncollected publications page as soon as I get it scanned.   It's a short story, "Dinner," about a seventeen-year-old girl who drives six hundred miles to meet her biological father for the first time.  Things, shall we say, get strange.

But what's good news for you is that Grasslands Review editor Brendan Corcoran is actively seeking creative nonfiction (until January), so if you have something marvelous, send it his way as an attachment to bcorcoran [at] indstate.edu.   

•  And for something completely different, if you're wondering why all those wonderful egalitarian men you know aren't pulling down the big bucks, organizational psychologists Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston have some (depressing) answers for you.

•  In other gender news, if you've ever driven yourself slightly nuts by pondering the unsettling question, Are women set up to fail — by being appointed to positions of power only in hopeless situations?, two British researchers have an equally unsettling answer for you:

In a write-up of their experiments in The Leadership Quarterly in October, the academics, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, called it “the glass cliff,” which they contend is an invisible form of prejudice. In other words, people will give women a position of power only when there’s a strong chance of failure. Why? “If someone has to be the scapegoat to take the fall, you’re not going to put your best man forward,” Ryan says. Women are thrust into desperate situations precisely because they’re likely to fail, generating “proof” that women can’t handle responsibility.

This applies, they say, to racial and ethnic minorities as well--and if you're thinking of our recent U.S. presidential election, you're connecting the dots the way Clive Thompson did.  

•  If you were one of the apparently few and apparently silent folks who were, like me, underwhelmed by the culturally enshrined brilliance of David Foster Wallace, James Ryerson of the New York Times Magazine offers up an overview of DFW's undergraduate honors thesis, which, Ryerson claims, "casts a revealing light on the early stages of his struggle to use the powers of his formidable mind for the higher good" by managing to, um, (wait for it), prove that the future doesn't control human actions in the present. 

Got that?  Whew!  Okay.  I'm relieved--and, gee whiz, so glad the New York Times Magazine spent page-space on it.  Now I'm wondering if maybe DFW had any high school term papers about the existence of God that scholars might want to investigate, or maybe some Crayola scrawls that will reveal insights about life in other galaxies . . .

•  And speaking of giving books as gifts for the holidays, let me please just recommend one more for the introspective personal-growth addict on your list (even or especially if that's you):  How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything.  Perhaps unbeknownst to those who know me in my academic guise, I am also a little woo-woo, a little spiritual-searchy, and this book speaks to that.

Though it has a reassuringly (or off-puttingly, depending on your aesthetic) warm, colorful, handwritten SARKy look, it's actually a kind but stern Buddhist guide about recognizing your ego's little games and learning to let go of your own crap.  It's this interactive workbook--you actually fill stuff in, and occasionally draw--and it's fantastic.  Here's one tiny excerpt:

    Inside each of us is a "persistent voice of discontent."  It talks in terms of if onlies and can never be satisfied.  Its function is to keep you feeling as if there is always something missing, always something just beyond your reach, which, if only you could get to it, would finally bring you contentment.

What do you think would happen if you stopped believing this voice?

I chewed on that for a while.  Check it out.

•  And if you have any spiritual-searchy friends, they might like this CD of mantras, Darshana:  Vedic Chanting for Daily Practice, which has been road-tested by way better folks than me.  The liner notes have both the Sanskrit and the English translations, and if you've ever felt a wild urge to "salute Vishnu, . . . who sports a lotus in His navel," then this CD is probably a must-have for you.  You can listen to sample tracks (just little snippets--not the whole mantras, but they'll give you a sense) at the linked page.  (I am personally partial to "Peace Invocation" and the pretty "Prayer in Praise of Goddess Lakshmi.")

•  Last but not least, if you have any teacher-friends in your life, they might enjoy (since we're on the whole woo-woo track here) Mary Rose O'Reilley's thoughtful Radical Presence:  Teaching as Contemplative Practice.  O'Reilley, a Buddhist/Quaker/Catholic college professor who's Zen-like and crotchety by turns, writes,

Let me return here to Parker Palmer's comment, "To teach is to create a space."  For what, we wonder?  Well, for whatever has to happen.  The act of contemplation begins, for each of us, simply in creating a space.  Of course one can go further than that, but for my part, I am still at step one.  After twenty-five years of teaching, it takes all the courage I have to keep silence for a minute and a half after  reading a poem aloud, or asking a question that heads us all for the depths of experience.  A minute and a half of silence is, however pitiful, a space.  Something can rush in, something we did not plan and cannot control; how each of us, students and teachers, experiences these "openings" (to use the Quaker term) will differ.

It's the end of the semester.  Hurray!  Here's to being at step one and to keeping a space open!  As we tumble toward our various holidays, stay warm, and celebrate "the promise of undimmed light."

Woohoo!  Now that it's all over, now that the world is exhaling and Sasha and Malia are going to get their First Puppy, it's great to be able to able to relax and laugh at myself, to laugh at all of us who've been so passionate and devoted for so long now.  We won! 

As the election was called last night and the talking heads waxed ecstatic, I couldn't help noticing that the rhetorical focus was all on the breaking of the racial barrier.  This was great, amazing, fantastic--and so dramatic.  Of course it was central in the commentary. 

But gradually I began to feel a lack.  What about Obama's policies?  What about the clear vote of the American people for peace, the environment, fiscal responsibility, economic justice?  Maybe the commentators considered all that a given; I don't know.  The Onion cracked me up by putting all the "historic moment" talk into grim perspective in the column, "Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress."

Lastly, I was struck last night, as I sat with friends watching John McCain's concession speech and Obama's victory speech, by the different tenors of the crowds.  The McCain folks booed repeatedly when McCain mentioned Obama, even after he motioned them to stop, while the Grant Park crowd clapped politely (if perhaps a smidge unenthusiastically) when Obama mentioned McCain.  It made me think about civility, about behaving with grace and generosity, whichever side you're on.  (Granted, it's easier to be genteel when you've just trounced your opponent.)

But I got a whole new perspective on it when I read Tayari's Twitter this morning.  On talk radio in Ghana, it's being said that "John McCain has taught the world how to lose," i.e., "No rioting."

Huh.  I guess so!  That sure put things in another perspective.   It made me feel good about it after all.  What are a few angry yells?  Let 'em vent.

In Ghana, where friend-of-the-blog Tayari Jones is currently sojourning as a keynote speaker at the Pan African Writers' Association’s 16th International African Writers’ Day Celebrations in Accra, a pop-tune smash is devoted to our U.S. presidential candidate:  "I got a crush on Obama.  In 2008, Baby you're the best candidate!"  Obama merchandise--t-shirts, hats, buttons--is the merchandise people want there, and the conference is going to include a big election-watching party and celebration breakfast from midnight (due to the time difference) to dawn, because people there are so engaged with the outcome of this election that they want to be up all night to see it happen.  Tayari was introduced as the "Lady from the Land of Obama." 

So it's not only Berlin and France and the European world that are excited about our brilliant, calm, big-thinking, forward-looking young candidate.  This is global.

James and I just got back from voting.  We were lucky; the line at our downtown polling place was only about ten minutes long.  A very enthusiastic young guy (were his eyes flashing Obama! Obama!--or was I beginning to hallucinate?) explained the ballots, and bing-bang-boom, we were done and heading down the street to get our free I-voted cups of coffee from Starbucks.   We held hands all the way (who knew voting could be romantic?), and at one corner, I actually found myself bouncing while waiting for the light to turn green. 

I am so nervous that something will go awry, but I'm also excited.  I think we're going to do it this time.  Tengo fe.

The lovely and amazing Tayari Jones read to a bumper-crop crowd at the Great Plains Art Gallery last night.  One hundred and seventeen people turned up on a windy, rainy, cold night to hear her read from The Untelling (the prologue, pp. 1-11, and the costume/pumpkins scene, 95-top of 104, if you're curious) and give thoughtful, witty answers to the several smart questions the audience posed.  Then an endless line of folks waited to have their books signed. 

And would you believe that the caterers included tiny red velvet cupcakes with the desserts?  I did not plan that.   How did they know? 

I still remember the homemade red velvet cake Tayari sent me after she visited Wabash College.  Nice and moist.  The woman can bake.  The woman can write.  The woman can give a great reading.  I'm predicting more great things coming soon!

The painting is by singer-songwriter-musician Gillian Welch.  Such a cheerful embrace of the deep end seemed just right for a Friday.  (Thanks, Maija, for the link!)

Hurray!

Straight from the airport, Tayari wanted to head out to Pioneers Park to check out the elk and the bison--to see some real Nebraska-y stuff.  (When she saw the large, anatomically correct statue of a bison at the entrance, she said, "Ooh!  He's a boyffalo!") 

She reads tomorrow evening at the Great Plains Art Gallery.  It's at 7:30 p.m., and the desserts, coffee, and decaf (I asked for the decaf, special) are free afterwards for the taking, so you can stand around and nosh and chat and schmooze with the author.  Stephanie Udall from the UNL Bookstore will be there, gracious as ever, to sell Tayari's two novels to anyone who's interested.  The whole event should take about an hour, total, so if you can tear yourself away from your usual Thursday-night delectations, come on down,

One of the things I like about Tayari Jones's novels is that they're not about race and gender only, though they do explore both of those things, and explore them well.  They're also about class issues within the black community and how differences in income, options, and social capital inflect people's interactions with one another.  We see this clearly in the different households of Tasha, Rodney, and Octavia in Leaving Atlanta, and it's also an important factor in The Untelling, as blogger Anne Fernald writes: 

Ariadne, the protagonist with the burdensome, ambitious name, is a young Spelman grad, drifting through her twenties. She doesn’t really know herself if her job teaching literacy for a community organization is a testament to her commitment to social justice or a symptom of her lack of ambition. She has a nice boyfriend, a locksmith and this character, Dwayne, is one of the book’s real pleasures: a lovely, lovely, settled young man, utterly confident of himself and his place in the world in all kinds of ways that unsettle Aria.

Tayari is really genius in writing about class: the scene in which Aria sits and watches as the pregnant teen from her literacy class does calligraphy to address envelopes for her roommate's wedding invitations is so rich. A regular middle-class girl, newly graduated from college but without family money to draw on, Aria looks in wonderment at both women and sees clearly how strange each is to the other, and, most distressingly, how far she is from either. This seems utterly right to me: so often, we skate along assuming equality and suddenly someone mentions their sailboat, or that they’ve reached the time of the month when it’s down to Ramen and tuna, and we’re brought up short—or, worse, see that we’ve brought someone else up short. Again and again in The Untelling, Tayari captures those economic complexities and brilliantly articulates the specific prism of the young, gifted black women who’ve gone to Spelman and remained in Atlanta, expecting their Morehouse man, expecting a lot of themselves, and caught in a richly conflicted relationship to all the various neighborhoods of their city—this one too bourgie, that one too ghetto, this one uneasily gentrifying, that one stubbornly down at the heels.

It's great that Anne Fernald is writing about this; I think some reviewers (white reviewers, maybe?) focus exclusively or predominantly on racial issues in books by writers of color because those are the issues that are most different and striking for them.  Class differences tend to get elided, smoothed away, as they read about "black women"--as though that group were monolithic.

Class is such a key issue in how we relate to one another, and I know I've had those moments Anne Fernald describes, when "we skate along assuming equality and suddenly someone mentions their sailboat, or that they’ve reached the time of the month when it’s down to Ramen and tuna, and we’re brought up short—or, worse, see that we’ve brought someone else up short."   These moments are often so memorable--and sometimes painful.  I remember once in graduate school a fellow student described a neighborhood she'd decided she'd never rent in.  She and her mother had driven through it and agreed, No way.  It looked too dirty, too rundown.  Too dangerous, even?  It took me a while to realize she was talking about where I lived with my son. 

And that was in graduate school, where everyone makes a pittance!  Clearly, the assumptions and expectations we bring with us have to do with much more than the bottom line on our paycheck.

These moments of class friction can often spiral outward into interesting analyses.  My friend Lorraine López is currently editing a collection of essays by women writers from poverty and the working class, and one of them, written by the inimitable Heather Sellers, is named "Sails with Good People," after the way her dean introduced one of her colleagues to her.  "He sails with good people," the dean said, and Heather spun off into the myriad associations about the poverty, instability, and mental illness that dominated her childhood and that make her essay about working in the academy so riveting. 

The book's coming out in 2009 from University of Michigan; I think the working title is An Angle of Vision.  Full disclosure:  I have an essay in it, too.  So does Dorothy Allison, who'll be here at UNL next week (yay!). 

Tayari Jones reads this Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Great Plains Art Gallery here in downtown Lincoln.  Everyone's invited.  It's free, and her books will be available for sale and signing afterwards.   And Tayari's super-nice, too, so come meet her and say hello.

I'm as excited as Snoopy when he jumps around (you know, when his feet paddle the air?), and here's why:  Tayari Jones, whom the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called "one of the most important writers of her generation," is coming to Lincoln this week!

She's a phenomenal writer, and I'm hardly the first to say so:  Leslie Marmon Silko, Robert Olen Butler, Paule Marshall, and Jewell Parker Rhodes number among her fans, and she's won slews of awards for her lovely novels Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling, which are closely observed, sensitively drawn, innovatively structured works of contemporary realism. 

I can't wait for her next novel to come out (I hear it's almost finished).  

She's giving a reading Thursday, October 23 at 7:30 p.m. in the Great Plains Art Gallery at the corner of Q and 12th.  The reading is free and open to the public.  Tayari will read for about half an hour, after which she'll do Q&A.  Then there'll be books available for signing (and cookies available for eating).  High school students as well as adults seem to be particularly drawn to her work, which is elegantly literary yet still hits the heart, so if you know some young people, invite them along.

Tayari's a dynamite performer, and her work is terrific.  I've seen her read three times and teach twice, and I've always been wowed.  If you can make it, please come! 

On Sunday mornings, James generally wakes up earlier than I do, and by the time I shuffle out to our living/dining/guest room/study, there's a big decaf latte awaiting me, together with the Sunday New York Times.  We sit in cheerful peace on the sofa, passing sections back and forth, until I'm fully awake.  Some of my happiest hours have been spent in that drowsy, companionable quiet, catching up on the world.

This morning, I learned three things of literary interest, and here they are:

#1:  Margaret Atwood, who is interviewed in Deborah Solomon's regular feature "Questions for . . ." in the Magazine, is currently touring with a series of lectures on the issue of debt, drawn from her latest book, Payback:  Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. 

I didn't know the average American family carries $9,200 in credit card debt.  I didn't think we carried any, and I asked James to make sure; we don't.  Student loan debt (still) and a car payment, yes.  Insanely huge payments to Oberlin College every month, yes.  But on the whole, we're fairly minimal in our purchases.  We've made a fine art of doing without. 

Long ago, when Sharon, my birth mother, and her first husband were young, married, and broke, they used to clip out pictures of what they wished they could give each other for Christmases and birthdays.  They'd slip the little clippings into a card and give each other those instead.  Sweet, right?  James and I have often joked, when holidays roll around, about O. Henry's story "The Gift of the Magi," in which she sells her beautiful hair to buy him a chain for his pocket-watch, and he sells his watch to buy combs for her beautiful hair.   (My favorite line is when she "leap[s] up like a little singed cat.")

Just last night, James said, "I don't want anything for my birthday this year."  He rubbed his fingers and thumb lightly together.  Money.

"Me, too, then," I replied.  It's been our pact for most years of our marriage.  Frugality and romance.  (And hey, let's put it into perspective:  if we can afford coffee and the Times on a Sunday, I feel rich.)  Thanks to Tayari for the link to a blog-post by my favorite chica lit writer, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (about whom I've blogged before), who lost her house in the recent financial meltdown and is sounding off on the lie of trickle-down economics:

It's nothing but gambling with rich liars, who, as we might have guessed, don't have much interest in letting any of their coins trickle anywhere. And here I was, lecturing my in-laws on their casino habits, when I did not know enough to see the fireball headed my way.

But I am ready to suffer the consequences, because I have decided that, unless I can buy a thing in cash, I am not going to buy anything anymore.

Can I get an Amen?  Anyway, Margaret Atwood's looking extremely well, with a cloud of gray curls and blue eyes lit by her smile.  She's wearing a long bright pink pashmina over black pants and sweater--and the sturdiest black shoes you've ever seen.   (Is she waiting tables on the side?  Ah, the podiatric relief of becoming a woman of a certain age.)  What doesn't come across in the photograph is that Atwood's a little slip of a thing; I once met her when she came to visit our class, long ago in Texas.  Honestly, I had expected the author of The Handmaid's Tale to be statuesque,  commanding, and maybe even physically intimidating, but she's a wee wisp of a gal.  It's her imagination and intelligence, not her physique, that are scary. 

Featherweight or not, though, she sat down and politely shredded the story we were workshopping that day. 

Now she's shredding, in lectures and in print, our economy, which has managed to end up in tatters quite well on its own. How did she come across the idea for a book about debt "two or three years ago," when "[e]verybody was happily buying subprime-mortgate vehicles"? 

Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature.  When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance--you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc.  But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn't overspent.

Ah, yes.  James has been reading Emma aloud to me each night before we go to sleep, and we're just at the end, where Emma learns from a (rather smug) Mr. Knightley that Harriet Smith has accepted Robert Martin, the farmer suitable to her station.  Everyone's happily paired off, each to his or her class-appropriate, heteronormative future.

But just think what might have happened if, in chapter three, Harriet had gotten a Visa card.

#2:  Hannah Tinti's new book, The Good Thief, got a positive review in the Book Review.  Hannah, whom you have no doubt met and whose generous, informative presentations on publishing you have surely attended if you've been anywhere on the writers' conference circuit during the past few years, is the founding editor of One Story, that lovely little journal that features just that:  one story per issue.  She's got a book of short stories, Animal Crackers, and now Maile Meloy's heralding the novel as "a book for adults, in addition to being the kind of story that might have kept you reading all day when you were home sick from school," and credits it with a "steady, authoritative style."  If you've been longing for a novel with a one-handed, orphaned child protagonist set in the mid-19th century America, Tinti has written your next good read.

Coincidentally, One Story is currently featuring fiction by Yannick Murphy, whose essay about calling her deadbeat dad to inform him of her brother's suicide is this week's "Lives" column in the Magazine.

#3:  Dorothy Gallagher offers a eulogy-in-print for her mentor, copyeditor Helen Pleasants, as the back-page essay of the Book Review.  The piece, "What My Copy Editor Taught Me," is also a love song to the sentence:

In musical terms, she had perfect pitch.  Helene had no literary theories--she had literary values.  She valued clarity and transparency.  She had nothing against style, if it didn't distract from the material.  Her blue pencil struck at redundancy, at confusion, at authorial vanity, at the wrong and false word, at the unearned conclusion.  She loved good writing, therefore she loved the reader:  good writing did not cause the reader to stumble over meaning.  By the time Helene was finished with me seven years later, I knew how to read a sentence and how to fix one.  I knew what a sentence was supposed to do.

Lovely--and a good reminder/model for me, as I end my Sunday-morning perusal and turn to student manuscripts.  I'm so excited about my current graduate students.  Their work is brilliant and moving.  I'm so excited to be here at UNL, working full-time with graduate students at last, and to be working this semester with the MFA theses of Pine Manor students.  It's a serious thrill.

At the same time I'm poring over their pieces, my agent Mitchell is poring over my novel manuscript.  (He emailed to let me know.)  I'm waiting to hear news.  Keep your fingers crossed for me!

As rejection letters go, the one mailed out by Noreen Cargill, the Administrative Manager of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, is extremely nice.

I’d been so hopeful, so excited.  I’d thought I had every reasonable chance; I’d twice been nominated by Bread Loaf Fellows, and my reference was a Bread Loaf faculty member--I was as much of an insider as an outsider could be.  I’d actually been there before, too, once as a paying contributor and once as a scholar, so I knew the ropes well enough to write a reasonably well-informed application, which I kissed it for luck when I sent it off—early.   

Every night before I fell asleep, I thought about reading my work in the Little Theater, sharing a room in one of the cabins with a cool new writer, walking through the Vermont woods during breaks.  I planned the craft class I would teach.  Positive visualization.

I also planned the nonchalant way I’d spin it aloud to my husband and best friends if I weren’t chosen:  I’d have a less chaotic August.  I’d have more time to write, more time to be at home, to work on preparing my fall classes.  I rehearsed my concession speech, but my heart wasn’t really in it.  In my veins, I knew, ran the unstoppable blood of champions.

When the letter came, so thin and anonymous, I turned my back to my husband and opened it, hiding my face just in case.  When I read its kind, logical refusal, I couldn’t speak.  I just shook my head.  Half-heartedly, I tried a few phrases from my concession speech, but the nonchalance was nowhere to be found.  When he tried to hug me, I was stiff.  He tried to put his arms around me.  I shrugged him off.

“I just can’t right now,” I said.

He moved off down the hall.  I phoned the writer who nominated me, who was driving and couldn’t talk.  So we hung up.  I didn’t mention the letter.  She said she’d call back.

I went to the little corner of the living room where my desk stands.  I sat down and looked at the manuscript of the novel I’d been working on before the mail came.  And then, to my chagrin, as my husband’s shadow hovered in the hall, I felt my face begin to crumple.

My husband is an extremely kind man.  He is not a writer.

He came back, pulled up a chair, and sat down in front of me.  “It must be a blow,” he said kindly, and then I began to sob.  Quietly, miserably.  The thought of Bread Loaf had lit my immediate future with a gold and glorious glow.  Now the lights were out.  

I’d imagined reading in front of the audience of luminaries, the way I’d seen Jhumpa Lahiri and Samantha Chang dazzle us when they were Fellows.  I’d hoped to impress my agent, who’d be there this summer, and make him believe that signing me would eventually turn out to be a shrewd literary choice, if perhaps never a lucrative one.  I’d dreamed of my well reviewed, commercially ignored book on the shelves at the little Bread Loaf bookstore, getting a second chance.

“I had everything lined up,” I told my husband.  “Which means it’s about the work.  The work’s just not good enough.”

My husband is a practical man.  “The odds were pretty rough,” he said.

Only 6% of more than 1100 applicants for merit-based financial aid received awards, said the letter.  66 people.  And only two of them, if things go as they have in years past, will be Fellows in creative nonfiction, the award for which I applied.

“It said you made the final round.  You could have been number three.”

“Or number thirty.  The letter doesn’t say how big the final round was.”   Or number a hundred and thirty.  Or maybe they put that on everyone's letter, to soften the blow.  My pessimism is one of my less appealing qualities, and it flares up wildly in the midst of disappointment.  I also possess an unpleasantly staunch resistance to consolation.  “It’s not that I think there aren’t any writers more brilliant than I am out there.  I know there are.  I just thought I had a chance."  My moaning goes global.  "I just want to win something.  Just one thing.  One definite thing that says my work is good.”

“You know your work is good.” He nods out our window toward the university campus.  “It got you your job here.”

“But you know how I’m always nervous, always worried that I’m lesser than.”  My colleagues are heavy hitters, Book-of-the-Month Clubbers, Poet Laureates, Famous Editors. “And it would have been so affirming if Bread Loaf’s answer had been otherwise.”

“Well, this isn’t the end.  There will be other conferences,” said my sweet, patient, hopelessly out-of-the-loop husband.  He brightened.  “What’s the best conference?”

“Duh,” I wailed through my tears.  “Bread Loaf is the oldest and most prestigious writing conference in the country.  In the world!  Everyone knows that.”  All you have to do is read the brochure copy.

“Well, but you have a long career ahead of you.  You’re still young,” he said.  In point of fact, I had just returned from Walgreen’s, where I’d purchased my usual box of Clairol Dark Brown Root Touch-Up.

“I’ve been publishing in national journals since I was twenty-two.”  I’m forty, practically antique for a Bread Loaf Fellow.  They’re usually young, hip, and inclined toward gorgeousness, like Danzy Senna and Amy Benson, the writers who’d been the Fellows in the two workshops I’d attended.  Like Michael Lowenthal and Tayari Jones and Ben Percy, with his unlined face and impossibly deep voice, and Camille Dungy, who has no pores.  “When is it going to happen for me?" I whined.  "There are so many awards out there—dozens and dozens of awards.”  Reading the “Grants & Awards” section of Poets & Writers is a special kind of self-torment, an acquired taste.  “Can’t I win just one?”

“You’ll win something.”

“I should have gone in 2006, when I first got nominated, when the book first came out.”  He nodded sympathetically.  I thought back.  Why hadn’t I?  “But I really wanted to take Grey to college.”  Bread Loaf’s August dates that year had conflicted with the drop-off dates at our son’s school.  It was his freshman year, a mythical rite of passage, when boy becomes man, all that.  At the time, it seemed I couldn’t possibly miss it.  Now, examining it in the harsh light of Bread Loaf’s rejection, it seemed like a pathetically unmemorable experience.  We unloaded a million boxes in the rain, hugged, and said good-bye.  Big wow.  Our son, who seemed unmoved at the time, hasn’t mentioned it since.  Family, schmamily.

“I should have gone to Bread Loaf,” I moaned piteously.

I flashed back to the time in my early twenties when my graduate professor, who’d written a paper about my first story, had wanted me to go with him to AWP, to stand there as Exhibit A and look full of promise while he delivered “How Minimal Is Minimalism?”  

At the time, I had no clue what AWP was.  I didn’t have the money to travel, and I didn’t want to leave my pre-schooler alone for that long.  My professor asked me where my priorities were.  I didn’t know.

“You’ve been doing other things,” said my husband, trying to console.

“I feel like Mr. f**king Holland.”  Mr. Holland’s Opus, a feel-good movie that warmed the hearts of millions, hadn’t warmed mine.  It had scared me.  A music teacher who foregoes his true love, composing, on behalf of his
students and other responsibilities is finally rewarded at the end of the movie—when he’s old and gray—by his devoted students’ performance of the one decent work he’s managed to complete.  Light bulb!  They were his opus, all those students whose lives he touched over the years, blah blah.

F**k that, I thought when I saw the movie.  The poor man should have followed his art, his heart.  But when push came to shove, I graded papers, pinched pennies, prepared for classes.  It was clear:  I was a small, small person.  I lacked courage and drive, as well as talent.

And here I was, a thin piece of paper in my hands, with my husband’s kind eyes gazing at me hopefully, willing me to cheer up.

“This is such a lousy business,” I said, speaking of writing.   “There’s so much insecurity.  So much self-doubt.”  He nodded again.  

“I know.”  It may have been something he’d heard before.  He may have wanted to add a few other nouns.

But my lovely, patient husband held my hands, brushed away a few more tears, and finally got me to smile a weak, grateful, co-dependent smile.  We hugged, and he headed down the hall to his office.

I sat at my desk.  “We do appreciate your interest in the Conference and only wish there enough awards for all of the deserving writers,” ends the letter from Bread Loaf.  Yeah, you and me both.

The letter is immaculately professional, immaculately kind.  The Bread Loaf folks probably sit around a table and analyze the text from every angle before they send it out, knowing that sad, embittered rejects will parse it, blast it, blog endlessly about it. “Good luck with your work.”

I sighed and set it aside.  I turned back to my novel manuscript, not at all sure of its worth.  

But, as Pushkin would say, there’s nothing for it. My confidence dented, my compass wobbling, I got back to work.

----

Epilogue:  The next day, this appeared--complete with get-back-out-there playlist--on Tayari's blog.  She's the best.

Malcolm X would have have turned 83 yesterday.  Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes at The Root:

. . . Malcolm's struggle to make his own authentic, political contribution reminds us that ideals are more important than personalities. Progressive political movements that engender lasting change are always bigger than the flawed human beings who lead them. . . .  He criticized the powerful rather than the powerless.  He pointed to the pathologies of the privileged instead of the failings of the oppressed. His own story of redemption was emblematic of the possibilities available to even the most disempowered, but when he pointed to solutions, they were consistently collective.

To read the rest of Harris-Lacewell's essay, go here, and many thanks to Daniel Zeno, activist and law student at University of Iowa (and my lovely former student at Wabash) for the link.

To read Veronica Chambers' new essay on the sexual wound, suffering, and shame of fistula--and how to help--go here, and go here for the New York Times story that first broke my heart about this issue.

And for my women friends who write and doubt themselves--and especially all my women writing students, who work so hard and are so talented--go here to Kore Press's blog while Gisela Telis's essay is still headlining.  You deserve to flourish with courage, confidence, and boldness.  With thanks to Tayari for the link.

Gentle Reader, there's an auction happening.  Novelist Tayari Jones, moved by the plight of the Dunbar Village gang rape survivors, decided to raise funds for the woman and her son by auctioning off such delectables as manuscript critiques, signed first editions by writers such as George Saunders and Pulitzer winner Natasha Trethewey, an author-photo session with a wonderful photographer, and other lovely perks donated by her circle of literary friends and acquaintances.

If you have a story, some poetry, a personal essay, or even an entire novel sitting in a drawer, you can get personal feedback from one of the terrific authors Tayari has lined up.  They're all gentle and respectful, so no worries about getting your hard work savaged.  I'm one of the donors, too, so if you've written a personal essay and want my feedback on the cheap--I'll provide line editing and overall comments--check it out.

The bidding started at 99 cents for many of the items, so it's a regular K-mart blue-light special right now.  The auction ends tomorrow (Sunday), so if you're interested, check it out now!  Get cool stuff and support a great cause.

Spring has already sprung on the beautiful campus of Vanderbilt University, where the symposium "Beyond Our Beginnings:  Women Writers from Working and Lower Class Backgrounds" took place last week.  All the magnolias were blossoming, and everything's green.

Meeting Dorothy Allison and serving on a panel with her was a personal highlight for me, as a long-time admirer, but I have to say that hanging out with the lovely Karen McElmurray, the inimitably hilarious Heather Sellers (who has a great blog, by the way), and our fabulous host Lorraine López for the rest of the week turned out to be great fun.  We ate at great restaurants, drank lots of wine, and got to know each other better over stories of surprising things we have in common.  I learned so much from them all and really had a blast.  

Getting to hear Dorothy, Heather, and Karen read was wonderful.  Dorothy read my favorite section from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, the painful part about beauty (32-38) that always tears me up, and a section from her forthcoming novel.  Heather and Karen gave beautiful readings, too, and I had fun reading sections from The Truth Book, the short story "A Notion I Took," and an excerpt from my new essay "Refusing to Pass," which I'm revising for the University of Michigan collection that Lorraine is editing on the symposium's topic.  (A shout-out to Tayari Jones, who helped me revise it in its original incarnation as a conference paper for the 2007 AWP.)

Serendipitously, my old roommate from Bread Loaf, Bryn Chancellor (whom I thanked in the back of The Truth Book for being such a pal during those grueling days in the Green Mountains), is now in the MFA program at Vanderbilt, so we also got to catch up.  She has a new story in Yalobusha Review, "Wrestling Night," that's so solid.  It has all these lovely, dazzling little moments.  Congratulations, Bryn!

The knockout highlight of the symposium, for me, was the performance on the last night by spoken-word poet Minton Sparks.  Funny, touching, and savage by turns, she was a terrific performer.  (Her accompanist was pretty awesome, too--she said he played w/Dylan for seven years.)  It was a knockout performance, and Minton blew the room away.  You can check out her stuff at her website, and if you have five minutes, you can even watch a little video sampler of some of the numbers we got to see.   They're just snatches, though; you won't get the full effect, b/c the big power often comes in the turn in her last line. 

I was so excited to learn about Minton's work--she's "about brilliant," as we used to say.  I want to go back to Nashville soon to see her perform again.

Many thanks to Lorraine López for the months of planning that went into designing the symposium and her writing course on working-class women writers, and many thanks to her graduate assistants Bryn Chancellor, Meredith Gray, and Wade Ostrowski, for all the behind-the-scenes labor that made the symposium run so smoothly.  I've put conferences together before, and it is a lot of work.  These folks did a gorgeous job.

The literary blogosophere is humming in the wake of the latest scandal surrounding a fake memoir, the middle-class, all-white, privately educated Margaret Seltzer's exploitation of violence, poverty, sexual abuse, and African American and Native American suffering, identity, and culture for her own ends.

And because of all that I'm reading on the topic, I need to disagree with one point in Mark Doty's "Bride in Beige:  A Poet's Approach to Memoir" in the latest issue of Poets & Writers.  A long-time admirer of Doty’s poetry and prose, I agree with and relish several of the points he makes, but I found myself drawn up short by this assertion regarding his book Firebird, a memoir I have happily taught:

. . . [S]ome memoirs are much more interested in the process and character of remembering than others; in these, it sometimes feels that memory itself is a form:  associative, elusive, metaphoric, metonymic.  Memory arranges sequences, heightens moments, makes the duration of some events vast or twinklingly brief, changes the colors or soundtrack or lighting of a scene in order to heighten emotion.

In other words, memory is an artist.  It fabricates.  It exaggerates.  Memory imagines—sometimes gorgeously—and memory lies.  I agree.  But "some memoirs," Doty claims nonjudgmentally, are simply "more interested" in those airy mental moves than in the facts that ground them.  He sees his own book as "allegiant to memory, not to history."  The key, for Doty, is capturing "the texture of subjectivity."

But that's a slippery slope, isn't it?  What about a memoirist, like Seltzer, whose subjectivity apparently includes a very high comfort level with deception and appropriation?  Or what about a memoirist whose subjectivity includes fantasies of having been a Jewish Holocaust survivor raised by wolves, as was the case with Misha Defonseca, who recently said,

The book is a story, it's my story. . . .  It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world.

Or what about even a well-meaning (I believe) memoirist like Ishmael Beah, whose subjective, traumatized, uncorroborated memory apparently took the liberty of expanding his time as a child soldier from months (at the age of fifteen) into years (beginning at age thirteen)?

Doty gives his own minor example of an overly creative memory:

In Firebird, I claim, for instance, that we lived . . . on Ramses Street.  It wasn't until I went back to Memphis after the book was published that I learned there was no such place.  But the town was named for an Egyptian city, and I'd been fascinated by mummies in a museum, and our front porch had fat, tapered columns just like the ones in the pictures of Luxor in my book of archaeology—so you can see how I got there.  Had I known that I was inventing this, I would have made that invention a part of my text, since the process of misremembering is itself revealing.  But I never looked at a map to try to confirm my memory, though I know there are memoirists who would.

Myself, I'm one of those pesky, pedestrian "memoirists who would."  I'm not sure what drove Doty to write Firebird, but in writing my own memoir, I had a lot at stake.  As a child, I had been accused of lying when I reported molestation, so I was already hesitant to speak out.  Moreover, my book reveals the inner workings of a little-understood religious sect and the private pathologies of an abusive home; I knew that some readers could be skeptical of and perhaps even hostile to those revelations.

So it was important to me, as my book went to press, that everything be strictly verifiable.  Though my book claims to be my story and my story alone, I understood that it might also be read as a social document, the way Ishmael Beah's story has been read as one way of gaining insight into the terrible, traumatized world of child soldiers.

Because I knew it would be read that way--and for the sake of other children suffering from abuse or religious manipulation--I wanted my book to stand not only as art but also as a reliable social document, which meant it had to be factual, corroborated, at every possible point.  To accomplish this—to include not only my own personal, subjective memories of events but also every feasible good-faith effort to verify them—I relied on maps, photo albums, a baby book in my mother’s hand, religious literature, files of legal documents, newspaper accounts, and, finally, my adult brother's corroboration and approval of what I'd written.  (So there was no sibling to come forward and reveal deception, as was the case with Seltzer.)

When an adapted excerpt from The Truth Book  was to run as the "Lives" column in the New York Times Magazine, the Times, burned by its own scandals, required me to FedEx a huge file of photocopied documents (including my parents' divorce decree from the 1970s) to verify every claim or allusion in the piece.  Their fact-checkers also called the relatives mentioned in the piece, in order to confirm the story.  They vetted everything.  Why can't publishing houses make a similar good-faith effort?

Doty’s essay continues: 

My interest was in how it felt to be that boy, in the world as he understood it, and that world is a construction, a set of associations tinged by obsessions and fascinations, a landscape as interior as it is external.  It is, in other words, a poem.

Ah, a poem.  Sorry to be pedestrian and literal in my capitulation to generic categories imposed by publishers, but the back cover of my copy of Firebird says "BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY," not "POETRY."  Maybe that's the space Doty's carving out for his practice of memoir here, and we can agree to disagree.  But I have to wonder, too, about the bottom line. 

Because we can all write dreamy, unverified reminiscences, and we can publish them, too.  There's a whole category for them; it's called autobiographical fiction, and its practitioners are legion and canonically esteemed.   But the bottom line is that, today, if your book is pitched as fiction or poetry, it won't sell as well in our current reality-TV publishing market.  And money seems to have an awful lot to do with the most egregious scandals. A whole lot of dollars have been changing hands for these non-memoirs and inaccurate memoirs.  Over a million for James Frey's Oprah-endorsed book, if I’m remembering correctly; about a million for Ishmael Beah's; something close to but "less than $100,000" for Seltzer's.  Misha Defonseca stood to gain an additional $22.5 million, had her fraud not been exposed.

So enough with the rationalizations, already.

"I just felt that there was good that I could do," said Margaret Seltzer in an interview after the story broke.  Oh, really?