News

I received notice about this event in NYC, and though I can’t attend (obvs.) I’d love to hear from those who do:

Celebrate Immigrant History Week with three talented writers:

• Susan Choi (American Woman)
• Azadeh Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran)
• Akhil Sharma (An Obedient Father)

April 12 at 7:30 p.m. International Center, 50 West 23rd St., 7th floor, between 6th Ave. and 5th Ave., New York, N.Y. tel: (212)255-9555. Subway: F to 23rd St.

The event is free to the public.

Tayeb Salih (whose Season of Migration to the North should, I think, be assigned reading whenever Heart of Darkness is studied) talks to Reuters about the state of Arabic literature.

“If you find a publisher who believes in Arab literature and takes a risk on it, not just publishing a few thousand books, you will find readers for it,” said the 76-year-old writer, who is married to a Scot and has lived much of his life in England.

“The Arab novel has reached a very high standard which is comparable to any standard, anywhere in the world. The fact that this is not recognised abroad is a matter either of criteria … or it is a lack of enthusiasm for foreign products,” he said.

Still, the Reuters guy can’t help but trot out those discredited numbers about readership in the Arab world. Sigh.

The April/May issue of Ruminator magazine is now up, and features contributions by writer-cum-gubernatorial-candidate Kinky Friedman, Jon Fasman, Harvey Pekar, Steve Almond, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. Lahiri’s piece is a reminiscence of her travels to India as a child, where her parents collected items for what she calls the “Food Suitcase.”

I am the daughter of former pirates, of a kind. Our loot included gold, silver, even a few precious gems. Mainly though, it was food, so much that throughout my childhood I was convinced my parents were running the equivalent of the ancient spice trade. They didn’t exactly plunder this food; they bought it in the bazaars of Calcutta, where my mother was born and to which we returned as a family every couple of years. The destination was Rhode Island, where we lived, and where, back in the Seventies, Indian groceries were next to impossible to come by.

“I came upon Wesley Gibson’s You Are Here with delight,” Trueblood says. “It’s a hilarious, energizing misery-fest of a book, about the attempt to live and write in New York when you arrive not so young as all that and without the cushioning illusions, with good work already behind you, and have to be, every day, younger, sexier and way cooler than you feel. Gibson knows how to fake being an upbeat guy; he is a bumbling knight to his writing students (one of the jobs to which he brings his guarded-against born tenderness is teaching four adult students on Saturday in an elementary schoolroom). The jobs appear and fade, his own work goes on behind the scenes as he struggles to make a living, a potential landlord finds him “not gay enough,” the apartment he takes (or that takes him) gives him, and us, the lonesome shivers, the roommate–here the book begins to soar–the afflicted roommate coughs his way into our hearts. You Are Here, a Memoir of Arrival: it’s a sad book, full of joy, the joy of life and of sentences like this: ‘Then she gave me a smile that was as slow as six deliberate paper cuts.'”

Valerie Trueblood is a writer based in Seattle. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Northwest Review, and One Story, among others. Her first book, a novel in stories, will come out this year from Little, Brown.

I went to Hedgebrook full of apprehension-the brochure said that the retreat was quite rural, that residents had to use a wood stove, that bats sometimes snuck into the cottages at night. I’m a big city kind of girl–Portland’s the smallest town I’ve ever lived in. Before I left, I made Alex promise that he would come get me if it proved to be too much. He had a mocking half-smile on his face. He’s a devoted backpacker; he thinks everyone feels at home in the woods. “Whatever you say. But I think you’ll love it.”

Hedgebrook Farm sits on 48 acres of land, on the south side of Whidbey Island, in Washington. Six writers are housed at a time, each in a post-and-beam, shingle-roofed cottage with a loft, a desk, and a comfortable chair. I could tell right away that great care had been put into every detail of the cottage–the L-shaped desk provided the right amount of workspace; the French press doubled as a thermos; the water filter provided just enough liquid for a day; the wood stove was the ideal size for a small place; the bookcase had a dictionary and a thesaurus. It was a place of work, and of love.

I spent the first three days of my retreat struggling to cut off the umbilical cord of my regular life. There was an Internet connection in the pump house, down the road from my cottage, and I’d go there every few hours to check my email and deal with bits of unfinished business. I was still copy-editing the manuscript for my collection, and it wasn’t until I shipped it off that I was finally able to focus on my second book, the novel I went to Hedgebrook to work on.

I started writing A Place To Call Home in November 2003. Set in Casablanca and Los Angeles, it’s the tale of two very different and yet very similar lives, tangled by issues of race, class, and politics. When I arrived at the retreat, I had just a little over 58,000 words of it written. I started to reorganize my chapters, shuffled scenes around, and, after staring at the stuff for a couple of days, I realized I had to cut the first part of the book out–nearly 20,000 words. It was painful. I couldn’t turn around and start writing again right away; I went for a walk, took a long bath, and spent the day reading a book.

barred owl who’d scared one of the residents when he swooped down near her would be tempted to do the same with me.

I don’t know if I’ve managed to conquer my fear of the woods. But I did learn to make a rip-roaring good fire. I watched rabbits and deer. I found out how to tell a cedar from a douglas fir. I listened to the winter wren in the morning and to the bullfrogs at night. Maybe Alex was right. I did enjoy being in the woods. In fact, if the cottage had wi-fi, I might not have come back home at all.