Category: personal

The spring quarter at UCR starts tomorrow. I’ll be teaching an introductory creative writing course, open to freshmen of all persuasions–future biologists, businesswomen, dentists, painters, or entomologists, as well as future poets and writers. I’m both excited (I get to give a lecture on writing twice a week!) and nervous (180 students? What fresh hell is this?), but probably more excited than nervous, since we’ll be reading and discussing Yusef Komunyakaa, Marjane Satrapi, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, and Maxine Hong Kingston, among many, many others.

PEN has announced its program for the World Voices Festival, which will be held in New York from April 27 to May 3. I will be doing four (!) events. Here are the details:

Personal Evolution, Social Revolution
Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, Laila Lalami, and Colum McCann; moderated by Benjamin Anastas
Thursday April 30, 2009
4:30 p.m.
Instituto Cervantes New York
211–215 East 49th Street

Garden Readings
With Laila Lalami, Morten Ramsland, and Peter Weber
Thursday, April 30, 2009
12:30–2 p.m.
Deutsches Haus, at NYU
42 Washington Mews

This Critical Moment!
With Eric Banks, Rigoberto González, Laila Lalami, and Kevin Prufer; moderated by Jane Ciabattari
Friday, May 1, 2009
3–4:30 p.m.
Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue

Season of Migration to the North: The Work of Tayeb Salih
With Elias Khoury, Laila Lalami, Bruce Robbins, and Raja Shehadeh
Friday, May 1, 2009
6–7 p.m.
Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue

The theme for this year’s festival is: Evolution/Revolution. The Arthur Miller lecture will be given by the Egyptian writer Nawal al-Saadawi. You can view the entire program and list of participants at the PEN website.

The reading at Macalester took place at the college’s art gallery. (It’s currently showing an installation that consists of pieces of insulation material hanging on strings from the ceiling; yeah, I don’t get it either.) I was introduced by my friend Marlon James, who teaches fiction here. I’m in the middle of his new novel, The Book of Night Women; it’s very good. I’m particularly fond of what he does with language.

I read from a short personal essay I’ve been working on and then from Secret Son. The most interesting question for me came when someone in the audience wondered why my main character is a man. It’s true (and this isn’t my first time.) But, with apologies to Flaubert, Youssef, c’est moi.

I just got back from dinner and I’m tired. More soon, I hope.

I am in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the weather is surprisingly (and thankfully) mild. On the way to dinner last night, we drove past Summit Terrace, the home of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and the place where he supposedly rewrote This Side of Paradise. There are several homes associated with Fitzgerald in the area, and I hope at least one of them will be open for visits.

As I was getting ready for bed, I noticed a thick book on the shelf beneath the nightstand; it was a 1920 edition of Old French Fairy Tales by the Comtesse de Ségur. I grew up reading de Ségur in Morocco, so it was strange yet wonderful to encounter her characters in English, in a bed-and-breakfast in St. Paul, of all places.

I’ll be doing an event at Macalester College on Monday. Here are the details:

March 23, 2009
5:30 – 7:30 PM
Reading from Secret Son
Old Main Room 210
Macalester College
St. Paul, Minnesota

If you live in the Twin Cities area, do come. I’d love to see you.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which takes place on the UCLA campus April 25 and 26, will this year include more than 450 authors, in all genres of fiction and nonfiction. A list of confirmed authors is now available. I will post my festival schedule here as soon as I have it.