Category: personal

I am finally back at home, after an exhilarating (and exhausting) stay in Middlebury, Vermont for Bread Loaf. Posting should resume soon.

The last two days at Bread Loaf were my busiest yet. On Tuesday, I taught a craft class on “The Character’s Language” or what to do when the characters we create do not speak the language in which we write. If your heroine speaks Urdu or Igbo or Arabic, if she thinks in Japanese or Afrikaans, how do you render her thoughts and her speech convincingly? We took a critical look at several excerpts from the work of: Mary Yukari Waters, Andre Dubus III, Mona Simpson, Ahdaf Soueif, Junot Díaz, Ha Jin, and Aleksandar Hemon. I also co-taught the regular fiction workshop with Robert Boswell that day.

Then on Wednesday, I gave a reading with the poet Carl Phillips. Instead of picking something from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I read two sections from the first chapter of my current novel. It was the first time I had ever done a public reading of a manuscript still in progress, but I figured it would motivate me to get my act together and finish my current revision.

I also attended readings by the wait staff and the social staff–these are highly anticipated events at Bread Loaf, because the material is usually excellent, and this year’s batch was no exception.

I am still in Vermont, fighting off bugs (what is it with bugs in this state? They’ve got mosquitoes the size of birds, and ants and spiders and bees and flies and moths and a dozen other insects I can’t even name) and having far too great a time to blog much at all. Yesterday we attended a great lecture by Josip Novakovich on writing in English as a second language, Helen Schulman read from her upcoming novel A Day at the Beach, and Peter Orner from his recently published one (The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo.) We also had an amazing craft class with Robert Boswell, in which we read Mary Robison’s story “Pretty Ice” and studied why it worked so well. Then there were readings by Toi Derricotte and Gonzalo Barr and David Tucker and half a dozen other people whom I’m sure I’m forgetting. Now I have to go prepare for a class I’m teaching tomorrow. More Soon.

One of the great things about being here on the Bread Loaf campus is that cell phones don’t work, and there are only a few computers to check email, so I have been blissfully out of touch with world news until this morning. My first day here was made of reunions with friends, like Mary Akers, Cliff Garstang, Katrina Denza, Nina McConigley, Paul Yoon, and many others, and also enjoying some very Loaf-y experiences, like drinks at Treman before dinner and green tea at the barn after the evening reading. Last night was the official start of the conference, with a welcome talk by Michael Collier, and readings by the amazing Percival Everett and Linda Gregerson.

I am on travel today, heading out to Middlebury, Vermont, for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where I will be a fiction fellow. Posting is likely to be sporadic over the next few days.

That is the title of the Dutch edition of Hope, which is coming out in October with Sirene.