August 12, 2008 at 7:36 pm (Conversations, Writers and Others, Writing)
Tags: interviews, Literary Journals & Websites, Writing
Self interviewed by Tania Hershman, of The Short Review.
The same issue has a review of Mayor of the Roses (and self can’t thank Tania Hershman enough for finding a reviewer for it.) The review was written by Steven Wingate, and all self knows about him is what’s listed on his website:
I have reviewed books for American Book Review, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, and other journals. My B.A. is from the University of Massachusetts at Boston and my M.F.A. from Florida State University. Since 2001 I have taught writing workshops full-time at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For a few samples of my work, see the Media etc. page on this site.
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August 12, 2008 at 12:29 am (Books, Quotes, Surprises, Writers and Others, Writing)
Tags: reading
Today was a quiet day. Self watered back and front yards, then read in the living room, Gracie peacefully snoring at her feet. She also trolled the web (for hours — as evidenced by her aching neck!) And she landed (somehow) on a website for the Department of Medicine in the University of Minnesota.
Self couldn’t resist perusing the list of recommended readings. And a very interesting list it was, too. Self has a particular interest in reading “cross-over” writers from the medical field, writers such as Atul Gawande, Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese. Atul Gawande is represented on the list, as are books by Biloine Young (with the most intriguing title, My Heart It is Delicious), Sherman Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, still one of self’s all-time favorites), Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain), Jean D’Haem (The Last Camel: True Stories of Somalia), Donna Gehrke-White (The Face Behind the Veil: The Extraordinary Lives of Muslim Women in America), Philip Gourevitch (We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda), Aleksander Hemon (Nowhere Man), and Ryszard Kapuscinski (The Shadow of the Sun).
And then there is this book, that was published by New Rivers Press quite some time ago:
* Lim, Shirley; Chua, Cheng Lok; Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing
The site has a short review, and self is most astonished to discover herself described as “well known” — !! To which self’s only response is a hearty, hubby-style BWAH-HA HA HA HA!!.
Without further ado, the review:
This anthology of American writers originally from Southeast Asia (Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaya, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) includes poems and short stories by 41 “emerging” writers in English. The anthology has been divided into themes such as “Family,” “Eating,” “The Different Past,” and “Returnings.” Some of the writers are already well known (editor Lim, Marianne Villanueva), and the others, with one or two exceptions, have already been published. All the writers deal with making a life in the United States while recognizing their differences, adjustments, and traumas. Particularly poignant are poems and stories by Anh Quynh Bui, Aurora Harris, Hanh Hoang, Joseph O. Legaspi, Lim, Ira Sukrungruang, and Villanueva; but all the works are well written and thoughtful. The editors, both professors of literature at California universities, have chosen well. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
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August 9, 2008 at 6:14 am (Books, Quotes, Writing)
Tags: Chang-rae Lee
By Chang-rae Lee, from his novel Aloft.
“You haven’t been around lately, Jerome. You don’t know. You don’t know that this is the place where they make the world’s boredom and isolation. This is where they purify it. It’s monstrous. And what they’re doing to Nonna over in the ladies’ wing, I can’t even mention.”
Nonna was his wife, and my mother, and at that point she had been in the brass urn for five years. Pop is by most measures fine in the head, though it seemed around that period that anything having to do with mortality and time often got scrambled in the relevant lobes, a development that diminished only somewhat my feelings of filial betrayal and guilt for placing him via power of attorney into the Ivy Acres Life Care Center, where for $5500 per month he will live out the rest of his days in complete security and comfort and without a worldly care, which we know is simple solution and problem all in one, which we can do nothing about, which we do all to forget.
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July 25, 2008 at 4:42 pm (Books, Surprises, Writers and Others, Writing)
Tags: poetry, Filipino authors
Now that July is limping along to its end, and there will be no more of it until next year, self thinks this would be a good time to evaluate how the past few weeks have gone.
This month, self received excellent news about various Filipino writers:
JoAnn Balingit, it was announced in Filipinas Magazine, became Delaware’s first Filipino American poet laureate.
Luisa Igloria’s panel proposal for the Chicago AWP was accepted (”Archipelagos of Dust”), and self learned that she will be presenting along with Luisa, Karen Llagas, Grace Talusan, Reine Melvin, and Angela Narciso Torres.
Paolo Javier launched LMFAO, published by OMG! press.
Self read: at the annual Foothill Writers Conference.
Self discovered a writer named Anis Shivani in Flyway.
Self was more than usually surprised this month:
Elisabeth Hasselbeck broke down and cried on “The View.”
Hubby belatedly informed self that his office was moving from Mountain View to south Fremont.
Dearest Mum informed self that there are “no plain mistresses in Manila.”
Self actually enjoyed seeing “Wanted.”
Dearest Mum scared self exceedingly with tales of how “depressed and weak” Ying was, but each time self called Ying, self found her feeling “up” and perky.
And, just this morning, self awoke to hear news of a Qantas jet landing in Manila with a gaping hole in its fuselage (thereby putting self’s feverish imagination in mind of “The Twilight Zone” movie in which John Lithgow goes absolutely bananas because no one will believe that he’s seen a gremlin on the wing of his plane)
As for books self read:
The whole world knows already about self’s exceeding admiration for Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Self read another good book: Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind, an account of how the Beaufort Wind Scale came into existence.
Self re-discovered the philosophical writings of Mencius.
Most important of all, self discovered that in spite of everything, she is still able to write. Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
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July 21, 2008 at 4:02 pm (Aunts, Calls, Food and Drink, Movies, Places, Son, Writers and Others, Writing)
Tags: Spain, classic movies
It rained. Self saw the almost transparent sheets of rain from the window in her living room. She waited, just to be sure. Until she saw the sidewalk begin to grow a darker grey. The heater kicked in, for the first time in months.
She stood at the kitchen counter, slicing broiled pork into slivers. Then she mixed in some Hoisin sauce. She’ll use the pork slices to make fried rice for dinner tonight.
Last night, she read portions of the piece she is writing to hubby, while he watched Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate.” Now and then he would guffaw, and self would think it was because of something she had read. But on screen, Dustin Hoffman was engaging in risible exchange with Anne Bancroft. It did lend a certain je-ne-se-quois to self’s words, to hear it in counterpoint to such dialogue as “Thank you for giving me a ride home, Benjamin.” Self knows that her new piece is good, because hubby was trying so hard not to show how much he liked it.
There is no word, of course, from Tel Aviv. Self promised she would not call Ying for at least a week. There were seven messages yesterday on self’s answering machine, all from the same aunt. And, this morning, two e-mails from son: he was in Toledo for his birthday, yesterday. He seems to have fallen in love with the city. His camera ran out of battery and all he could do was describe the city in words: the churches, the bridges.
Self wrote back: “If you love Toledo, now you will understand El Greco.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
4 Comments
July 21, 2008 at 3:35 am (Places, Pleasures of Travel, Quotes, Writing)
Tags: Mendocino, writing conferences
That is where self will be, from July 31 to Aug. 3. Never fear, dear blog readers, self is bringing trusty laptop with her to Mendocino.
Here’s where the conference will be held:
College of the Redwoods
Fort Bragg, California
Information: mcwc.org
Here’s an excerpt from the conference brochure:
Come and enjoy three and a half days on the beautiful Mendocino Coast of Northern California in the company of fellow writers, editors and agents.
- Become more fluent and comfortable in your craft.
- Learn how to express your ideas more effectively.
- Talk with publishing professionals on what they and their clients require.
- Go home refreshed, invigorated, and with a clear vision of how to write what matters most to you.
Conference fee includes continental breakfast on campus for the four mornings, lunch of salads or sandwiches Thursday through Saturday, complimentary coffee, soft drinks and water throughout each day, a welcoming reception with local wines and hors d’oeuvres, and a gala dinner.
Mendocino Coast Writers Conference 2008 Faculty:
Keynote Speakers: Michael Datcher and James D. Houston * Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston: Memoir * Linda Swanson-Davies: Glimmer Train Editor * Susan Wooldridge: Poetry * Daphne Gottlieb: Poetry and Graphic Novel * Jody Gehrman: Young Adult * Suzanne Byerley: Open Genre * Marianne Villanueva: Short Fiction * Andrew Todhunter: Narrative Nonfiction * Jenoyne Adams: Literary Agent * Kate Gale: Editor, Red Hen Press
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July 19, 2008 at 2:16 pm (Books, Quotes, Writing)
Tags: Poets & Writers
This quote is from a July/August 2008 Poets & Writers interview of Janet Silver, previously of Houghton Mifflin (the publisher that brought us Jhumpa Lahiri) and now with Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. The interviewer, Jofie Ferrari-Adler, asks the million-dollar question:
What are you always looking for in a new writer?
Silver: I tend to like character-driven fiction by writers who are sort of pushing their own ambition and their own vision. Someone like Peter Ho Davies, who has this marvelous background. He can write about his Welsh heritage or his Malaysian heritage — and sometimes the two meet — but there’s always a strong sense of history. In his story collection The Ugliest House in the World, there’s a central story called “A Union,” which is about the Welsh mining strikes. But it was also about a marriage. And I just loved the way these characters were set in time — which is not to say that I like historical fiction, because I don’t especially — but I really do like to know that the author has a sense of history, so there’s a context and a richness, a textural kind of context. Peter’s stories take you all over the world, but they also are very grounded in his sensibility.
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July 19, 2008 at 1:48 pm (Places, Quotes, Writers and Others, Writing)
Tags: Literary Journals & Websites, reading
Anis Shivani discusses his poem, “On Where I Grew Up,” published in the Spring/Fall 2005 issue of Flyway:
Why can’t I write about medieval Anatolia, or contemporary Greece or India or Iran, without having experienced those places personally? Why should we relegate ourselves to ethnic and regional ghettoes? After not having been to a place for a while, revisiting it actually dulls its position in the vibrant beehive of imaginative transformation. Natasha Tretheway helped me with this poem and asked if I knew that the Biloxi palms were really as desultory — because stunted and awkwardly placed — as I’d described them? I’d never been to Mississippi at that point. But even if imagination doesn’t confirm experience, why should that be a problem? The Moscow of Bulgakov’s imagination, the Berlin of Isherwood’s, the Oxford of Powell’s, these might only be reflections of heavy bouts of nostalgia, exotic in the most extreme sense of the word. But what’s wrong with that?
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July 12, 2008 at 7:03 pm (Conversations, Relatives, Surprises, Writing)
Tags: Manila
Self undertook to write a story during Dearest Mum’s latest visit (only a month ago, how time doooes fly!).
Story was about a man, his wife, and the man’s plain mistress, living in Sampaloc.
Dearest Mum expressed extreme eagerness to read draft.
Self allowed it.
Dearest Mum read a few pages, then put it aside. There was an oddly prim expression on Dearest Mum’s face.
There ensued the following conversation:
Self: What’s wrong?
Dearest Mum: You spend too long getting to the “fun” stuff. What’s all this about the beautiful skirt the wife wears? And, besides, it’s not realistic. No one would have a plain mistress in Manila. That’s just crazy.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
1 Comments
July 11, 2008 at 5:05 pm (Conversations, Surprises, Writing)
Tags: conference, Events, Luisa Igloria, Readings
And, as the 2009 AWP takes place in mid-February, it will be cold. And self will freeze her toes off. As she (nearly) did in Seattle last month. Self thinks the word to describe her sensitivity to cold is “lamigin.”
But, anyhoo, being in the presence of the five other lovely ladies who will be on the panel with self will be warmth enough 
And, in addition, self thinks the title of the panel is the most GORGEOUS panel title ever. And it was probably Luisa who thought it up (because Luisa has a brain like a computer: not only does she write poetry, teach, raise children and cook, she also thinks up genius titles for panels. Self’s predilection for multi-tasking is nothing compared to Luisa’s!)
Panel was put together in something like two days, just before the panel proposal deadline. Self had proposed panels twice before (but she had a dearth of ideas: both times she used “Landscape” in the panel titles, and she remembers calling up someone in AWP afterwards, and he told her: “Do you know how many proposals we got with the word ‘Landscape’? Eleven.” And all self could do was go: “Uh, really??? Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee . . . “)
Without further ado, allow self to introduce (drumroll, please) THE PANEL:
Event Title: “Archipelagos of Dust, Habitations of Language: Reiterating Landscape, History and Origin at the Threshold of a New Century”
Event Organizer: Luisa Igloria (Creative Writing, ODU)
Moderator: Grace Talusan (Creative Writing, Tufts)
Marianne Villanueva
Reine Marie Melvin
Luisa Igloria
Angela Narciso Torres
Karen Llagas
Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
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