Huge gaping thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, which recently granted me one of their forty-odd 2010 Literature Fellowships in Creative Writing (Prose). It's pretty amazing company to be in--Barry Gifford and Adam Johnson and ZZ Packer also won this year, along with my friend and fellow Dzancer Mike Czyzniejewski. The book I pitched in my application will require more in the way of travel expenses than I could ever have afforded on my own, so again, thank you, NEA!
December 18, 2009, 9:20 p.m.Categories: Auto-trumpeting, History, Novels, Travel
especially if you like color and line and happiness.
January 30, 2009, 3:57 p.m.Categories: Art, History, Politics
I've just gotten back from an extraordinary three weeks in St. Petersburg, where I was on the faculty for the Summer Literary Seminars. I taught a travel writing workshop, gave a reading with the poet Mark Halperin in the gorgeous Nabokov Museum, gave a lecture and a craft talk. And outside the classroom, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the beauty of the city, the intensity of the white nights, the richness of literary culture and cultural history...
Part of it, of course, were the people with whom I shared the experience. Aside from Mark, Tony Swofford was there, Paisley Rekdal and Meg Storey, Daniel Baird and Elizabeth Hodges... And that's just the foreigners. We also got to hang with some of the writers building contemporary Russian literature--Alexandr Skidan, Ekaterina Taratuta, Dmitry Golynko. Just superb.
Like everyone else who's ever been part of the program, I went with James Boobar on his justly famous Dostoevsky walk. Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker and Tom Burke have put together a great local staff, and a great program of extracurricular trips. And the city itself...
Forgive this raving, but I just can't recommend the place/time/seminar strongly enough. Many thanks to Dan and Steve at Dzanc for arranging my time there. St. Petersburg will be showing up in my writing for years, I suspect. And I'd write a great deal more about it right here and now, except that it's time for me to leave Beijing, fly to Peru, move to Syracuse, build a year's worth of life there... But if you're interested, go check out the program's webpage, or this promo video that Ken Calhoun put together.
And then go, go, go.
July 6, 2008, 10:02 a.m.Categories: Art, History, Nonfiction, Translation, Travel
I spoke earlier about how open the Chinese government has been in allowing full reporting, both inside and outside China, in regard to the Sichuan quake and its aftermath. Old habits die hard, apparently. It has been quietly declared that there will be no more stories (at least inside China, at least for now) about the fact that so many school fells and so many government buildings didn't, or about the immense amount of donated aid that is vanishing into thin air long before reaching the victims. (For example.) But the edicts don't seem to have the force they once did. Too many people are too angry. What happens next isn't clear yet: maybe the hammer will fall hard and things will go back to how they were; maybe the hammer will fall hard and break; maybe a new compromise will be reached before the hammer falls.
In other news, I've never done it myself, but I've often thought that "News Crawl" would be a good fiction workshop exercise. You watch any major television news program, see, but instead of watching the images and listening to the anchors and reporters, you only read the headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen, and you have to write a story linking the first, say, five items into a single narrative.
Last night, though, this would have been a stretch. My mouth just kept dropping further and further open at each successive item:
A 747 carrying U.S. diplomatic baggage breaks in half on take-off...
and a cast member from the Harry Potter series was stabbed to death in a bar fight...
All of which was just a little too cosmically incongruent for me, so I stopped watching. I'm guessing that the fifth item would have been in regard to Virginia Quarterly Review and Zyzzyva beating the hell out of each other as re: slushpile etiquette. And I'm guessing that right now some hack at Fox is pitching his superiors on his great new idea: When Lit Mags Attack.
May 26, 2008, 8:44 a.m.Categories: China, History, Litmags, Politics
Most of what I have to say about all things Tibet these days has been posted over here, and that's where I'll continue to think out loud about it, but here's one post I thought perhaps worth editing and double-posting:
My thoughts on Chinese politics are (obviously) informed by my own big-picture stance, which is not and I hope will never be (kneejerk or otherwise) anti-China, anti-Chinese or anti-Han, but simply (and purely, and always) anti-bully.
The problem of course being that my reactions as determined by that stance often come perilously close to--or, still worse, actually become--more instances of bullying itself.
The other problem being that sometimes the bully has a point, and I find myself caring less than perhaps I should, as my antibullyness is invariably higher energy than my yesyouhaveapointness.
Most of what I have to say from here on out can be synthesized by mixing what you find here with what you find by scrolling further down that same page to CCT’s comment "Where the Western media dropped the ball..."
By which I mean only one of the things Orwell meant: to the extent that They (any manifestation of power--Bush or Hu, take your pick) can control what we know, they can control what we are. And there are two ways to do that: giving no information, and giving misinformation. And we should be no less quick to condemn the latter when CNN or RFI is the mouthpiece than to condemn the former when Xinhua is the (okay, silent, but still) mouthpiece.
That said, the two are not equal crimes, regardless of who commits them. Those giving misinformation can be challenged and corrected and, best case scenario, smacked in the mouth. Those giving no information (or, worse, actively working to prevent anyone from gathering any information whatsoever) cannot be challenged in the same way, and there is nothing to correct. One might well try to fill the gap from other sources, but the non- or anti-informationist has reserved for himself a plateau from which to say, "Ah, but those sources are biased!"
And however irritating it may be, he has a point.
But he should not be too surprised if no one listens. The only voice more grating than that of a bully bullying is that of a bully claiming victimhood.
March 30, 2008, 11:07 a.m.Categories: China, History, Politics
One of the first stops on the All Over tour was New York, and one of the first projects there was a sit-down with Ed Champion, he of the infamous Bat Segundo Show. Great questions over great sandwiches: a hard combination to beat. And the results are now up for your listening pleasure right here.
November 30, 2007, 1:14 p.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, History, Interviews
A very fun radio interview to start things off here in Champaign-Urbana, with David Inge of Will Focus 580 AM. You know the cough button that mutes your mike for as long as you press it down? For reasons I would be hard-pressed to explain, I love that button.
November 5, 2007, 12:37 p.m.Categories: China, Fiction Collections, History, Novellas
Columnist, writer, poet, friend and fellow McSweeney's dispatcher John Griswold on the mound. Me at the plate. Here comes the heat.
October 10, 2007, 6:35 p.m.Categories: China, Fiction Collections, Food, History, Interviews, Novellas
Julie Sisk, the editor of Map Magazine out of Nanjing, takes her best shot at me in the latest issue. Most of the interview deals with the new cultural/historical guide to the city that I just wrote, but the questions branch out from there.
June 28, 2007, 8:21 p.m.Categories: China, History, Interviews, Nonfiction, Travel
It's been a long time coming but Nanjing: A Cultural and Historical Guide is at last alive.
May 2, 2007, 11:48 a.m.Categories: China, History, Nonfiction, Travel
