My hat goes high and then higher to the new U.S. Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin: extraordinary poet, superb translator, and author of one of my favorite offbeat nonfiction gems, The Mays of Ventadorn.
A full glass lifted to Ron Mitchell and the rest of the staff at Southern Indiana Review for fitting two chunks of flash memoir into their Spring 2010 issue. “Houhai Lake in Winter” and “The Overnight Train from Xian Pulls Into Beijing” have superb company - Liam Rector and James Valvis, Randall Brown and Joe Meno, Laura Madeline Wiseman and Adam Johnson, bright lights all.
April 28, 2010, 7:35 p.m.Categories: Auto-trumpeting, China, Litmags, Nonfiction, Travel
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
It is of course a pleasure to be very nearly anywhere: that is, to be. But to be in an anthology compiled by Lee K. Abbott and featuring, among many others, Michael Martone, Stephen Dixon and Terese Svoboda: that is a splendid thing. "Krazy" was first published in the likewise awesome Hot Metal Bridge back in 2007; Best of the Web is one of Dzanc's yearly endeavors, captained through 2009 by Nathan Leslie, by Matt Bell from here on out, and I thank all involved.
July 8, 2009, 10:44 a.m.Categories: Auto-trumpeting, Nonfiction, Travel
will be in Chicago for the upcoming AWP conference, by all means track me down.
January 30, 2009, 11:03 a.m.Categories: Interviews, Litmags, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Travel
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
This news made me just unfeasibly happy. I first came to Snyder almost exactly twenty years ago, in an early edition of Donald Hall's excellent Contemporary American Poetry. I'd just dropped out of college and was hitchhiking across the country on my way to Alaska, bought a couple of books in a used bookstore in Seattle before jumping on the ferry, and that anthology was one of them.
I already knew a few of the poets inside--Lowell and Bly, maybe Stafford, maybe Ashbery--but most of them were new to me, and they made me crazy with pleasure and desire, the whole crowd: Duncan and Nemerov and Dickey and Levertov and Logan, Ammons and O'Hara, Kinnell and Merwin and Wright and Kennedy. Creeley and Wilbur were crack to me--the feeling that whole countries were there, and that maybe, if I was just a bit smarter, if I really read the shit out of those poems, I'd be given the visas, have earned them. John Haines felt like a brother-in-arms, because, hey, poems about Alaska, exactly where I'm going right this very minute!
And of course Gary Snyder as well. I like what Margaret Soltan has to say about him here: the man knows how to listen to the world, has hearing most of us can barely imagine. Sitting there on the deck of that northbound ferry, skirting Canada, sun on my face but not in my eyes, reading "Milton by Firelight" and "Hay for the Horses," I'd have given Snyder a hundred grand right then and there, if, you know, I'd had a hundred grand, and hadn't been on a ferry. Thank God Ruth Lilly has my back.
Steve Morison's kind profile (partly about me, partly about Zhang Lijia, all in the context of the Beijing expat writers scene) just showed up in Poets & Writers. This kind of thing is Morison's forte--he's also done articles about Kabul and Tangiers (if I remember right, he was the last known person to interview Paul Bowles), and was in Myanmar researching something similar when the typhoon hit.
April 16, 2008, 12:44 p.m.Categories: China, Fiction Collections, Interviews, Travel
And the family trip we took to Xian, which I've mined once or twice before, comes through for me once again: a hard moment going bright, now up as part of Issue Two of the fine new Hot Metal Bridge, along with great fiction by Dan Chaon and Dan Marshall, nonfiction by Michelle Wildgen and Shya Scanlon, and interviews with Tom Perrotta and Stewart O’Nan.
October 30, 2007, 7:20 p.m.Categories: China, Food, Nonfiction, Travel
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
