Collins, Arthur, Christle Poetry Reading: A Brief Recap

Heather Christie

Arda Collins, James Arthur, and Heather Christle gave a reading at the NYU Lillian Vernon Writers House on Friday, March 15. NYU creative writing faculty member Matthew Rohrer introduced the three poets.

Arda Collins kicked off the reading with several of her intense, disquieting poems from her 2009 book It is Daylight, wryly observing that her poems are “incredibly lonely and incredibly creepy.” Collins also read several new poems titled after numbers she likes, including “152”, “392”, and “266,000”.

James Arthur read next, fluidly delivering his poems from memory. He read poems from his debut 2012 book Charms Against Lightning, and explained that many of the poems were inspired by his wanderings, and his belief as a younger man that, “if I just kept moving, and just kept changing, finally I would end up somewhere where I would be completely myself, completely happy.” His poems meditated on everything from the omnivore diet to the biblical story of Cain and Abel to the sight of an ergonomic bicycle.

James Arthur

Heather Christle read last, charming the audience with questions about Daniel Day-Lewis and lines like, “I lost my phone    I am using the baby monitor instead   it’s in the flowers    nobody is calling.” She read poems from her 2011 book The Trees The Trees, poems which Matthew Rohrer introduced as “deceptively simple, emotionally rich” and as “taking place in Narnia.” Christle closed with a poem dedicated to her friend Bill Cassidy who she last saw climbing the stairs at the reading she gave at NYU in 2009.

A podcast of the reading can be found here: http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/podcast#27938

Dana Isokawa, Assistant Interview Editor

Review: Viral Voyages

Viral Voyages: A Reading by Lina Meruane

Seropositivo. HIV-positive. For some Latin American authors, this was a death sentence. In her nonfiction book Viajes virales (“Viral Voyages”), Chilean author Lina Meruane explores the literature of AIDS in Latin America. Meruane describes her new work as a “libro mapa,” in which the books of landmark writers like Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas—Cubans who lived with AIDS and struggled against homophobia—echo throughout the text.

Meruane herself comes from a rich literary background suited to this exploration. As a teacher at NYU’s Liberal Studies Program and the author of several novels, she most recently won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize for her novel Sangre en el ojo. Sylvia Molloy, the great Argentine novelist and critic, as well as the holder of the NYU Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities, advised Meruane’s PhD dissertation that became, after a decade of work, Viajes virales.

On Thursday, March 14, Molloy masterfully guided a discussion in Spanish with Meruane at McNally Jackson Books.

In her introduction, Molloy called Meruane’s work an investigation of “los cuerpos—y el corpus—seropositivo.” The linguistic play in cuerpos/corpus (literally, bodies/body of work) is appropriate, for in Viajes virales, the connotations, etymologies, and echoes of words take on extreme significance.

As the evening progressed, Meruane took us through the actual and metaphorical journey of Latin Americans during the AIDS crisis. As in many parts of the world, the prevailing opinion in Latin America was that homosexuality was a disease. As a result, many gays traveled to Europe and the United States, to cities like Paris and New York, seeking the freedom to be themselves. Instead, they found AIDS. Sometimes, Meruane explained, these “exiled” bodies would return to Latin America, but she rejected the term “return” (“el retorno”). It was, instead, more like a “repatriación.” People may return, but it is “remains” that are repatriated. This was not a homecoming but a journey toward death, in which HIV-positive Latin Americans sought not only “hospitality” but also “hospice” in their home countries. The meeting of metaphor and reality—of homosexuality-as-illness and the real illness of AIDS—was, in Meruane’s words, “la gran tragedia del SIDA.”

The Q&A part of the talk revealed some of the unfortunate details of the linguistic miscommunications that occurred during the AIDS crisis. For example, Meruane pointed out that the States would send health pamphlets to Chile, but they would be in English and therefore useless until those at risk for contracting HIV learned English. Meanwhile, statistics gathered in the Caribbean were faulty in part because many Caribbean cultures only defined the “penetrated” male as gay.

Words and word choice, echoes and definitions—the layers of meaning added up to a heartbreaking portrait of Latin American AIDS literature and of the destruction wrought by the disease itself. It was a complex and compelling discussion of Meruane’s critical investigation.

Viajes virales is out from Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica. It is available in Spanish.

Gina Rodriguez, Layout Editor

2013 Washington Square Awards

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Karen Russell, Matthea Harvey, Shane Jones, Washington Square Awards

the 2013 Washington Square Awards

The deadline for the 2013 Washington Square Awards is March 15, 2013. The winners from all three genres (poetry, fiction, and flash) will receive a $500 prize and publication in Washington Square. The submission fee is $10 and comes with a FREE year-long subscription to Washington Square Review.  Submit online or by mail.

Poetry  Judge: Matthea Harvey

Matthea Harvey has published three collections of poetry, most recently Modern Life, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a Notable Book by The New York Times. She has served as the poetry editor of American Letters & Commentary as well as a contributing editor to jubilat and BOMB. She earned her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Fiction judge: Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of a short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and a novel, Swamplandia!, which was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. She has been named one of the “5 under 35” by the National Book Foundation, and her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker and Zoetrope. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2006.

Flash Fiction Judge:  Shane Jones

Shane Jones lives in upstate New York. His first novel, Light Boxes, was originally published by Publishing Genius Press and reprinted by Penguin in 2010. Light Boxes has been translated in seven languages and was named an NPR best book of the year. This year, Penguin released his new novel, Daniel Fights A Hurricane. Shane is also the author of the novella The Failure Six.

A Clarification: Mary Ruefle on Meringue

Zadie Smith NW Reading: A Brief Recap

On September 27^th 2012, NYU Creative Writing MFA faculty and celebrated author Zadie Smith gave a reading from her new novel, NW, to a packed house at NYU’s Kimmel Center. She read two passages, one from the “Natalie” section of the book and one from the “Felix” section. The Natalie reading, “On the playground,” tells the story of a group of residents of Northwest London’s council estates confronting a young man smoking outside a playground. The passage captures myriad voices from different cultures as they treat this confrontation as both necessary and entertainment.

The Felix section deals with a young man breaking up with his older lover. Again, this time in a scene with just two people in it, Smith’s writing and reading illuminated the backgrounds and differences between these two characters, the way they talk to and past each other. This section was more poignant than the first, but not without her usual incisive sense of humor. A Zadie Smith reading is always a treat, a wonderful way to experience her work, because of her ability to portray accent and character in her delivery as well as her words.

After the reading, she took questions from the audience, which mostly had to do with her writing process. Some highlights…

• She captures different voices by having confidence, being willing to make mistakes, and remembering that characters don’t have to carry the whole weight of their culture. She credits having a varied life and having different kinds of friends with her ability to evoke these voices in prose.
• When writing a non-fiction article, especially about a curated experience, like a sponsored trip to Liberia, or the Oscars, she likes to focus on looking where her tour guides are not telling her to look. In the case of the trip to Liberia, she focused on the NGOs themselves, not their showcases of local people, and at the Oscars she focused on the agents and deal-makers rather than the actors.
• Writing a novel about London while living in New York was not as hard as one might imagine. Being away from a place makes it easy to be nostalgic.
• Coming back to novel writing is always challenging—criticism is easy; writing a novel is hard. Creating the illusion of life, sparks of life, on the page, is what brings her back. An essay can make a writer sounds smart, but doesn’t capture life.
• She famously writes a novel from beginning to end, re-reading what she has written each day, editing as she goes before adding more, which means that it takes a long time to complete, but at the end she has a draft ready for submission.
• Reading criticism can be paralyzing, and some critics seem to hate writers. If you’re a writer, find critics to read who are sympathetic to creative art.

Zadie Smith is a Senior Faculty member of the NYU Creative Writing Program. This reading was part of the Creative Writing Program’s Reading Series.

Linnea Hartsuyker, Assistant Web Editor