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Mitchell S. Jackson May 15, 2015

Show notes

Mitchell S. Jackson begins with a round of thanks, sometimes unconventional, to all those who influenced his journey to stand before thousands of people in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, as a successful author. He mentions that after he was incarcerated as a young man, he began the process of revision, and he goes on to discuss the differences between editing and revision. “Editing is fixing the small things . . . it is minding convention.” Revision, on the other hand, “is to re-envision.” He talks about being grateful for the opportunity to revise his life and shares various examples of people that he knew who got caught up in gang activity and crime, saying he wishes he could give them the opportunity to revise their lives, too. He also confesses that he use to feel inadequate as a writer when he compared his education to others, but he came to realize the value of his experiences and his gift to hear poetry in the language of the streets. He encourages the audience to help those who may be on a path to “a headline that makes their moms cry” to revise their lives, explaining that “revision is not just for those who want to be writers and artists.”

Mitchell S. Jackson is a Portland, Oregon, native who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received an MA in writing from Portland State University and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Urban Artist Initiative and The Center For Fiction and is the former winner of the Hurston Wright Foundation’s award for college writers. Jackson teaches writing at New York University. He published the e-book Oversoul: Stories and Essays in the summer of 2012. His novel The Residue Years was released in the summer of 2013 and was praised by publications such as The New York Times, The Times of London, and O, The Oprah Magazine. The novel was a finalist for The Center For Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/ Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for best fiction by a writer of African descent. It was also long-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Chautauqua Prize and named an “Honor Book” by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. (source: www.mitchellsjackson.com)

Editing is about minding convention. And if you’re minding convention, you’re also minding the power.”

“Revision is to re-envision. Revision is a philosophy. Revision is seeing the work as a whole.”

“I grew up with pimps and hustlers. Don’t grow up to be a pimp or a hustler, please, I’m not advocating for that. But one thing that I learned from them is that they speak in poetry. You hear the average slick-talking dude—he’s a poet. And if you can take that voice and use that ear, that is a gift. That is me mastering what I had. I don’t have Latin, but I have this guy over here who sounds like Oscar Wilde.”

Kazuo Ishiguro May 15, 2015

Show notes

Kazuo Ishiguro begins the interview by talking about growing up in a Japanese family in England and watching the British with “amused distance,” stating, “I was taught to respect British customs, but they were just that: values and customs that the natives adhered to.” His family finally decided that they would not return to Japan when he was 15, but he says that he first began writing novels with the idea of “this Japan that I never went back to.” He goes on to discuss the real-life places that writers build versions of in their imaginations. Ishiguro also answers questions about being an international writer in translation, saying, “My idea of an international story isn’t someone who gets on planes a lot; it’s universal because it’s something human that people of all cultures can relate to.” He goes on to discuss experiences from his life that have motivated him to take up specific themes.

“I feel quite at home in big cities.”

“I would hope that something like The Remains of the Day would be universal, because essentially it isn’t, as a few people suggested…a study of the British class systems or anything like that, specifically. It might be that incidentally, but I always start with a fairly abstract idea about human beings and people. And I had certain actual themes that I wanted to express.”

“I know that a lot of writers write very fine books by taking a kind of alter ego of themselves and putting them through the story. Now, there’s a long tradition of that, and I know a lot of writers feel happier doing that. But I’m at the other end. I feel terribly inhibited if I try to work through a character who is, on the surface, like me.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s seven published books have won him numerous honors and wide renown. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have more than 1,000,000 copies in print across platforms, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films. His most recent novel is The Buried Giant. (source: Random House)

Joyce Carol Oates May 07, 2015

Show notes

Joyce Carol Oates takes the audience on a dreamlike, philosophical journey as she discusses the origins of art and stories. She poses several hypothetical questions, touching on the purpose of human existence and the reasoning behind our desire to create art. Oates explores these questions by tracing the evolution of the writer: the writer as a child, the writer in school, and so on. She is fascinated with how people progress with the craft of writing and how they contribute to the evolution of literature.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller, The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. (source: HarperCollins)

Literature is a culture, not a cottage activity. It’s a mysterious evolutionary process, where all participate in the evolution of culture. We don’t know why . . . our species does this—it’s one of the qualities of our species.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being normal, but nobody wants to be average.”

“All truth is illuminating and helpful. No truth should be paralyzing.”

Carlos Fuentes May 07, 2015

Show notes

Carlos Fuentes gives a talk titled “After the Cold War: The Rise of a New Agenda.” It is the keynote address for a conference intended to help Oregonians put into a global perspective the cultural, economic, and political significance of the emerging Hispanic population of Oregon and the United States. Fuentes discusses the changes taking place in the world since the end of World War II, mainly focusing on the increases in technology and economy brought on by rapid globalization. Because of this globalization, he says, it is incredibly significant to bridge the gap between “us” and “them.” He makes the case that the solution to many of the divisions in the world lies in coexistence, collaboration, and understanding.

“The problem that is rushing forward to meet and embrace us is that of the other—learning to live in our new multi-polar world with he or she who is not like you and me.”

“Melting pots are now either unmelting or brimming over, for the city of the 21^st century is demanding that we not only assimilate the foreign, but that finally we accept its continual cultural personality.”

Carlos Fuentes was a Mexican novelist, playwright, critic, and diplomat referred to by The New York Times as “Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and a grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world.” His novel The Old Gringo earned him international acclaim in 1985 and was made into a movie featuring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a bestseller in the United States. He received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary award, as well as the National Order of Merit, France’s highest civilian award to a foreigner, and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.

Isabel Allende May 07, 2015

Show notes

Isabel Allende begins her lecture with stories about writing her new book, Island Beneath the Sea, focusing specifically on the connections between the histories of Haiti and New Orleans. The inspiration for the book came after Allende visited New Orleans and was intrigued by the Haitian refugees who created their own identities in Louisiana. She tells how her research into the plantations and the stories of Haitians imported as slaves made her physically sick, and she was worried until her husband reassured her that it would pass as soon as she finished. “He is a wonderful man,” she added. “He is like a wife. Everybody should have a wife.” Island Beneath the Sea begins on a plantation caught in the midst of violence, fear, and revolution. The obsession of the book, and of the main character, is freedom.

“Every story is like a seed that I have in the belly. Some of the seeds grow, some don’t. And when they start to grow, they sort of end up choking me, and then there’s a moment when I’m ready to write it.”

“Writing this book has been a long journey, and a fascinating one, and a very tiring one. Now I want to write an erotic novel, but I have to wait until my mom dies.”

“Life has no endings. Life is just walking in circles.”

Isabel Allende is a Chilean author whose 20 books have been translated into 35 languages and sold more than 65 million copies. Allende has received 14 international honorary doctorates and 50 awards in more than 15 countries. Her books have been adapted into two international movies, as well as plays, musicals, operas, ballets, and radio programs. The Isabel Allende Foundation empowers women and girls worldwide. Her newest novel is The Japanese Lover, forthcoming in fall of 2015 from Simon & Schuster. (source: www.isabelallende.com)

Joan Didion & John Dunne May 01, 2015

Show notes

John Dunne begins his lecture by discussing how two people can experience the exact same thing and come away with completely different observations—specifically how writers betray the image the subjects hold of themselves. He gives anecdotes about a shared experience with Richard Rhodes and quotes Henry James, saying, “If a writer talks about writing without quoting from Henry James . . . then you should get your money back.” Joan Didion then takes the stage to talk about being a journalist and her dislike for the term “literary journalist.” She goes on to discuss the ethics of being a journalist and the questions she asks herself when she writes. Didion emphasizes the importance of revealing one’s opinion as a writer: “This is the tricky part, because most of our press conventions rest on . . . not expressing opinion or bias: in other words, a quite spurious objectivity.” She shares stories from her experiences in the White House pressroom and discusses the challenges of writing about American politics due to the pressure to maintain a conventional narrative.

“What the writer does is observe, and then he filters; observation is nothing without an intelligence to translate it.” –Dunne

“Taking the long view obligates the writer to listen.” –Didion

“Writers are people: they have opinions, they have attitudes, and the fact that these opinions . . . too often remain unspoken . . . tends to come between the page and the reader like so much marsh gas.” –Didion

John Gregory Dunne was an American screenwriter, journalist, and novelist. He was born into a wealthy Irish Catholic family in Hartford, Connecticut, and studied at Princeton University. He married Joan Didion in 1964 and they began writing together for the Saturday Evening Post, as well as collaborating on the screenplays “The Panic in Needle Park,” “A Star Is Born,” and “True Confessions,” the latter an adaptation of Dunne’s novel. Dunne was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and his final novel, Nothing Lost, was published shortly after his death in December of 2003.

Joan Didion is best known for her novels and essays. She was working as an editor at Vogue when she wrote her first novel, Run, River, and married John Gregory Dunne. Her second novel, Play It As It Lays (1970), was nominated for a National Book Award. More recently, Didion is known for The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), written in response to the death of her husband and her daughter’s illness. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Didion’s memoir, Blue Nights, was published by Knopf in 2011.

Ruth Ozeki May 01, 2015

Show notes

Ruth Ozeki discusses her novel A Tale for the Time Being, specifically the phrase “time being” and its several meanings. Ozeki tells the story of discovering her main character, Nao, and her journey toward figuring out all the various narrative elements of her novel. It was a long, circuitous route: world affairs, books, and life experiences all influenced the characters and events Ozeki wrote about, and she struggled to decide who Nao was writing her journal for: “It was my job, as a novelist, to figure this out.” She also philosophizes extensively about the way we view time, asserting that, “All that exists, all that we can ever know, is the present moment.” She cites Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher Dogen Zenji and uses filmmaking techniques to discuss our experience of time, arguing that viewing time as a quantifiable commodity is unhealthy. At the conclusion of her talk, Ozeki leads the entire audience through a meditation exercise.

“I find [Dogen Zenji’s] view of time to be quite astonishing. It’s so expansive and generous. It means there’s always enough time if you just slow down. If you just slow down and take your time, you will have plenty of opportunities to do something beneficial.”

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her critically acclaimed independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been screened at Sundance and aired on PBS. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ozeki was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in British Columbia and New York City. She currently teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature.

“Our bodies and minds are rarely together in the present moment at the same time, and this skews the alignment between being and time and causes all sorts of suffering, which is what makes us humans such anxious and unsettled time-beings.”

“[Writing A Tale for the Time Being] took an achingly long time, but I think it illustrates an important point, that novels are time-beings too. They take the time they take.”

Gore Vidal May 01, 2015

Show notes

Gore Vidal is interviewed by Lauren Kessler, answering several questions about his political writings and the power of writers in America, specifically Mark Twain and Noam Chomsky. Vidal says he strongly dislikes systems, especially the press, whom he calls “part of the corporate ownership of the country.” He goes on to discuss his work, including a comparison of his novel, The Smithsonian Institution, and its fantasy elements to his historically accurate nonfiction books, Lincoln, Burr, and Julian. When asked about his writing process, Vidal compares it to sex, saying, “You need a lack of self-consciousness. You just do it.” He says he writes to find out what will happen next, claiming he was halfway through writing Myra Breckenridge before he realized Myra had been a man. An attentive audience can be heard laughing and applauding throughout the conversation.

“I think anyone with writer’s block should say, ‘Well, thank god, I don’t have to do it. I’m not a writer.’ You’re condemned, really, to a kind of life of slavery. But I do it as naturally as I breathe.”

“Lack of self consciousness, I think, is the first thing a writer must learn. You just do it, you know. I’ve never done anything else.”

“To paraphrase John Quincy Adams: The United States is not designed to go forth and slay dragons in other lands. She could become Dictatress of the world, but we will have lost our soul.”

American writer Gore Vidal is known for many popular screenplays, plays, novels, and other literary works. He wrote and published more than 200 essays and 24 novels throughout his lifetime, and his career path included a venture into politics, a stint as a popular talk-show guest, and even running for political office. Among Vidal’s most famous works are his historical novels Julian (1964), Lincoln (1984), and the controversial social novel, Myra Breckinridge (1968). His political nonfiction, United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award, and his memoir, Palimpsest (1995), was a bestseller. His screenplay for Ben-Hur (1959) won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Vidal died at his home in Hollywood, California, on July 31, 2012 from complications due to pneumonia. After his death, The New York Times described Vidal as “an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent.”

Terrance Hayes Apr 17, 2015

Show notes

Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes begins by reading from his most recent collection, Lighthead, opening with “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy.” He is relaxed and conversational about his writing, pausing between poems to discuss why he chose to write about specific ideas and to define words that, he says, “only people east of the Mississippi would understand.” (For example: muscadine.) Many of the poems he reads lean toward the autobiographical side, often commenting on race and culture in America or creating portraits of the South. Hayes ends by answering several questions from the audience about his work and influences, and he reads a few more poems upon request.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include Wind In a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Pres, 1999). Hayes’ honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2015. (Source: terrancehayes.com)

You can spend your whole life / doing no more than preparing for life and thinking, / “Is this all there is?”

“Not what you see, but what you perceive: / that’s poetry.”

“Maybe art’s only purpose is to preserve the self.”

“I always return to the idea of pulling a sentence, stretching a sentence out. That’s one of the ways of surprising myself.”

Jane Hirshfield Apr 17, 2015

Show notes

Jane Hirshfield reads poems from her new collection at the time, After, which was named a ‘best book of 2006’ by The Washington Post. The poem she begins with— “Theology”—immediately establishes Hirshfield as a writer in tune to the frequencies of the natural world, observing life and death, animals and humans, through a stunning montage. Between poems, Hirshfield shares the meaning of her collection: After is meant to encompass the idea of continuity after death. Each poem is an elegy, paying tribute to the subject by picking it apart and examining what it’s made of, thus making it seem infinite. Hirshfield’s language is quiet but complex, painting images of the natural world that echo the meaning and beauty of existence.

Jane Hirshfield is a prize-winning poet, translator, and essayist. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her newest books are a collection of poetry, The Beauty (2015), and a book of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015). Hirshfield’s honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; two Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards; two Northern California Book Reviewers Awards; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Orion, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, seven editions of The Best American Poetry, four Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and several other publications. In fall 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy. (Source: barclayagency.com)

A good poem smuggles us past the border of our own hesitation.”

“These are poetic assays—poems that look at their subject with the mind of examination and dismantling to see what they’re made of, what the imagination can find in them.”

“You can’t look at the external without bringing in the internal, subjective self. And you can’t look at the inner world without doing so by means of the outer, objective world. Each of them cross mantles with each other.”

“We don’t actually have much agency. We have some choices, but not many.”

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