THE AMERICAN BLANDSCAPE: Risky Writing and the Forces Keeping It Silent
Presented by PEN New England's Freedom-to-Write Committee and the Cambridge Forum
Thursday, April 10, 2008, 7:30 PM
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church
3 Church Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA
The panel, moderated by Richard Hoffman, Memoirist, Poet, and Fiction Writer will feature:
Linda McCarriston, Poet and National Book Award finalist,
Mark Pawlak, Poet and Editor of Hanging Loose Press
Jill Petty, Editor and Publisher
Most of us are familiar with the trends in publishing favoring a few big-name authors at the expense of the lesser known perhaps riskier writer: big publishers taking a Hollywood blockbuster approach to deciding what books to publish and market. Profit being the index of success, publishers no longer seem to feel an obligation, as Andre Chiffron has pointed out, to publish, even at a loss, a modicum of important, risky books each year. Many serious or unknown authors must look more and more to small presses to publish their work, but systemic distribution challenges make it hard for these books to reach a wide audience. The rock-star argument even exists in the academy: often authors with books published at smaller presses find it much harder to get tenure than those with books from the big publishers.
But is there something more insidious than the market at work? In her The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award), Frances Stonor Saunders details how after World War II the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, publishing and translating well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsoring abstract art to counter art with any social content, and subsidizing those journals that criticized revolutionary politics and defended or ignored violent and destructive U.S. policies at home and abroad.
The importance of politically challenging fiction and poetry throughout history is undeniable: from Turgenev’s powerful “A Sportsman’s Notebook,” which prompted Czar Alexander II to become the first world leader to free his country’s slaves, to the Lost Generation’s opposition to fascism, which led to U.S. involvement in the Great War; from Ginsburg’s “Howl” to Doris Lessing’s fiction to James Baldwin’s powerful and incisive essays. Has such writing been effectively denied its audience in our day? To what extent are the barriers to risky or oppositional writing real or imagined? What are the long-term societal and cultural dangers of a safe literature, of books as mere entertainment or escape? And what is the individual author, and the reader hungry for substance, to do?
Robert Finch Reads at Hotel Marlowe
Wednesday April 2, 2008
6:15 PM to 7:00 PM
During the Hotel Marlowe's Wine Hour, which begins at 5:00 PM
Robert Finch is widely regarded as one of America's leading nature writers, and has lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, since 1971. He has published seven books of essays, most recently, The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore (Counterpoint Press, 2007). Others include Common Ground (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1982), The Primal Place (republished in 2007 by Countryman Press), Outlands, and The Cape Itself (with photographer Ralph MacKenzie), Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays, and Special Places on Cape Cod and the Islands. In addition he has edited A Place Apart: A Cape Cod Reader and co-edited (with John Elder) The Norton Book of Nature Writing. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and has been widely anthologized and translated. In 2005 he received the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for Radio Writing. Mr. Finch has taught at numerous colleges and writers conferences and is currently on the nonfiction faculty of the MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University, Louisville, Kentucky. He lives in Wellfleet, MA, with his wife, the writer Kathy Shorr, and spends summers in Newfoundland.
Porter Square Books will be selling books at this reading.
The Hotel Marlowe is located at 25 Edwin H. Land Boulevard, Cambridge. Inexpensive parking is available in the Cambridgeside Galleria garage with direct entry into the hotel from Levels A and C. The hotel is closest to the Lechmere T-stop, and is within walking distance of Charles and Kendall Square.
For more information call 617-824-8820 or e-mail pen_ne@lesley.edu