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?
Freedom-to-Write Workshop, November 5
PEN New England's Freedom-to-Write Committee is Seeking Teachers for its Prison Writing Program
PEN has long been involved in the teaching of writing workshops in prisons, both as a way of helping rehabilitate prisoners by giving them the means to express themselves, and as a way of giving a voice to the otherwise voiceless.
PEN New England is no exception: for a number of years we on PEN NE's Freedom-to-Write Committee have taught workshops at Northampton County Prison. We are now beginning a program closer to home at Bay State Correctional Center near Foxborough, and are looking to expand our cadre of teachers.
Other programs—Framingham's Women's Prison, for example—will hopefully soon follow, depending on the number of teachers we have available.
NO TEACHING EXPERIENCE IS NECESSARY, NO OBLIGATION. REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED.
If you are interested, please come to the following information and training session:
Sunday, November 5th at 2:00 PM
MIT Room 2-105
182 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA
(The #1 bus is easy also for getting to Bldg. #2)
Even if you're just curious, PLEASE COME! Poets, fiction writers, and non-fiction writers are welcome.
We look forward to seeing you there! For more information, feel free to e-mail pen_ne@lesley.edu.
The Pen and the Sword: Writing and Expression in Wartime and the 2006 Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award Ceremony
Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 7:00 PM
First Parish Church, Cambridge
(3 Church Street, on the corner of Church Street and Massachusetts Avenue, Harvard Square)
War, in most obvious ways, is the enemy of free expression: truth gives way to propaganda; dissent is squelched; and as soldiers and civilians die, so too die their views and their voices. And yet, from Homer to Hemingway and beyond, war has inspired some of our greatest writers to do their greatest work. As the United States continues waging its current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the first books emerge out of these conflicts, PEN New England is convening a diverse group of writers to discuss the special questions posed for writers in wartime.
Panelists
- Rebecca Faery (Moderator), author of Cartographies of Desire, directs First Year Writing in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. She is currently writing a collection of personal essays on the Vietnam War.
- James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist and National Book Award-winning author of An American Requiem and the forthcoming House of War, a history of the Pentagon.
- Nathaniel Fick, Iraq War veteran and author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, winner of the 2005 Barnes & Noble Discovery Award for nonfiction.
- Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation, one of Entertainment Weekly's "Top Ten Novels of 2005" and winner of the 2005 Barnes & Noble Discovery Award for fiction.
The 2006 Vasyl Stus Freedom to Write Award
The Vasyl Stus Award recognizes a writer who has been persecuted for the peaceful expression of his or her views, and whose courage in the face of censorship and oppression has been exemplary. The 2006 Vasyl Stus Freedom to Write Award will be presented (in absentia) to Shi Tao, a Chinese poet and journalist who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for having disseminated a Chinese government document about the Tiananmen Square anniversary rites.
For more information, contact pen_ne@lesley.edu.
Panelists' books will be available for purchase from Harvard Bookstore.
Directions to First Parish Church: Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes. As you exit the station, cross Mass. Ave. and look for the newsstand called Nini's Corner. Turn right and proceed one block north along Mass. Ave. going toward the Cambridge Common. You will pass the Harvard Coop, Bank of America, and CVS. The First Parish Church is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Church St. Please enter through the front door of the church. Additional directions are also available elsewhere online.
Vasyl Stus Freedom to Write Award Ceremony
May 11, 2005 at 6:30 pm
Location: Fanueil Hall
Boston, MA
PEN New England to Honor Jailed Saudi Poet
Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis to address crowd at Faneuil Hall
The Freedom-to-Write Committee of PEN New England has announced that the 2005 Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award will be presented to the Saudi Arabian poet, editor, and novelist Ali Al-Domaini.
The award will be presented on Wednesday, May 11, 2005, 6:30 p.m., at Boston's storied Faneuil Hall.
Anthony Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times columnist, will deliver the keynote address. Lewis, whose books include Gideon's Trumpet and Make No Law, has been a longtime advocate for civil rights and freedom of expression.
The Vasyl Stus Award recognizes a writer who has been persecuted for the peaceful expression of his or her views, and whose courage in the face of censorship and oppression has been exemplary. The award is named in honor of Stus, the leading Ukrainian poet of his generation, who was the last Ukrainian poet to die in the Soviet gulag.
This year's award winner, Ali Al-Domaini, has been detained without trial, along with two other constitutional reformists, since March of 2004 for criticizing the slowness of official human rights initiatives in Saudi Arabia. Long before his arrest, his works—three books of poems and a novel—were banned in his native country. Appreciation and affection for his work, widespread among readers in Saudi Arabia, is the result of books smuggled into the country, published in Lebanon and Bahrain.
The award ceremony at Faneuil Hall is free and open to the public. Known as the "Cradle of Liberty" because it was the site of patriotic orations during the American Revolution, Faneuil Hall will serve as a potent backdrop for PEN’s celebration of free expression in the face of tyranny.