PEN Contributors Featured at AAWW Literary Festival

The Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Festival happened this weekend, and some of PEN America’s favorite authors were honored!

Frequent contributor Jessica Hagedorn received the Lifetime Achievement Award. Check out her response for issue 14’s forum.

Favorite poet Kimiko Hahn, recipient of the 2008 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry, was honored for her collection Toxic Flora.

Check out Amitava Kumar’s essay, “A Collaborator in Kashmir” from PEN America Issue 10, and support him at the festival this weekend—his book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb won the nonfiction award.

For more information about the prizewinners and the festival click here. 

(credit: Marion Ettlinger)

Cuban journalist freed, Burmese poet speaks, Colombian journalist excluded

Journalist Normando Hernández González (pictured right) was freed from prison in Cuba Saturday morning. He was arrested in 2003—one of 75 writers and activists jailed in a major crackdown on dissent—and sentenced to 25 years in prison for criticizing the government’s management of tourism, agriculture, fishing, and cultural affairs. His prison conditions were reportedly deplorable and he was hospitalized repeatedly over the past seven years.

As his health declined, PEN mounted an increasingly urgent campaign on his behalf, awarding him the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 2007 and pressing the Cuban government to provide adequate medical care and grant him a humanitarian release. He was finally released as part of an agreement between Cuban authorities and the Catholic Church to free 52 political prisoners, all jailed since the March 2003 crackdown. He will reportedly fly to Spain with his wife and daughter today.

Meanwhile, Saw Wei, whose subversively acrostic poem “February the Fourteenth” we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, has given an interview to the The Irrawaddy, a magazine that covers Burma and other parts of southeast Asia (it's named for a river in Burma; credit to The Literary Saloon for spotting the interview). As previously noted, Saw Wei was jailed for disturbing public tranquility with a poem; happily, he did more writing while in prison:

I wrote some poems and essays while I was in prison. I have to make some final revisions to an essay called “Modern Art and Modern Images.” Before I was put in jail, I had already written about 50 short stories and planned to publish the stories in one go. But I couldn’t finish that, because I was imprisoned.

For the community work, we have a group called “White Rainbow.” We need more members. I want to go everywhere to help our people. If there are no restrictions, I will continue this work.

Meanwhile, a Colombian journalist, Hollman Morris, who was recently selected to participate in the Nieman fellowship program at Harvard, has been denied a visa by the United States. “We were very surprised. This has never happened before,” the Nieman curator, Bob Giles, is quoted as saying in an AP story about the case. PEN, the ACLU, and the American Association of University Professors have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton protesting Morris’s exclusion.

On a lighter note, if you’re having a hard time letting go of the World Cup, here’s a possible antidote: 32 books to add to your reading list, one from each finalist nation—courtesy of Anderson Tepper. For Brazil, he selects Clarice Lispector, and suggests you join in the discussion of her final work, The Hour of the Star (New Directions), at PEN.org/penreads. That discussion has been quite interesting so far; “Clarice is not mysterious or (worse) obscure,” writes one participant in the conversation, who seems familiar with her work in Portguese, “she is intense.”

Update: The AP has the first photographs (taken by Arturo Rodriguez) of Hernández landing in Madrid.

The poem that threatened “public tranquility”

Saw Wei, pictured left, whose “only ‘crime’ was writing a poem,” has been released from prison in Burma, “nearly five months after his sentence expired and two and a half years after he was sent to prison for ‘inducing crime against public tranquility’.”

How did Saw Wei, according to the government in Myanmar, threaten public tranquility? He wrote “February the Fourteenth,” an eight-line poem about Valentine’s Day, which was published in Love Journal, a weekly magazine based in Rangoon. We published an anonymous English translation in PEN America 10: Fear Itself (the translation was later reprinted in Harper’s):

Arensberg said:
Only once you have experienced deep pain
And madness
And like an adolescent
Thought the blurred photo of a model
Great art
Can you call it heartbreak.
Millions of people
Who know how to love
Please clap your gilded hands
And laugh out loud.

“February the Fourteenth” is an acrostic poem: When the first letters of each line are put together in Burmese, they read “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.” Than Shwe is Myanmar's 77-year-old military dictator. The issue of Love Journal in which “February the Fourteenth” was published sold out quickly after word of the coded message spread.

PEN continues to work with the Open Society Institute to pressure the government in Myanmar to follow the rule of law and release the “many other writers, journalists, and bloggers still imprisoned in that country today, including Nay Phone Latt,” who received the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award this year. Learn more about (and get involved in) the campaign here and here.

Pushcart Prize for Hari Kunzru’s fiction from PEN America 10

“At the beginning of the Decadence it was easy. Although we were bored, and though everything had been done before, we were seized with a peculiar sense of potential. Our anomie had something optimistic to it. This was the golden age of our decline.”

So begins “Memories of the Decadence,” an older story by Hari Kunzru that we published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself. Today we were alerted that Hari has won a Pushcart Prize for the piece, which will be included in the next Pushcart Prize anthology, to be published in November. Hari’s short fiction has been collected in the UK, but not in the United States—yet. Perhaps someone will decide to rectify that.

This is the second year in a row that a work of fiction from PEN America has been selected for the Pushcart anthology; last year, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s “Soap and Ambergis,” from PEN America 9: Checkpoints, was tapped for the honor.

So, congratulations to Hari. And more about our new issue, and the just completed World Voices Festival, soon.

Utne Independent Press Award nomination (and the “Top Quark”)

Two pieces of happy news to share. First, PEN America has received its first Utne Independent Press Award nomination, in the category of international coverage. We face stiff competition from last year’s winner The New Statesman, plus The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Middle East Report, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Internationalist, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, and The Walrus. It’s great to be in their company.

Second, Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post about “Scorched Maps,” a poem of his published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, was selected by Robert Pinsky for the “Top Quark,” celebrating the year's best blog writing in arts & literature. Here’s what Pinsky said about Rozycki’s piece:

Tomasz Rozycki’s poem “Scorched Maps”—translated by Mira Rosenthal into real lines of poetry in English: I will remember this poem about memory and Rozycki's commentary (same translator) on it. The image of the past and its losses as “subterranean” is familiar. Re-imagined in “Scorched Maps,” the image regains its emotional force: the seeker face-down and speaking to the earth, and the earth along with the lives it contains responding, “vast and wild around my head.”

PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar received second prize for his short-short story “Postmortem,” which, Pinsky said, “has also entered my imagination in a way I will not forget. ” And Lydia Kiesling received third prize for her review of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, a review published by The Millions. Congratulations to Lydia, Amitava, Mira, and Tomasz.

Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Richard Price, Patti Smith, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Melvin Van Peebles...

...as you may have heard, those are just a few of the participants in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. My favorite reply to the newly unveiled lineup comes from Mark Sarvas: “the organizers appear to have outdone themselves,” he says, adding, “it’s enough to tempt me into thinking about a trip east to cover this one for all my loyal readers.” I hope we see him soon.

Much more in this space over the next few weeks, of course; in the meantime, a few notes before the weekend:

* As noted earlier this week in The New York Times, PEN and the ACLU are teaming up with Slate to sponsor a conversation with Tariq Ramadan and others, held at Cooper Union in New York on April 8. This will be the first U.S. appearance for Ramadan since he was barred from entering the country by the Bush administration.

* Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s novel Munira’s Bottle was written up recently in Arab News (via The Literary Saloon). The novel was excerpted in PEN America 9, earning the magazine its first Pushcart Prize. Here’s what Annie Proulx has to say about the book:

Munira’s Bottle is a rich and skillfully crafted story of a dysfunctional Saudi Arabian family. One of its strengths lies in its edgy characters: Munira, a sultry, self-centered, sexually repressed woman; Ibn Al-Dahhal, the bold imposter who deceives and betrays her; and Muhammad, her perpetually angry and righteous brother, a catalyst who forces the events. Western readers will welcome it for its opening door into Arab lives and minds.

(You can read a conversation about “Books that Changed My Life” featuring both Proulx and Al-Mohaimeed in PEN America 10.)

* Tomorrow we’ll find out how much Robert Pinsky liked Tomasz Rozycki’s piece about “Scorched Maps,” a finalist for The Quark. Among the other finalists is PEN America contributor Amitava Kumar.

* There’s no online announcement yet, but PEN America has received its first Utne Independent Press Award nomination, in the category of international coverage. More on that soon.

Links: Kiarostami on Panahi, Cole on Yoo, and more reality hunger

Check out the great new feature on literature in translation up at PEN.org—including the latest online “translation slam.”

Abbas Kiarostami, probably Iran’s most esteemed living filmmaker (his films include Taste of Cherry, among many others), has written a letter calling “for the release of Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof, two directors recently detained by the authorities” in Iran. (PEN is currently lobbying for free expression in Iran along with five other organizations; learn more here.)

Kiarostami sent the Persian-language text of his letter and an English translation to a New York Times blog, The Lede, through Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (and a contributor to PEN America 10: Fear Itself). You can read it here.

David Cole has written a long post about John Yoo and the torture memos for the excellent blog of The New York Review of Books. Cole, a professor of constitutional law, has been covering this story in detail for some time (he also participated in both the New York and Washington, D.C. versions of “Reckoning with Torture”) and will have a longer version of this piece in The NYRB’s next issue.

Progress has been made in the fight for reader privacy, despite some recent setbacks.

David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, excerpted in PEN America 11: Make Believe, continues to provoke reflections on writing, reality, fiction and more; this week, James Wood responds to the book in The New Yorker.

Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post here on the blog is now a finalist for “The Quark,” a prize for the best blog writing of the year. The winner will be decided by Robert Pinsky.

Livestream of tonight's event + other links

If you can’t make it to tonight’s event, “Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the ‘War on Terror’,” in Washington, D.C., you can watch it live here at 7 p.m.

The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, “whose work has consistently challenged the country’s social strictures, especially as they pertain to women,” was reportedly arrested along with his wife, his daughter, and 15 dinner guests, at his home on Monday night. (Via. Read about PEN’s Iran campaign, “Our Society Will Be a Free Society,” here.)

Sam Lipsyte’s new book The Ask is getting great reviews all around; you can listen to him read from the hilarious Home Land over at PEN.org.

Lastly, the excellent blog 3 Quarks Daily is awarding their annual prizes for “the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature.” Tomasz Rozycki’s guest post about his poem “Scorched Maps” is a nominee in the latter category; you can vote for it here (but only once!). The finalists will be judged by the American poet Robert Pinsky.

Footnote to Zamora, news on Ramadan, reckoning with torture

One of the villains in “Public Demons,” the essay by José Rubén Zamora excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself and reprinted in The Utne Reader, was indicted in U.S. federal court on money-laundering charges yesterday. Alfonso Portillo was the president of Guatemala from 2000 to 2004. “The day Portillo came to my house,” Zamora writes, “he offered me $600,000 not to send my family out of the country because this—in his words—would affect his image.” The military had just violently raided Zamora’s house, terrorizing his family, after Zamora published unflattering things about the government and the military.

In other legal news, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed orders effectively ending the exclusion of Tariq Ramadan from the United States last week, which should resolve a lawsuit filed by PEN together with the ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Academy of Religions. (Ramadan is pictured right, appearing via video at the PEN World Voices festival during his exclusion.)

In 2004 Ramadan was prevented from accepting a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame when the Department of Homeland Security refused his visa application. He had been to the U.S. many times before; in 2002 he participated in a conference hosted by former president (and PEN America contributor!) Bill Clinton called “Islam and America in a Global World.” The refusal of Ramadan’s re-entry into the United States was an example of “ideological exclusion,” a Cold War practice that was revived after 9/11.

And speaking of post-9/11 policies: On March 3, PEN and the ACLU will hold another “Reckoning with Torture” event, this time in Washington, D.C. The event we held in New York in October was attended by seven hundred people and presented, I think, a moving and powerful account of what has taken place in the name of the United States over the last eight years (video here).

By the way, PEN’s Freedom to Write director, Larry Siems, is writing an account of U.S. torture policy post-9/11 for the ACLU, and he’s presenting the work online as he writes it, posting his thoughts as he goes (like this take on John Yoo’s recent Daily Show appearance) and getting feedback from experts. Check out The Torture Report.

Our contributors elsewhere

Two of my favorite literary conversationalists, Aleksandar Hemon and Colum McCann, talk with each other in this month’s Believer. (McCann used a line from Hemon’s The Lazarus Project as the epigraph for his National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin, which was excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.)

AH: Here is the news, Mr. McCann: novels do not solve problems, though ideally they cause some. And if a Katrina novel would be a noble effort, that does not mean it would be any good—and if it is not good, then the pain and suffering and humiliation would have been misused for a literary tryout. You don’t practice your craft on other people’s tragedy.... published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

CM: But I’ve never even dreamt that novels can solve problems. If they could we’d have no problems, or more likely no novels. And you’re right, the Guantánamo novel will probably take twenty years. But here is the flipside of the news: Stories have to be told over and over again, lest we forget them. Here, I think you make a mistake. You’re assuming once told is always told. Which I fear is the problem of how history is presented.

Hemon’s line about “other people’s tragedy” (and even his specific example of “a Katrina novel”) reminded me of Anya Ulinich’s story “The Nurse and the Novelist,” which appeared in PEN America 9: Checkpoints and prompted considerable discussion. (His remarks elsewhere in the conversation echo his contribution to our latest forum.)

And Colum’s reply called to mind his recent op-ed in The New York Times (where Hemon, too, has occasionally appeared), about the way fiction can shape our ideas about history: “Kennedy and Johnson traipse along feeling the weight of the things they have carried, and Bill Clinton sounds out the saxophone alongside the white noise.”

Fellow PEN America contributor Lydia Davis also showed up on the op-ed page of the Times recently, with a piece called “Everyone Is Invited,” published on Christmas Eve. Davis also conversed publicly not long ago, participating in a live chat on the website of The New Yorker. One reader asked about her story “Jury Duty,” and got this illuminating reply: “I don’t think too much before I plunge in and write the story. I knew I wanted to write about my experience of it, and then I found the form—David Foster Wallace’s question and answer, with the question blank.”

Lastly, a transcript of the recent PEN event honoring Natalia Estemirova is now online at HELO magazine, for those who couldn't be there.

P.S. As another update to the posts below, see this post on The Daily Beast about the New Year’s Eve rally for Liu Xiaobo, featuring a transcript of E.L. Doctorow’s closing remarks about what happens when a nation’s “poets and writers and artists, its thinkers and intellectuals, are muzzled in silence.”

Congrats to Colum

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, won the National Book Award for fiction last night.

As those who come to the PEN World Voices Festival know, Colum is also a great conversationalist, and he has talked with several writers in our pages. In PEN America 8: Making Histories, he talked with Arthur Japin*, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, and Michael Wallner about “inventing the past” and with David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Anne Provoost, and Jeanette Winterson about “writing myth now.” Fear Itself includes not only “A Code for the Disappeared,” the piece adapted from Let the Great World Spin, but also Colum’s great conversation with Michael Ondaatje, in which Colum asked Ondaatje, “Do you have fun?”

In that conversation with Ondaatje Colum describes his job as a writer in a way that will likely resonate with those who love Let the Great World Spin:

My responsibility, I think—which I’ve learned from you and John Berger and other writers I love and admire—is to talk about the dark, anonymous corners of human experience and about the value of those dark, anonymous corners. And intersecting with those dark, anonymous corners you have these famous lives, these big desires, and big issues.

Congratulations to a wonderful writer.

(Photo of Colum McCann and Michael Ondaatje by Beowulf Sheehan.)

* Speaking of Arthur Japin, his novel Director’s Cut, narrated by a filmmaker not unlike Federico Fellini and excerpted in Making Histories, will be published by Knopf in English in February.

Obama in China & other links

As you may have heard, Barack Obama has addressed the matter of press freedom on his visit to China. PEN American Center has been calling for Obama to speak up for free expression on this visit (see the letter signed by PEN president K. Anthony Appiah). It appears that Obama’s comments are being censored from Chinese news reports.

A “leading” member of president Nicolas Sarkozy’s party in France, one Éric Raoult, is arguing that the latest winner of the Prix Goncourt, the nation’s highest literary prize, should “be censured and asked to recant” for comments she made back in August about “the climate of heavy policing and surveillance [under Sarkozy].” Marie Ndiaye won the Goncourt for Trois femmes puissantes (Three Powerful Women), and she is the first black woman to win the award.

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, is up for the National Book Award this week, and it also tops Amazon’s “Best of 2009” (via The Millions).

Back around Halloween, Gigantic talked with Brian Evenson about horror movies. (Evenson’s brilliant and eerie story “Windeye” appears in PEN America 11: Make Believe and is also available on the PEN website.)

Lastly, The Rumpus has several good literary pieces up:

a long interview with Paul Auster, whose latest novel, Invisible, was deemed his finest ever by Clancy Martin in The New York Times Book Review

excerpts from a piece by Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag (who said, “I saw the best writers of my generation destroyed by teaching,” Nunez recalls) that was recently published in Tin House (read Nunez's story "Rapture Children" in our new issue)

and a tribute to An African in Greenland by Terese Svoboda (“I understand my curiosity about sex but why do I adore reading about bad food?” she asks), whose lovely contribution to our “Make Believe” forum is up on the PEN website, along with a bunch of other interesting responses (post your own!)

Our contributors elsewhere

Cynthia Ozick’s essay “Ghost Writers,” which was published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, is in the new edition of Best American Essays.

José Rubén Zamora’s description of a raid on his house by the Guatemalan military, published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, is in the new issue of The Utne Reader.

Over at The Reading Experience, Daniel Green is disappointed by the new Tin House anthology, but praises the contribution of Lucy Corin (“the only essay in this book that makes it worth having”), whose “Seven Small Apocalypses” ran in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

Lynne Tillman, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” has just gone online, is interviewed at The Millions.

Rabih Alameddine, whose contribution to our forum on “make believe” I mentioned on Monday, writes about The Twilight Zone, V.S. Naipaul, and creativity for The Rumpus.

On November 9, Mary Gaitskill—who contributed to the forum in PEN America 3: Tribes—will join Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, and others at the second annual benefit reading for the PEN Prison Writing Program. As an installment of WNYC’s signature series “The NEXT New York Conversation,” this event will be broadcast and live-streamed, allowing incarcerated men and women with radio and/or internet access to listen to the event and join our audience. More details here.

And there’s a free PEN event tomorrow: Salman Rushdie—who paid tribute to Ryszard Kapuściński in PEN America 8: Making Histories—will join Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and others in honoring Natalia Estemirova—the award-winning human rights activist and journalist murdered on July 15, 2009—and discussing the state of dissent and press freedom in Russia. Full details below.

Bearing Witness in Chechnya: The Legacy of Natalia Estemirova

When: Thursday, October 29
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate School, 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Salman Rushdie, Michael Arena, Ann Cooper, Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, and Elena Milashina.

Free and open to the public

“Public Demons,” by José Rubén Zamora

Last week, PEN issued a letter to Guatemalan authorities protesting the conviction of Raúl Figueroa Sarti, owner of the publishing house F & G Editores, on spurious charges of copyright infringement—charges that appear motivated by Sarti's publication of books on human rights abuses in Guatemala.

PEN America 10: Fear Itself touched upon such abuses in two pieces: “The Secret Lives of Cities”—a conversation featuring, among others, Francisco Goldman, who spoke about Guatemala—and “Public Demons,” by José Rubén Zamora, which was recently selected to appear in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Utne Reader. “Public Demons” is reprinted below.


This has to be recorded for your children, one of my captors says. You’re going to die, you son of a bitch. They throw me in the room with my family. Ramón is eleven years old. The rest of my family has their eyes taped, but not him. He’s watching. I tell him: Be cool, don’t worry. I even smile. And deep down I’m thinking: here’s where the shit ends. Ramón is dripping snot.

Why are you making trouble? they say. Stop fucking with the higher-ups. Every so often they say they are going to kill us. There are twelve or fourteen guys, and they can’t stop moving. Shouts, threats, guns. One of them closes the curtains and climbs on the bed. He starts jumping around with a shotgun.

Rodrigo cries silently. The raiders tear the house apart. In my son’s closet they find a collection of guns. That’s when they go crazy. They drag me out of the room, say they’re going to kill me. I’ve now lost my bathroom, I’m completely naked. Look, guys, I’m not making trouble, I tell them. Whatever you say, we’ll do. Just fucking kill me in the garage, so the kids aren’t brought into it.

They keep me outside for fifteen minutes with a shotgun in my chest. Twice they pretend they’re going to shoot me. I’ve accepted my fate. But I lose it when they drag me back in the room, naked, and tie me up with neckties. Tell your children to watch, they say. And to them: You’re going to witness your father’s death. Ramón is in a green pool. I have no idea where so much snot came from. Everyone is crying.

They fire.

False alarm.

We’re going to carry off the little one and your wife, they say. What are they worth to you? There’s no calculating their worth, I tell them. So if you want to keep them, they say, you have to keep quiet. If you go to the police, if you make a public statement, if you tell anyone you work with, if you complain to an ambassador, if what happens here leaks out in any way... We know your family’s routines, we’ll fucking kill them all.

Before they leave, one comes up to me and says, I was the good one. Did you notice? I was the one who kept them from killing everyone. So, in gratitude, you’re going to give me 250,000 pesos. Tomorrow or the next day. I’ll call and tell you where and when. You’ll get in your gray Volvo and we’ll meet up. I’ll be on a motorcycle. I’ve seen your house. You’ve got dough.

After two and a half hours, they leave. They take my cell phones, credit cards, a computer, a watch, my wife’s jewels, my grandfather’s guns, and a pair of running shoes.

I’m not going to say shit, I tell myself. But then I call Gonzálo Marroquín, another journalist. Look, man, I say, and I break down. What the fuck happened? he asks. Call my assistant, I tell him, and have her cancel my credit cards. They stole them. In case anything gets out, prepare my mom and my Aunt Marina, because she’ll be scared, remember her heart. What the fuck is going to get out? he asks me. And I tell him.

What are you going to do? he asks.

You know what? I’m going to report this.

Soon there are four thousand people in the house.

People from the military police come. And my wife says, pointing to one, That man was here, during the raid. I think she’s crazy. But in fact, he’s erasing fingerprints.

I have to get my family out of the country, and my children are pissed off. The second oldest says to me, I’ve respected what you do, but I think it’s unfair that because of your decisions we have to flee Guatemala like thieves. You did this to us.

Me, I decide to stay.

The house is empty.


José Rubén Zamora continues to edit El Periódico, the third newspaper he has founded in Guatemala. Because of the stories he has published, he has been repeatedly harassed, threatened, and attacked by government, military, and organized crime figures. The raid described above took place on June 24, 2003; a more detailed account is available at www.pen.org/publicdemons.

“Some Kind of Change,” by James Yeh

Yesterday, we posted a piece by Joan Downs about her experience teaching the story “Some Kind of Change,” by James Yeh, from PEN America 10: Fear Itself, in a literacy class. Today, we’re posting James’s story. Enjoy.


Over coffee a friend was telling me about a dream she had had the previous night.

You’re going to think I’m crazy, she began.

Probably, I said.

She told me her dream, in which she had dreamed she was a building. Bricks, mortar, and networks of piping. I don’t know why I felt like that, she said, but in the morning I felt like everything would be different, that I would be different.

Were you, I said.

No, she said.

Across the coffee shop I saw our server getting up from her laptop computer, where she had been checking her email and browsing the internet profiles of friends. I thought about my friend’s dream, of change and non-change.

It’s probably just because you’re moving, I said.

Could be, she said. How’s everything else?

The same.

She gave a sympathetic frown.

Well, I said, she’s immature. So am I.

At least you had something in common.

At least.

It doesn’t change anything.

No, I said, it doesn’t.

Our server walked over with the check. Outside was cold and windy and the streets were still damp with rain. I walked my friend to the subway. At the station for a moment I considered getting on too, riding out of my way so we could keep talking, a habit of mine, prolonging things, sometimes too far. She was flying back in the morning, returning to a long-distance boyfriend I believed she had cheated on while she was here but didn’t ask about because I thought it would have been too obvious and somehow ungentlemanly. We said our goodbyes.

Be safe, she said to me.

You too, I said back.

I turned around, walked down the empty streets, thinking about my friend’s advice, my friend who had been mugged not too far off, not too long ago. A group of men in hooded sweatshirts passed me by. I kept my hands in my jacket, my face serious. Jaw clenched. It was that kind of neighborhood. The neighborhood was changing—the coffee shop we had just been in was evidence—but it was still that kind of neighborhood. Beside a high-rise and the park there was a gas station. A brown-skinned man was refilling his sports car as his wife and child waited inside. A car in the city, I thought to myself, was a curious thing—the maintenance, the parking. The man’s wife was getting impatient with how long it was taking, she was opening the door. I walked on. I was the air and fog. I thought about what I liked about the city, what I liked about being there. So many beautiful things, constantly around me. I walked on. My body swelled up like a blowfish. My cheeks started to hurt.

I remained unchanged.


James Yeh is a founding editor of Gigantic, a new magazine of short prose and art. His fiction has appeared in elimae and is forthcoming in The New-York Ghost and the anthology 30 Under 30. He is at work on a novel-in-stories called I Love and Understand You and Would Be Perfect to You Now and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Guest post: Joan Downs on teaching “Some Kind of Change”

We’re busy finishing up PEN America 11. In the meantime, here’s another guest post—this one from Joan Downs, a retired magazine editor and writer and member of PEN, “whose second act, teaching adult literacy, is just as involving and perhaps more important than the opener.”


They’ve never heard of Updike or Roth, ditto Hemingway. Shakespeare rings a bell, although no one has read a sonnet or seen a play. The students of Literacy Partners, Inc. (LPI), a nonprofit that provides a free adult literacy program serving low-income New Yorkers, are not PEN America’s usual audience.

When they first come to us, some students can’t recite the alphabet. We teach them to write letters—up the hill, over the bridge, down the hill; up the hill, over the bridge, down the hill. Imagine the desperation confronting such hurdles at age 19, 27, 34, 42, 55.

As a volunteer tutor, I try to find contemporary writing that’s both accessible and relevant to my students’ experience. The students—drop-outs mainly, teenagers and twenty- and thirty-somethings—are bright and motivated despite hardscrabble lives. These are our advanced students, maybe even harboring a success story.

One Saturday morning I’m browsing PEN America for reading to go with my coffee. The issue’s theme is “Fear Itself.” I come across “Some Kind of Change” by James Yeh.

The story, a conversation between a man and a woman, takes place in a coffee shop. Fate! (LGQ, my husband predicts: Low Gunplay Quotient.) I read it once, twice, again. (It’s short.) The writing is spare. Yeh evokes strong visual images in swift, deft strokes. His ear for language is pitch-perfect. This Yeh person’s got talent! (Little stab of excitement.) I have a hunch his story may connect with my passel of diploma-deprived adults who, nevertheless, have an uncanny instinct for honest writing—and zero tolerance for a scintilla of phoniness.

This is the drill: Silent reading, followed by reading aloud, taking turns doing the honors. Then the tutor tries to point out the allure of the vignette, how powerful small forms can be, the underlying layers—stuff teachers like to talk about. Nobody’s buying it. It seems they have their own ideas.

“I think the coffee shop is on the lower East Side.” Someone pulls out a wrinkled Edward Hopper print from an old lesson, “Like this?” “He’s dorky and smart. She’s pretty, not smart. But he’d like to hit on her.” “They’ve had an affair.” “No, she’s a tease. She cheated on her boyfriend, but not with him.” “She had a dream she’s a building, give me a break.” “He explained it’s because she’s moving.” “A building is supposed to be a woman’s privates.” “Shut Up!” “He should have ridden with her on the subway. He wanted to.” “No, he doesn’t want to get involved, he knows she’s nasty.” “He’s telling the story, we just have his side.” “He doesn’t take her home because they’re both moving on. The title says the story is about change.”

Tutor interruption: Where does the fear theme come in? “She tells him to be safe. Be safe in life.” “Probably it’s be safe in this neighborhood. He’s walking home. One block is good, the other is empty buildings, lots, and three guys wearing hoodies coming toward him.” “Guys in hoodies are trouble.” “Maybe they’re just cold.” “Since I got mugged and robbed, I see a man in a hoodie sweatshirt, I cross the street.” “He puts his hands in his pockets, puts his head down and walks faster—that’s just how you guys behave.” “But then he starts thinking how beautiful the city is. He’s happy.” “He’s happy he escaped her.” “He’s just another guy who’s afraid to commit.”

Fifteen minutes go by, and no sign of resolution. The conversation is animated. Judging by noise level alone, “Some Kind of Change” has opened up their nerve endings. Settle down, says the tutor. You have five minutes. Write what you think happens next.

No one here is bashful about expressing an opinion, but these students HATE to write. This time, though, they whip out their notebooks and get to it. When they’re asked to share their thoughts, everyone wants to go first.

On a whim I email the class’s handiwork to the author. Secretly, I hope he might email back. Nothing elaborate. Just thanks; I read the students’ work. Unlikely, however. But it would mean a lot to them.

So it makes the last class of summer session a celebration when I report James Yeh has read their pieces. A “real” writer validates them as bona fide students. He emails that writing is about connection. He says Holden Caulfield’s line in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye about liking books written by authors whom you felt you could just call on the phone and be friends with has always stuck with him. Of course, readers intuit that from James’s story. You really ought to read it.


Note: Tomorrow we'll post James Yeh’s story, “Some Kind of Change,” from PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

Our contributors elsewhere + other links

Words Without Borders has a new anthology coming soon: The Wall in My Head features “fiction, essays, images, and original documents” that aim “to pick up where most popular accounts of the Cold War end, and trace the path of the revolutionary spirit of 1989 from its origins to the present day.”

Among the many intriguing pieces in the book is an essay by Judith Sollosy that began as a guest post for this very blog: “Regardless of the Cost,” on Péter Esterházy’s Revised Edition. (You can see the table of contents at Three Percent, the blog for Open Letter, which is publishing the book.)

You can read Judith’s piece here, and read all our guest posts—including Wayne Koestenbaum on Elizabeth Hardwick, Amy Bloom on Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, and more—here.

James Yeh, whose story “Some Kind of Change” appears in PEN America 10, has just had a one-line short story illustrated by Arthur Jones for his Post-It Notes Stories Project. James also recently published a very funny interview with Gary Shteyngart on the subject of meat, and another interview, in the new online publication The Faster Times, with John Wray, on the topic of writing on the subway.

Scott Esposito finds something Barack Obama and Roberto Bolaño have in common: each has had his books banned from an American prison.

PEN’s latest online translation slam features a political slogan that has been taken up by Iranian protesters in response to an insult levied at them by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “structure of the slogan recalls a ghazal included in the collection Divaan-eh Shams by Rumi, the classic 13th century Persian poet” which suggests “the extent to which poetry plays a role in the Iranian upbringing and consciousness.” Ahmadinejad referred to them as khas-o-khaashaak, meaning dirt and dust, scraps and bits. Here’s Niloufar Talebi’s version of the reply:

You’re just riffraff, lower than dirt,
I'm the aching lover, blazing and lit.
You’re the black halo, oppressive and blind,
I’m the brave hero and this land is mine!

Lastly, a reminder: tonight at 7 pm Shaul Bakhash, Roger Cohen, Haleh Esfandiari, and Karim Sadjadpour will discuss Iran at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

Guest post: Tomasz Rozycki on “Scorched Maps”

Tomasz Rozycki’s poem “Scorched Maps,” reprinted below, appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself. Both the poem and this guest post were translated by Mira Rosenthal, who received a grant from the PEN Translation Fund to translate Rozycki’s Colonies, a book of seventy-seven sonnets.


Scorched Maps

I took a trip to Ukraine. It was June.
I waded in the fields, all full of dust
and pollen in the air. I searched, but those
I loved had disappeared below the ground,

deeper than decades of ants. I asked
about them everywhere, but grass and leaves
have been growing, bees swarming. So I lay down,
face to the ground, and said this incantation—

you can come out, it’s over. And the ground,
and moles and earthworms in it, shifted, shook,
kingdoms of ants came crawling, bees began
to fly from everywhere. I said come out,

I spoke directly to the ground and felt
the field grow vast and wild around my head.


The poem “Scorched Maps” came out of a trip I took to Ukraine in 2004, when I was invited to a literary festival in Lwów. I took the opportunity to visit the places associated with the history of my family, who were resettled from that area after the Second World War because of the agreement between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, who won the war. At that time the borders of Poland were shifted west, and the Poles who lived in the area that was lost to the Soviet Union were transported by freight train west to Pomerania and Silesia, where I live today. These changes affected several million people, who had to abandon their homes, neighbors, traditions, memories, and God knows what else—everything that had happened on that ground for centuries. The Second World War in particular afflicted those living in this area, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians—everyone who had helped form the unusual mosaic of cultures and languages there over the centuries. They experienced the terror of Soviet occupation—mass executions and the transportation of millions of victims to the Gulag and forced labor camps deep within Russia—which met with the terror of the Nazis as the Germans, in a systematic way during the extermination of the area’s population, prepared their future “living space.” Inconceivably, at the same time a brutal domestic war continued between Ukrainian nationals, who cooperated with Hitler during the period, and the Polish resistance—a war in which neighbors murdered neighbors and the number of victims and the atrocity of what happened calls to mind ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. My family was one of those that experienced all of the terror and mourned each of the victims.

It is impossible for me to write about this poem without such a lengthy introduction, which is probably unnecessary in the end and obscures more than it illuminates. I went to Ukraine with all of this on my mind in an attempt to free myself from this terrible history. I went to the spot where my grandmother’s house stood before the war. My ninety-year-old grandmother—when she found out I would be going there for the first time so many years after the nightmare of the war—wanted me to tell her if there was any sign of her house left, even though she didn’t have much illusion that there would be. Yet she couldn’t help but hope that there would still be a brick shrine with the figure of Our Lady standing in front of the house, some kind of specific recognizable sign of the house and her entire life there, Our Lady who—as my grandmother believed—saved her and her children’s lives many times.

Despite the fact that I had a small map drawn according to my grandmother’s memory, I wasn’t able to find the house or the shrine. Out of everyone living there, I couldn’t find anyone who remembered her or anyone whatsoever from the neighbors she had mentioned, regardless of whether I used a Polish, Ukrainian, or Jewish surname. So I wandered around the forest, around the meadows and fields. It was already getting dark, and I felt more and more desperate and awful. I even thought that I must have gotten the spot mixed up, that it was all a big misunderstanding. And just when I had to leave for my return train to Lwów, I found someone who helped me, who showed me the way. There wasn’t a house, or a shrine, not even a tree remained in the garden—someone had rubbed out all the signs. But I found one of my grandmother’s neighbors, an old woman who remembered how they used to play together when they were young. She showed me the one thing that remained of the house—a brick cellar, half-buried, next to a dirt road that runs today over the spot where the house once stood. It was the only reminder of all the people whose tracks I was searching for.

When I returned, I found out that my friend, Jacques Burko, the translator of my poetry into French, carried out a similar journey a month later in search of traces of his Jewish family. I then wrote this poem and dedicated it to him.


Tomasz Rozycki has published six books of poetry, including Colonies, The Forgotten Keys, and the book-length poem “Twelve Stations,” winner of the Koscielski Prize. He has been nominated twice for the Nike Prize, Poland’s most important literary award. He lives in his hometown, Opole, with his wife and two children.

Mira Rosenthal has received NEA and Fulbright grants and held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Slate, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. She is also the translator of Tomasz Rozycki's The Forgotten Keys.

Iran reading this Saturday + links

This Saturday, July 11, from 2 to 5 pm, the Bowery Poetry Club will host a free event entitled “Literatures of Resistance: An Afternoon in Solidarity with the Iranian People.” Among the readers are PEN Award-winner Dalia Sofer and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose writing appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

The following Wednesday, as previously mentioned, PEN is co-sponsoring a forum on Iran with The New York Review of Books and the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

The translators’ roundtable over at The Observer Translation Project has been fairly widely noted; also worth reading there is the “Letter from Chişinău,” by Moldovan journalist Leo Butnaru, about the relationship between literature and politics -- and, more specifically, the current political situation in Moldova.

And speaking of writers and politics: Liu Xiaobo was formally arrested on June 23 and charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” PEN considers this arrest “transparently abusive” and “a deeply disappointing and anachronistic denial of Liu’s right to freedom of expression under Chinese and international law.” Liu Xiaobo is one of the authors of Charter 08, calling for democratic reform in China; you can sign a petition to free him here.

And lastly, a plea for the theremin, the musical instrument that inspired Petr Zelenka’s play, which itself is about -- among other things -- the arts under communism. Part of the play appeared in PEN America 8: Making Histories, and was read, on one occasion, by Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl.

Our contributors elsewhere

James Wood -- whose essay “Virginia Woolf’s Forgetful Selves,” appeared in our first issue -- reviews Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story in this week’s New Yorker. Mandanipour’s book, which has not been published in Iran, is, in Wood’s words,

not simply prohibited by censorship but made by it. For Mandanipour, the censor is a kind of co-writer of the book, and he appears often in this novel, under the alias of Porfiry Petrovich (the detective who chases Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov). We see him squabbling with Mandanipour, chatting to another Iranian writer, plotting alternative stories for Dara and Sara, striking out offensive phrases, and finally falling in love with Sara.

Mandanipour hinted at the story of Dara and Sara in a talk, “The Life of a Word,” published in PEN America 8: Making Histories.

Petina Gappah, whose story “Rosie’s Bridegroom” appears in our latest issue, also has a story in issue 8 of A Public Space, entitled “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion.” Both stories are available online. You should also check out Petina’s blog.

Jeremy Schmall, whose poem “The Functioning Synapse Papered Over” appears in our latest issue, has written an essay about poetry and capitalism for HTML Giant.

Finally, Toni Morrison talks about free expression and the essay collection Burn This Book, which she edited, and which was published by HarperStudio in conjunction with PEN American Center.