Talib Kweli, Junot Diaz, Wally Lamb and more: Prison Writing Benefit, November 1

On Monday, November 1, at 7 pm, in New York City, Talib Kweli (pictured right), Junot Díaz, Lisa Dierbeck, Wahida Clark, Barbara Parsons, Sean Dalpiaz, Wally Lamb, and more will gather for a benefit reading and reception to support the PEN Prison Writing Program—which, since 1971, has sponsored an annual writing contest, published a free handbook about writing for prisoners, provided one-on-one mentoring to inmates whose writing shows merit or promise, conducted workshops for former inmates, and sought to get inmates’ work to the public through literary publications and readings.

(We have frequently published work by the finalists and winners of the contest in PEN America; see, for example, Chris Everley’s excellent “Hook Island Traveler,” published in PEN America 9: Checkpoints.)

A reception will follow the reading of fiction, poetry, and memoir by men and women who have participated in the PEN Prison Writing Program. We hope you’ll join us. Full details are below.


Breakout: Voices from Inside

When: Monday, November 1, 7 p.m.
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., New York City
Tickets: Collaborator: $75 (limited quantity); Friend: $50. Please be advised that there is a 2 item order minimum. Purchase tickets at lepoissonrouge.com.

Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN Member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy of PEN’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

Tomorrow night: Censorhip by Bullet in Mexico

Tomorrow night, American and Mexican writers and journalists—including Paul Auster, Calvin Baker, Don DeLillo, Laura Esquivel, and Francine Prose—will gather at Cooper Union to call attention to and discuss “censorship by bullet” in Mexico—the silencing of reporters investigating violence and corruption connected with the drug trade. At least eight journalists have been murdered in Mexico in 2010 alone; many more have been kidnapped, threatened, or disappeared.

Also reading tomorrow evening are Jose Zamora, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, and Luis Miguel Aguilar. After the readings, Carmen Aristegui of CNN en Español, Rocio Gallegos of El Diario de Juárez, and José Luis Martínez of Milenio Diario will talk about the situation in their country; the conversation will be moderated by Julia Preston of The New York Times.


State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico

When: Tueday, October 19, 7 p.m.

Where: The Great Hall Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, NYC

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN Members and students with valid ID. Visit www.smarttix.com or call (212) 868-4444. Tickets also available at the door. Seating is by general admission, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Liu Xiaobo receives Nobel Peace Prize

Read the seven sentences that landed him in prison.

Watch Edward Albee, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, and others rally for Liu Xiaobo last New Year's Eve, reading those sentences, along with some of the poems he wrote while in a "reeducation camp."

Listen to Paul Auster read those poems.

Write to the Chinese government to demand his release.

Learn more here.

The Nobel and other news

This morning, Mario Vargas Llosa, former president of PEN International, received the Nobel Prize for Literature. You can listen to his conversation with Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco, which took place at PEN World Voices 2008, here.

Tomorrow, the Nobel committee will announce the recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. PEN is urging the committee to confer the award on Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned writer who would be the first citizen of China to receive the award. You can read all about PEN's campaign on his behalf here.

Next Wednesday, PEN will holds its annual awards ceremony. Anne Carson, Susan Choi, Don DeLillo, Paul Harding, Theresa Rebeck, and many others will be on hand to receive their awards, and the event is free, though seating is limited. If you would like to attend, RSVP to awards@pen.org.

The following Tuesday, October 19, PEN will present “State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico,” an event seeking to call attention to and discuss the silencing of Mexican journalists investigating drug violence in their country. Participants include Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Laura Esquivel, José Luis Martínez, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, Francine Prose, and Carmen Aristegui.

PEN round-up: Don DeLillo, World Voices, Mexican journalists, and more

As we put the finishing touches on the fall issue, the PEN office is bustling.

Today, the 2010 PEN Literary Award winners were announced. Among them, Don DeLillo, who answered questions from PEN (via fax) on the occasion:

PEN: Thanks to e-books, blogs, and social media, writers are arguably using new technology as never before. Stories are written using Twitter, novels as text messages, and there seems to be a reemergence of serial narratives. Do you think technology will have a considerable influence on fiction? Do you think it already has?

DeLillo: The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense. Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?

To celebrate DeLillo’s award, our fall issue will include his 1983 short story “Human Moments in World War III,” the beginning of which you can read on PEN.org. For the rest, pre-order your copy of the issue (or subscribe!).

And, if you’re in New York, join us for the 2010 PEN Literary Awards ceremony on October 13.

News of this year’s winners followed just a day after PEN announced its new Director of the World Voices Festival and Public Programs, László Jakab Orsós, who joins PEN from the Hungarian Cultural Center. Jakab is also an accomplished journalist and screenwriter. You can read more about him here. The 2011 World Voices Festival will be held from April 25 to May 1.

Lastly, a trio of announcements from the Freedom to Write department: Liao Yiwu (discussed previously on the blog) has finally been permitted to travel outside China; PEN writers urged the U.N. to abandon efforts to legally prohibit the defamation of religion; and several writers from Mexico and the United States (including DeLillo) will gather next month to discuss and call attention to the violent suppression of journalists in America’s neighbor to the south. Please join us if you can.

PEN Quiz Night + the Brooklyn Book Festival

It’s busy here as we finish the fall issue; details coming soon.

In the meantime, join me this Friday, at 7 pm, along with a great group of writers—Jami Attenberg, Jane Ciabattari, Lisa Dierbeck, Rivka Galchen, Tayari Jones, Joseph O’Neill, Wesley Stace, and Justin Taylor—for the first PEN Quiz Night, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, on 38 Water Street in DUMBO in Brooklyn.

The quiz will start promptly at 8 pm, but you should arrive early for drinks and to be matched on an author’s team. That way you can compete both with and against some terrific writers. All the questions will be literary.

Quiz Night is PEN’s kickoff for the Brooklyn Book Festival, which takes place on Sunday. PEN will have a booth there, and has also put together a reading to mark the 50th Anniversary of PEN’s Freedom to Write program, which will include Cathy Park Hong, Roxana Robinson, Sarah Schulman, Xiaoda Xiao, and more.

Hope to see you there. (Pictured above: Joseph O’Neill, Rivka Galchen, Tayari Jones.)

“All these funny expressions” — Melissa James Gibson

Starting with PEN America 8: Making Histories, each issue of PEN America has included at least one excerpt from a play. In the last few issues we’ve published dramatic work by Petr Zelenka, Sarah Ruhl, George Packer, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nilo Cruz, and most recently, Melissa James Gibson.

I’m surprised more literary magazines don’t publish drama; while scripts are written to be performed, the best ones tend to work beautifully on the page as well. That’s certainly the case with This, the play by Melissa James Gibson that we excerpted in PEN America 12: Correspondences.

Gibson has a wonderful ear for the everyday absurdities of colloquial speech:

ALAN
All these funny expressions
Just Got The Baby Down
It’s like the baby’s depressed or
or like you’ve finally succeeded in oppressing the baby
I Just Got The Baby Down
I Just Got The Baby Down

This is from the opening scene; Alan is at the apartment of two college friends, Tom and Marrell, whose newborn baby never stays asleep for long. Another college friend, Jane, has joined them for a dinner party, along with Jean-Pierre, a French friend of Tom and Marrell’s.

MARRELL
Jean-Pierre’s a doctor
(with emphasis) Without Borders

ALAN
I always think that sounds like the doctor has a messy personal life

JEAN-PIERRE
That’s frequently the case actually

TOM
I’m a cabinet maker without borders

Tom and Marrell are trying to set Jean-Pierre up with Jane, a teacher and poet. When a surprisingly involved discussion of whether a “Brita” water filter should be pronounced with a short ‘i’ sound or a long ‘e’ sound (like “Rita”), Jean-Pierre turns to Jane as the expert on language:

JEAN-PIERRE
You’re the poet

JANE
More of a standardized test proctor these days actually
And I teach a bit

MARRELL
She’s being modest Don’t be modest

JANE
I’m an aMAZing standardized test proctor

The scene is full of funny, awkward, and tense exchanges, especially after the characters begin to play a parlor game—one that brilliantly highlights the way language can carry meanings other than the ones we intend. One person (Jane, as it hapens) must leave the room, while the others allegedly create a story in her absence. Then she must return to the room and piece the story together by asking a series of yes-or-no questions. But, as Tom and Marrell inform Alan and Jean-Pierre after Jane has left the room, the real game is that there is no story, and that Jane will construct one herself through her questions. I’ll simply say that this does not go well.

In Gibson’s work, as Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times, “even the drabbest constellations of vowels and consonants—words like ‘this,’ in other words—are made to soar and leap like ballet dancers in full, ecstatic flight, or alternately stand alone in a sea of silence, ominous and resonant, like those pregnant pauses in a Pinter play.”

You can read some of the excerpt we published at PEN.org; for the rest, pick up a copy of PEN America 12. And keep an eye out for Melissa James Gibson’s next play.