Marginalia: the magazine of the Piper Center for Creative Writing

              Welcome to the Premiere issue of the Virginia G. Piper Center Newsletter!
Our continuing programs and events for the next season are cause for much excitement. The 2004-05 Distinguished Visiting Writers Series hosts Gail
Tsukiyama, Robert Pinsky, Charles Baxter, Edward
Albee, Alexander McCall Smith, Beckian Fritz
Goldberg, Stephen Cannell, Jana Bommersbach,
E. L. Doctorow, Dave Smith, and Chase Twichell.
The 2005 ASU Writers Conference “Desert Nights, Rising Stars” will feature talents such as Billy
Collins, Sarah Vowell, Jean Valentine, A. S. Byatt, Lee
Gutkind, and Naomi Shihab Nye. It promises to be
another sellout event, so be sure to register early.
Many of our visiting writers will be working with Creative Writing Program students through the Young Writers Program and other Piper Center Outreach
efforts.
In addition to publishing our newsletter, we are making more changes and additions to our publica­tions.
With the Barrett Honors College, the Piper Cen­ter
is launching LUX, a new undergraduate magazine. Hayden’s Ferry Review’s Spring/Summer 2004 issue is now available featuring the work of James Turrell, C. D. Wright, and David St. John.
The Piper Center’s goals are nothing less than to touch many lives in many ways by promoting the value that art is integral to all our lives and making it acces­sible
to our community of writers and readers.
The adventure continues! Join us this season for our Distinguished Visiting Writers Series and Writers Conference, and stay tuned for more announcements of literary events. Visit our website for the latest news from the Piper Center at: www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter.
If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact me. The Piper Center’s goal is to be responsive to our community and help promote our metropolitan community as a premier literary and cul­tural
destination.
Special thanks go out to Maximilian Werner for his work as the editor for this premiere issue of our news­letter.
Best wishes for a great year.
Jewell Parker Rhodes
Letter from the Director
Contents:
News, Opportunities, Programs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
Q&A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Interview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
Announcements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
In Progress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Alumni Liner Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Friends of the Piper Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Calendar of Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
VIRGINIA G. PIPER CENTER for CREATIVE WRITING
newsletter
FALL 2004 VOLUME 1, ISSUE 12
NEWS, OPPORTUNITIES, PROGRAMS
Outreach
• In Spring 2004 ASU’s Young Writers Program established a part­nership
with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing in or­der
to provide a multitude of creative writing opportunities for Arizona students and teachers.
• The Young Writers Program continues to train and mentor M.F.A. students in creative writing pedagogy, then places them as teaching artists in schools and community centers throughout Maricopa County. This year our M.F.A. students conduct­ed
numerous residencies impacting hundreds of elementary and middle school students.
• This past June, the Young Writ­ers
Program (YWP) successfully lead creative writing workshops for nearly one hundred Hispanic mid­dle
school and high school students in the “Early Start to College” pro­gram
offered through ASU’s His­panic
Border Leadership Institute (HBLI).
• YWP’s 22 Across: An Anthology
of Talented Youth is now one of the Piper Center’s publications along with Hayden’s Ferry Review and ASU’s new undergraduate magazine, LUX.
• The Young Writers Program in conjunction with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing will begin offering creative writing pedagogy classes for middle school and high school teachers this com­ing
year.
The Virginia G. Piper Cen­ter
for Creative Writing
will move into the newly ren­ovated
Piper Writers House during December 2004.
The renovation of the Cen­ter
is managed by DWL
Architects, Phoenix, AZ. The Piper Writers House will
be a gathering place for stu­dent
and com­munity
writers and will house the offices of the Piper
Center staff. The grand opening
for the Piper Writers House will be February 3, 2005.
Special guests for the all day events in­clude
authors Amy Tan, E. L. Doc­torow,
Alberto Ríos, Norman
Dubie, Ron Carlson, Beck­ian
Fritz Gold­berg,
Jeannine Savard; and editors Joseph Witte of St. Martin’s Press and Don Lee of Ploughshares.
The Virginia G. Piper Writers House
Creative Writing Program
One of ASU’s strongest interdisci­plinary
programs is creative writing. From the time of its formal establish­ment
in 1976, the Arizona State Uni­versity
Creative Writing Program has been on a star-bound trajectory. Be­ginning
with its first director, Nor­man
Dubie, who joined ASU at age thirty-one having already published six books of poetry and taught at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the program has attracted a highly productive and talented faculty that has gained it increasing national stat­ure.
Our current director, Ron Carl­son,
is no exception. He has taught writing at Arizona State University since 1986 where he is also Founda­tion
Professor and a newly inaugu­rated
Regents Professor.
In 1985, ASU began offering the M.F.A. degree in creative writing
(replacing the M.A. degree with a creative writing emphasis). Just twelve years later, in 1997, U.S. News & World Report ranked the program among the top twenty in the country.
In addition to an outstanding
faculty, ASU’s M.F.A. in creative writing program is distinguished by its dual focus on developing students’ skills both as writers and teachers as well as its emphasis on instill­ing
in students a citizen-artist ethic. Housed in the English department
in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the creative writing pro­gram
is offered jointly by English and the Theatre department in the Herberger College of Fine Arts. Stu­dents
may tailor their course of study to meet their individual needs, with an emphasis on fiction, poetry, or playwriting.
Amy Tan
E. L. Doctorow
Don Lee3
Piper Center Publications
• 22 Across
In Fall 2004, the Piper Center and the Young Writers Program will publish the fourth volume of this yearly anthology of writing pro­duced
from the Young Writers Pro­grams
in K-12 schools. The Fall 2004 issue will be published in
December 2004.
• Hayden’s Ferry Review
The award-winning national literary and art magazine offers thirty grad­uate
and undergraduate students hands-on editorial experience.
The Spring/Summer 2004 (Number 34) issue of the magazine includes poetry and interviews with David St. John and C. D. Wright; art­work
and an interview with James Turrell, poetry by Chase Twichell and Frank Paino, and fiction by Bar­bara
Nelson. The editors for Issue 34 were Charles Jensen and Sarah Vap, poetry; Kyla Carter and Josie Milliken, fiction; and Valerie Vidala Homer, art.
HFR’s Fall/Winter 2004-05 Is­sue
35 is well underway featuring an interview with William Gass and a special section on metafiction. Edi­tors
for Issue 35 are Chris Becker and Eric Day, fiction; Laura Cruser and Brian Leary, poetry; and Kris Sanford, art. Issue 35 will be pub­lished
in February 2005.
Subscriptions to the journal are $14.00 per year (two issues). Please contact HFR@asu.edu, for more information.
• LUX—The Undergraduate
Creative Review
The Piper Center has partnered with the Barrett Honors College to publish ASU’s annual undergraduate literary magazine offering twenty undergradu­ate
students hands-on editorial experi­ence
and publishing only ASU under­graduate
writing and art. The first issue will be published in February 2005. Ed­itors
for the premiere issue of LUX are; Christoper Yen, fiction; Jamie Forseth, poetry; and Lucia Bill, art and design.
Please visit the Piper Center web­site
publications page at <http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/publi­cations/>
for more information on upcoming deadlines, special issues, and publication dates for Hayden’s Ferry Review, LUX, and 22 Across.
NEWS, OPPORTUNITIES, PROGRAMS
• In January, 2004 the Piper Center began a program to provide intel­lectual,
literary, creative, and cultural exchanges with the University of London-Royal Holloway and War­wick
University. These exchanges will include conference participa­tion,
distinguished lectures, and fac­ulty
exchanges. Student university exchanges are expected to begin in Spring 2006.
• MELISSA PRITCHARD is spend­ing
the fall semester at the University of London-Royal Holloway as our first faculty exchange.
International Writers Exchange
Piper Scholars
• The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is proud to announce the 2004 Piper Scholars:
MARIAN CROTTY The Theresa A. Wilhoit Fellowship in Creative Writing 2004.
The Theresa A. Wilhoit Fellowship is a competitive fellowship pack­age
for third-year M.F.A. students to devote themselves exclusively to writing and study during their thesis year.
• The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing Summer Fellows Program for M.F.A. Students is a com­petitive
summer stipend award for first and second year M.F.A. students to do research and creative activity.
Summer 2004 Recipients:
JEFF BAKER
KELLY HOULE
MICHELLE IWEN
JIMMY LO
VERONICA LUCERO
MICHELLE MARTINEZ
SEAN McCORMICK
JOSH RATHKAMP
EVA VALENCIA
SARAH VAP
PIPER CENTER STAFF
Jewell Parker Rhodes . . .Artistic Director
Jaime Dempsey . . . Program Coordinator
Salima Keegan . . . . . . . . Managing Editor
Sean Nevin . . . . . . . Outreach Coordinator
Maximilian Werner . . . . . . . . . . . . .Editor
Carlos Chavarria . . . . .Program Assistant
Elizabyth Hiscox . . . . .Program Assistant
Kriste Peoples . . . . . . . .Graphic Designer
Marian Crotty4
Q&A
How has your writing changed over the years?
Gail Tsukiyama (GT): I hope that it has grown in depth and breath, gained a bit more wisdom along the way just as I would want for myself. I also think that I’m more apt to take steps in different directions and write with larger scope. After all, writing is a continuous learning experience.
Robert Pinsky (RP): All of my writing has been about the improvised, partial, patchwork, exhilaratingly daffy or menacingly savage nature of my culture, American cul­ture.
That has not changed. Neither has my reliance on the sounds of vowels and consonants as what I have to offer. But I’ll make an arbitrary, semi-silly division into three periods:
Q & A
Side-by-Side with our Fall 2004 Distinguished
Visiting Writers—Gail Tsukiyama, Robert Pinsky, Charles Baxter,
Edward Albee, and Alexander McCall Smith.
Many books are dedicated to demystifying the writer’s process, or to paraphrasing the artistic
work. These concerns are not treated here. Instead, the questions that follow are primarily intended to give these distinguished writers an opportunity to share their ideas about how art can behave as a tool for individual expression, and as a force capable of effecting global relevance. Of course, this notion raises other questions as well: What is the value of individual expression? How does art function on a global level? What is the nature of this unification? One possibility is that art arises through the interplay between the human imagination and the physical world, which is ultimately what makes it possible for us to talk about human universals, characteristic themes, and other commonalities as we find them both in life and in literature. Beneath the richness of world cultures, we are all naked searchers. I think the reader will agree that discussions of this kind are always timely. Although often and necessarily confrontational, insofar as art reveals and clarifies our shared complexity, it may (in contrast to dropping bombs, committing genocide, and other “failures of the imagination”) accurately be described as a constructive act. In the spirit of linear drift, I have included several questions that emphasize this interdependence between writers and the world in which they live. I know these writers had little time to answer these questions, which is why I want to thank them for their generosity, and for their willingness to provide impromptu responses. The result is a menagerie of wit, recollection,
nuance, and insight into the searching mind. Maximilian Werner, Editor 5
As a high school failure—in the “Dumb Class” in the eighth grade, frequently suspended from school, gradually more able to get along with authority—I lived in dread of prolonged, dark frustration. A life as the gifted person who messed up everything.
My first book of poems, Sadness And Happiness was informed by my astonishment that I was OK: I had work, love, friendship, despite adolescent melancholy.
A point comes when early fears and obses­sions
are, if not exactly finished with, no longer the most urgent thing. One looks around, al­most
literally: as a famished animal finally looks up after filling itself. The question of what mat­ters
in the world becomes more important, apart from questions about oneself. The essay and the mock-essay became interesting forms to me. “An Explanation of America” is a book-length poem about the country, but also about connection: I had become a father, the book is addressed to a child.
But the apex of the triangle that has “oneself” and “the world” at its base is something like “interest” or “pleasure” or “art.” In History of My Heart, The Figured Wheel, Jersey Rain, even in a sense in The Inferno of Dante the interest is in instruments of art, or pleasure—reflecting, maybe, an old guy’s interest in having a good time?
Charles Baxter (CB): My poetry, like that of most poets, has gone from the slavishly imitative to more subtle forms of stealing. To come off as original really means that the poet has found ways to disguise his or her influences. Billy Collins I don’t know. I try not to analyze my work the way I might analyze the work of other writers. Self-consciousness can be paralyzing for creative endeavors.
Edward Albee (EA): I suppose my craft is more under con­trol.
Alexander McCall Smith (AMS): I think my writing has changed over the years in that I have become more confident in writing in my own voice. I think that this is one of the good things about books becoming successful—the author feels liberated.
How would you characterize the poetry or prose being written today, and how does your own work reflect that characterization?
GT: I think that some of it is very courageous—voices that are tackling big subjects with truth and conviction. I’ve listened to a lot of spoken/performance poetry lately, and I’m amazed at the honesty of these young voices. And, while I’m much more reticent, I think that we’re all telling our truths, whatever that truth may be.
RP: An artist is the last person to ask about trends, schools, “what is being written today”—the whole point is to do something uniquely desirable, unlike what is expected, right? So I don’t feel able or suited to answer about “what is being written today.” It is more or less my job to ignore that sort of question.
For pleasure and excitement, I mostly read very old litera­ture.
When I read contemporary work, I look for similar feel­ings
of pleasure and excitement.
On the other hand, I think many of my contemporaries— for example, James McMichael, Louise Gluck, Frank Bidart, C. K. Williams, others as well—continue to write great work, that deserves to be read and remembered forever. But fortunately, poetry doesn’t have the equivalent of art dealers or collectors to make us worry about what is “in” or not.
And fortunately, everyone knows that literary critics and speculators about trends and what’s in or out mostly get it all wrong. (In the time of Keats and Hopkins and Shakespeare, the equivalents of the people who now write about those au­thors
didn’t pay much attention to them.)
AMS: I believe that my writing is perhaps a bit out of step with current trends in prose. It is sometimes seen as a bit old fashioned, but I do not mind that.
What do you see as the single most important function of art, and how do you think your own work fulfills that function?
Q&A
“I think we teach by writing our
stories, by sharing our varied experiences
of how we live and who we are and thus
gaining more understanding.”
— Gail Tsukiyama6
Q&A
GT: To tell the truth. I hope that every story I write carries the truth of the characters and the world I’ve created.
CB: Does art have a “function”? It’s a question worth asking. Does art manage to accomplish anything and does it change the world? I don’t know. Americans, whose culture tends toward the pragmatic, always like to think that everything has a use or a function. Certainly art should provide delight and laughter and memorability and understanding. But I don’t think art has any one function in the way, for example, an automobile does, in getting a person from one place to another.
EA: Communication is the most important function, and that is what I attempt.
AMS: The purpose of art is to afford people the opportunity to achieve insights into the life that we lead in this world. It thus also has a very important spiritual purpose in that it allows people to develop a richer inner life.
What responsibility, if any, do writers have to voice their opinions about war and other related issues?
GT: A writer’s responsibility is to their work, capturing the truth of what they’re trying to say and bringing it to a reading audience. Everything else is what a reader gains from it. If the work should explore particular issues, then all the better. We as writers will always be voicing our opinions in one way or another, but my responsibility as a writer is to the work first.
CB: It depends on the writer, if s/he has strong opinions; if that person has them, then, like any citizen, s/he should voice those opinions. But writers have only one responsibility in re­gard
to their opinions: to be articulate and persuasive. Fiction does not necessarily gain in importance by voicing opinions.
AMS: Writers do have a certain political responsibility. They must bear witness, but they should not overreach themselves in doing so.
Do you subscribe to a particular theory or understand­ing
of language or art, and if so, would you describe what it involves?
GT: I’m a strong believer that less is always more. It has a great deal to do with having my roots in poetry.
What does it mean to know your subject?
GT: In my case, to embody a character and know which direction they’ll walk.
RP: The occasion of the poem—a war, a nightin­gale
in the back yard, a person you desire, a land­scape,
an atrocity, a death, a birth, a fear, a turn-on, a piece of paper blowing down the street, the inva­sion
of the Post Office, the glory of the Lord—is not the subject of the poem. It is the occasion of the poem. The subject of the poem is created by the poem, and cannot be named except by reading the poem. The poem is the process of knowing that subject.
CB: To have observed it carefully, or to have imagined it fully.
AMS: It is very important that one should write about that which one knows. You should therefore ideally have direct ex­perience
of the sort of people and places about which you are writing. Without that there is a risk that ones descriptions will be shallow.
How do you make your personal experience useful to strangers?
RP: By certain arrangements of the sounds of consonants and vowels and sentences. By offering a surprise, or whatever is the opposite of a cliché. By thinking about my experience in relation to larger things. But mainly, by certain arrangements of the sounds.
CB: This question assumes that literature is useful. Sometimes it is, but often it has no obvious use at all.
“Get a poem by heart. Say a poem
out loud. Study music. Teach every child to play an instrument. Technology is
not the contrary or enemy of art.”
— Robert Pinsky7
EA: I translate it in to art.
If translated, would your work be meaningful to, say, an aboriginal tribe in New Guinea? Please explain.
GT: Yes, I would hope so. After all, while our cultures are dif­ferent,
the way we experience life as a humanity remains the same. Understanding will come in that connection.
RP: “Trans-latere” is to carry across: literally, translation is impossible. One cannot carry a meaning from language to language as one carries a loaf of bread from the bakery to the house.
“Bread” is a Germanic word in a language that mixes Ger­manic,
Latinate, and French roots. The word rhymes with its fellow-Germanic “bed” and with Latinate past-tense verbs like “uninhabited.”
Whatever the word for bread in the aboriginal language of New Guinea (if that culture had bread) might be, it will not have those attributes.
But I will be interested to read a poem in translation from that language, not simply for what it might tell me about New Guinea, but for what it might tell me about English, and America: how did my language need to buckle, warp, stretch, improvise, to accommodate this new meaning?
And if there is a maniac at all like me in that culture, she might be similarly interested in how her language might need to stretch, buckle, etc., to accommodate my “Samurai Song” or “Shirt” or “Impossible to Tell.”
AMS: It should be the ambition of serious writing to be universal. It would be very grat­ifying
to know that one’s work crossed very deep cultural divides. Clearly, however, there will be limits to the extent to which an individual book can do this. I have been very fortunate in being translated into many languages, and I hope that the characters in my Botswana novels manage to speak effectively to people of very dif­ferent
cultural experience.
Do you see any limitations to your art? If so, what are the implications of those limitations?
GT: There’s the great challenge of not allowing yourself to be pigeon-holed as one kind of writer. Being an Asian-American writer can be a difficulty in itself. Readers have the tendency to want the same kind of book from you.
It’s also based on the business/commercial side of the pub­lishing
world. If you don’t sell enough books, it becomes more difficult to write the next one. So, it’s up to each of us as writers to step out of the box, and to find new ways to tell the stories we need to tell.
RP: My art is limited by how much I can do before I die. But subject and technique are infinite, I think.
How do you respond to the idea that the humanities are anthropocentric? Might the humanities be described as insular?
CB: This is what might be described as a hostile question. I’m not sure what fiction would be about if it weren’t about hu­man
beings. I’m interested in human behavior, as I assume most readers are. “Insular” as compared to what? Video games?
RP: “The humanities are anthropocentric”? If I know what a tautology is, isn’t that a tautology?
How could art be made more vital and useful to a pub­lic
saturated in technology?
GT: I believe art is already vital and useful, and to be given more money and grants to performance and gallery shows might be one way. Also, continuing to publish voices with more cultural diversity might be another.
Q&A
“Does art manage to accomplish
anything and does it change the world? I
don’t know. Americans, whose culture tends toward the pragmatic, always like to think
that everything has a use or a function.��
— Charles Baxter8
Q&A
RP: Get a poem by heart. Say a poem out loud. Emulate the people in the videos at www.favoritepoem.org. Study music. Teach every child to play an instrument.
Technology is not the contrary or enemy of art.
CB: Perhaps the real question is: should the public be as satu­rated
in technology as it seems to be? Art doesn’t defeat tech­nology
by becoming more technological itself. That, at least, is certain.
How would you characterize the relationship between art and commerce as you have experienced it?
GT: As I answered earlier, it can be very limiting to the artistic creation. At the same time, it’s a necessary evil in order to reach a greater public.
RP: I don’t sneer at commerce.
In my experience, people who need to make a living, to show a profit, understand the needs and motives of art pretty well.
An artist tries to make something peo­ple
will want. This is true of the man­ufacturer
of lawn furniture and candy, too—though not necessarily of eminent academics or arts administrators.
The book-buying public sometimes behaves stupidly, but I am not sure it is not wiser than the committees that choose poet laureates, award prizes, etc. In my experience, the edi­tors
I deal with at Norton, Farrar Straus & Giroux, and at magazines are more sensitive to art, and have better literary judgment, than the people at English Departments, grant-giving organizations, etc.
CB: The artist does his best to sell his work. If he cannot sell it, he is probably not an artist.
AMS: Art and commerce can and do co-exist very success­fully.
I have never been pushed by commerce in a direction in which I did not wish to travel. However, one must be aware of the potential inroads which commerce may make on artistic integrity. I certainly feel that there are some in­stances
in which commerce has distorted artistic goods very badly. Perhaps there will be more of a reaction to this in the future.
Is there a difference between the reality of your art and the reality of your life?
GT: Much. My characters are much more courageous than I am.
EA: The first is probably more real.
How do you think the concerns of American writers differ right now from the concerns of other writers in the world?
GT: I think we’re actually closer to the interests of other writ­ers
in the world right now. For the first time, many are directly facing their same concerns dealing with the ongoing war and destruction.
RP: The first person plural that is the concern of any American—what “we” do, where “we” bomb, the needs and power of “our” economy, the promises and disap­pointments
of “our” system and culture—that first person plural, in such pervasive ways, is the concern of American artists, too.
The dire condition of that first-person plural is our burden and opportunity.
CB: American writers tend not to be as interested in history as other world writers are, and American readers don’t read enough foreign literature in translation or in the original lan­guage.
European readers read much more than we do.
What do American writers have to teach other writers in the world? What might they learn?
GT: I think we teach by writing our stories, by sharing our varied experiences of how we live and who we are and thus gaining more understanding.
“Writers do have a certain political responsibility. They must bear witness, but they should not
overreach themselves in doing so.”
— Alexander McCall Smith9
EA: The fragility of democracy. The dangers of intellectual sloth.
AMS: Any writer, of whatever nationality, should be open to the writings of others. In my view, the more that literature crosses national boundaries the better. Great literature, anyway, knows no national boundaries. I think it is a great pity if writers remain entrenched in a national school of literature or do not open their minds to what others abroad are writing. Their own writing will become insular and shallow if they do that. In particular, I think we writers who write in English should avoid the easy option of immersing ourselves only in that which other writers in English produce. We must be open, we must listen to all voices, particularly those which come to us from more vulnerable cultures. At the same time I think that one must keep up one’s standards. I am not im­pressed
by weak work just because it comes from some­where
exotic or under-represented. &
GAIL TSUKIYAMA was born in San Francisco,
California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. She attended San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has been a part-time lecturer in creative writing at San Francisco State University, as well as a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has sat as a judge for the Kiriyama Book Prize and is currently Book Review Editor for the online magazine Pacific Rim Voices. Her novels include Night of Many Dreams, The Langauge of Threads, and Dreaming Water.
ROBERT PINSKY is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. His book The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1965-1995 was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and also received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. Pinksy has co-translated poems by Czeslaw Milosz and published a new verse translation of The Inferno of Dante. He serves as poetry editor of the online journal Slate and a contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
CHARLES BAXTER was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and its M. F. A. program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of four novels, four collections of short stories, three collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction, and is the editor of other works.
EDWARD ALBEE has defined modern American theater with four decades of provocative, controversial and brilliant plays. Lauded as “one of the eternal innovators” in American drama, his most recent hit play, The Goat, won the 2002 Tony Award for Best Play. Albee is perhaps most well-known for his debut three-act drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Released in 1962, Virginia Woolf was immediately recognized for its unabashedly honest dialogue and jarring interpretation of modern relationships. It won both the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and is widely considered a classic of contemporary theater.
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH was born in Zimbabwe. He became a law professor in Scotland and later returned to Africa to work in Botswana, where he helped to set up a new law school at the University of Botswana. He has written more than fifty books, including specialist academic titles, short story collections, and children’s books. His detective novel, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, received two Booker Judge’s Special Recommendations. McCall Smith recently finished the first book in a new series featuring detective Isabel Dalhousie called Crushed Strawberry. He is currently Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh.
“Communication is the most important function, and that is what I attempt.”
— Edward Albee
Q&A1 0
INTERVIEW
Maximilian Werner: One of the characteristics of your work is its sensuousness. It might even be said that your work drips and bleeds and sweats a good deal of the time. Could you talk a little about why sensuousness is so impor­tant
to our understanding of the people that inhabit your poems and fiction? There are many ways to reveal a charac­ter
or person. Why should the shape and the color of their lips, the sweat in the cup of their necks, or the poison-honey odor of their breath be important parts of that process?
Rigoberto González: I’m fascinated by the details of the body because they are the stories within a story. A cut, a scar, a welt, a bruise, a curl or dimple or birthmark, all have the potential to initiate a narrative or inspire a poem. And though I don’t always begin a project with that premise, those small clues of who we are, where we’ve been and what we’ve done eventually creep onto the page. For the people I write about—usually laborers—the body is less an instru­ment
of vanity than an instrument for survival. All the wear and tear and wear of the physical burdens leaves its history on those brown skins, so it’s important for me to allow read­ers
a more intimate look at these bodies. I want readers to focus past the occupations, past the uniforms, so that they can understand who these people are as individuals.
One of the strategies in writing the novel Crossing Vines, about the California grape pickers, was to show the farm workers performing every single bodily function and physi­cal
expression humanly possible. Readers become as con­scious
of the body as the laborers who are enduring hour after hour in the sweltering heat. I like to think of this strat­egy
as a political act—an opening of the privileged eyes to let them see who they have been keeping invisible all this time.
MW: I see what you mean. So really the body is our lan­guage
before language—a kind of metalanguage, if you will.
Invisible Skins
an Interview with Rigoberto González
An alumni of the M.F.A. program at ASU, Rigoberto González is the author of three books, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks,
a 1998 National Poetry Series selection (University of Illinois Press, 1999); Soledad Sigh-Sighs / Soledad Suspiros (Children’s Book Press, 2003), a bilingual children’s book; and a novel, Crossing Vines (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), which received ForeWord Magazine’s Editor’s
Choice for Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2004. 1 1
After all, isn’t a scar a scar, and a welt a welt no matter who bares it? There is the story of how the scar came to be, of course, and that is what makes the people in your work unique. But then the scar itself is also a story, isn’t it? A physical story. We may not share the same language, but we all have bodies that ache and breathe and scar and love. So even while the details of our wounds may differ, they are all wounds in the end. Which is interesting, be­cause
you mentioned “brown skins.” Might this help to explain how you can tell your story as a Mexican-American, and still tell a story that, as you say, goes beyond the details or particulars of that story? Is this how you tell a story we can all care about?
RG: I become nervous talking about universality, because in the end this usually means that whatever is being talked about is being understood through the lens of the dominant group, i.e. through the lens of whiteness. But to keep it sim­ple,
yes, pain is pain and sorrow is sorrow no matter what and where. However, the experiences I write about are specific to the Mexican population, which is why I do say “brown skins,” why I use untranslated Spanish in my work, and why my characters interact with themselves as themselves and not through the masks that Mexicans and Chicanos usu­ally
wear when interacting with white people. I rarely write those dialogues because they would be false: the people in my communities have minimal contact with non-Mexicans. Others are writing those stories, but that certainly isn’t the reality of my family in Mexico or in the U.S., where they live in predominantly Mexican neighborhoods.
MW: Your comment about growing up reminds me of something you said earlier, about opening the eyes of the privileged to the realities of “invisible” people. Our readers may already know that you write poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, but what they may not know is that you also write children’s’ books as well, one of which, Soledad Sigh-Sighs, appeared not too long ago. What a wonderful place to be­gin
teaching children about themselves and offering them alternative visions of the world. I imagine that opening children’s eyes to issues of self-identity and diversity involves using very different strategies than those used to reach your adult audience. Assuming that you treat the same types of concerns in your children’s’ stories as you do in other genres, how do you make your concerns meaningful to children?
RG: Writing for children is as challenging as it is rewarding. Three of my poetry teach­ers
(Gary Soto, Francisco X. Alarcon, and Pat Mora) are also well-respected and popular children’s book authors, so it’s not so surprising that their mentorship included teaching me (through their works) about this sensibility for a younger audience. But when I started writ­ing
my own books I wanted to set myself apart, so I decided to write books that deal with serious social issues. I worked with children for many years, as a dance instructor, a day care provider, and as a literacy teacher, and one important discov­ery
for me was that children possess sophisticated minds. It is the adult world that insists on keeping them infantalized. In Soledad Sigh-Sighs, I write about the latchkey kid phenom­enon
and the loneliness of childhood; in Antonio’s Card, I write about a child with same-sex parents; and in the third book (no title yet) I’m writing about a young boy with a sister who has Down’s Syndrome. I believe these books should be occasions for adults to talk to children about the real world. I like to think that even through picture books I’m allowing people an opportunity to recognize what most of us would rather not talk about.
MW: You mentioned your reluctance to talk about the uni­versals
of human experience. If I understood you correctly, your concern is that the dominant group will determine what is considered universal or not. According to this view, “reality” is contingent on the ideas of those who are doing the defining. So I guess I’m wondering how it’s possible to talk about the “real world” with children when no one really seems to know what the real world is. How do you define the real, and how do you escape the limitations of that definition?
RG: What I have to offer is my vision as a gay man of color. It’s not the only lens into the world nor the most important, but that’s the whole point, to maintain complexity and to challenge absolutes or notions of limits. I disagree that the real has limitations. Since our human experiences are so var­ied
we have to come to terms with them through language
INTERVIEW1 2
and imagination, which are also limitless. I trust in a child’s ability to find a space for his or her own experience through the particulars of my picture books. It’s no different than the expectation I hold for my adult readers who come from many backgrounds.
MW: Could you give us an example of how you “challenge absolutes” in your work?
RG: By giving voice to the voiceless. My poetry books are inhabited by people we may have seen or heard about, but not necessarily heard from: the woman who changes the hospital sheets, the man who fixes refrigerators, the woman who works in the doll factory—they have stories, not only func­tions.
And their stories are so particular, I hope it’s clear that if a second doll factory worker or refrig­erator
repairman were to speak, that story would be com­pletely
different. Individuality is important in my work: what these personas have in common is that they are working class Mexicans, but their oppressions, sorrows, burdens, etc., can’t be lumped together otherwise. Each path is unique. And since my perspective is from the inside—as a person with sensitivity to these stories because I grew up among them—I’m present­ing
not the most authentic or definitive vision, but one of many. There is not one way to tell a story, but this is mine.
MW: How does your voice or story as a gay man of color differ from the voices of your personas? In other words, when you write a poem from your personal perspective, what do you write about, and how does that reflect your own need to give voice to the voiceless?
RG: I call my second book of poetry my “queer book” because it’s the volume of poems I wrote from the per­spective
of gay men on either side of complicated re­lationships,
usually abusive ones. It’s informed by my own experience as a young man seeking answers about sexuality and desire outside of my ethnic community, which didn’t provide me with a safe space to explore these issues. Homophobia is an unfortunate reality among Mexicans. Not all of these poems are personal testimonies, but certainly my growing knowledge and confusion about the intimate world between men fuels these voices, mine among them. I see Butterfly Boy, my memoir about this transition from a dangerous home to a dangerous relationship, as a companion to “Other Fu­gitives
and Other Strangers.” The memoir of course is all truth, as I remember or imagine it. One of the threads I explore in Butterfly Boy is how I came into writing. One reason was to overcome my shyness, to empower myself through print because I was this confused, an­gry
young man who couldn’t stand up or speak up for himself otherwise. From there I developed an affinity to channel others who were also silenced for whatever rea­son.
I don’t mean to say that I champion the underdog, but that those stories of struggle and survival are much more appealing to me. I relate to them, and by writing about them I learn something about myself. &
INTERVIEW • ANNOUNCEMENTS
“What I have to offer is my vision as a gay
man of color. It’s not the only lens into the
world nor the most important, but that’s the
whole point, to maintain complexity and to
challenge absolutes or notions of limits.”
Announcements
• Congratulations to C. D. Wright, who has been named a MacArthur Fellow for 2004 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foun­dation.
Ms. Wright visited ASU last fall as one of our Distinguished Visiting Writers and is also a member of the Piper Center Advi­sory
Council. Ms. Wright will return to ASU to teach at the ASU Writers Conference–Desert Nights, Rising Stars from March 9 -12, 2005.
Preview of Spring 2005 issue
• Interview with Mary Gannon, Deputy Editor of
Poets and Writers Magazine
• Q and A with C. D. Wright and Billy Collins
• Piper Book Club
C. D. Wright1 3
IN PROGRESS
hide
your face
whispers of
the dead
hang in
the trees
at dawn
like birdsong
no address
& no remorse
without
a name
only your work
leaves its
signature
Robert Hampson:
from “exit wound”
: She read what mattered
was what she embodied. She believed in
the “feminine magnesia.”
Jeannine Savard:
from a poem entitled “Woman Inclined Towards Gnosis”
4 tony lopez
forgotten
in the bar
abandoned
women
sit amid
cross-currents
of voices
the continuing
possibilities
of narratives
hammerblows &
the sheering of
electric saws
Robert Hampson:
from the beacon
The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is pleased to be part of a larger community of
students, writers, readers, and literature enthusiasts of all kinds. As part of the Center’s overall mission of providing opportunities to its members, In Progress was created to share glimpses into the forthcoming work of residential and visiting writers.
Jeannine Savard is an Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University and has published two volumes of poetry: Snow Water Cove and Trumpeter. She is the recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize for poetry from The American Poetry Review and the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Prize.
Robert Hampson is a Professor of Modern Literature and Head of the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. His numerous publications
include Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity and Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems, 1973-1998.1 4
JORN AKE’s (1999) first book of poetry, Asleep in the Light­ning
Fields, won the 2001 X. J. Kennedy Award. His second book, The Circle Line, will be published in 2005.
JENNIFER CHAPIS (B.A. 1995) is the founder of Night­boat
Books (www.nightboat.org). She recently received NYU’s Outstanding Teaching Award and has published poems in
McSweeney’s, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She also recently became engaged to Josh Goldfaden, a fiction writer from California.
MARY GANNON (1992) is deputy editor of Poets & Writers Magazine and co-editor of The Practical Writer: From Inspiration to Publication. Her poetry has appeared in the Paris Review, Washington Square, and SHADE.
MICHAEL GUERRA (2001) is a recipient of Oregon’s Liter­ary
Fellowship and recently won Mid-American Review’s 2003 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize. He’s working on a novel.
CATHERINE HAMMOND (1990) is moderator for Tempe Poetry in April, a reading series in its fifth season. Her website is www.hammondart.com.
MATTHEW HEIL (2002) is assistant editor of Echo Maga­zine,
Arizona’s largest gay and lesbian newsmagazine. His poem, “The Night Circus,” was published in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review.
HERSHMAN JOHN teaches at Phoenix College. Recent publications include O Taste and See: Food Poems and a public art sculpture on Mill Avenue in Tempe, AZ—a poem set in a bronze roadrunner sculpture.
ROBERT JOHNSON (2003) is the Academic Advisor at Prescott College. His essay is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review.
TAYARI JONES (2000) is the author of Leaving Atlanta, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Untell­ing,
published by Warner Books. Jones is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois.
ROBERT KRUT (1999) currently lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His po­etry
has appeared in Barrow Street, Salt Hill, The Mid-American Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others.
WENDY MARSHALL’s (2003) book, William Beaudine: From Silents to Television, will be published in December 2004 by Scarecrow Press as part of its Filmmaker Series.
MIGUEL MURPHY (2003) has poems soon to be published in Hawai’i Review and Opus42. Some of his poetry was also nominated for Pushcart prizes. He is currently teaching at Santa Monica College in California.
PATRICIA MURPHY’s (1996) manuscript, Inevitable Flow, was a finalist in the 2003 Carnegie Mellon University Press se­ries
and was also a semifinalist in the 2004 Alice James Beatrice Hawley Book Award.
IRENA PRAITIS (PH.D. 1999, MFA 2001) will be teach­ing
in Lithuania as a Fulbright Scholar. Her book, Touch was published by Finishing Line Press this year.
GARY SHORT (1990) has published three books of
poetry; Theory of Twilight; Flying Over Sonny Liston, which received The Western States Book Award; and 10 Moons and 13 Horses.
JENNIFER SPIEGEL (2003) teaches at Grand Canyon University and continues to write and sometimes publish. In August 2004 she married a biochemistry guy!
ALUMNI LINER NOTES
Alumni Liner Notes is devoted to spreading good news about our Creative Writing alumni. We are thrilled with the response for our first section, in fact we received more than we could publish in this issue. If you are an alumnus of the Creative Writing Program and are not represented on this page, or have more good news, please let us know, and please tell your former classmates that we want to hear from them at pipercenter.info@asu.edu. Please type “Alumni news” in the subject of your e-mail. Or, you can write to us at The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, ASU, Box 875002, Tempe, AZ 85287-1502. Attn: Alumni news. We want to hear from you!
THOMAS LEGENDRE (1996) & ALLYSON STACK (1997)
announce the birth of their daughter Nicole Legendre Stack who was born July 24, 2004, 9:45 p.m. 8 lbs., 3 oz. They live in Scotland. 1 5
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Thank you for your contribution!TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2004
Edward Albee – Gammage Theatre, ASU Campus (The Flinn Foundation Centennial Lecture) 7:30 p.m. FREE
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2004
Edward Albee – Galvin Theatre, ASU Campus (Getting at the Marrow: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Goat or Who is Sylvia? A Colloquium with Edward Albee) 5:30 p.m. FREE
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2004
Alexander McCall Smith – Old Main, Carson Ballroom, ASU Campus
7:30 p.m. FREE
TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2005
Stephen Cannell and Jana
Bommersbach – Scottsdale Center for
the Arts, Piper Theatre, 7:30 p.m.
TICKETS: $20.00
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2005
Piper Writers House Grand Opening
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2005
E. L. Doctorow – Scottsdale Center for
the Arts, Piper Theatre, 7:30 p.m.,
TICKETS: $20.00
TUESDAY, MARCH 08, 2005
Dave Smith – Piper Writers House, ASU Campus 12 p.m. FREE
THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2005
Beckian Fritz Goldberg and Chase Twichell – Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Stage 2, 7:30 p.m., TICKETS: $10.00
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 — SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 2005
ASU Writers Conference – ASU Campus. Featuring A. S. Byatt, Denise Chavez,
Billy Collins, C. D. Wright, Sarah Vowell, and many others.
CALENDAR OF EVENTS
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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: (480) 965-6018 • WWW.ASU.EDU/PIPERCWCENTER • PIPERCENTER.INFO@ASU.EDU
Gail Tsukiyama reading at Scottsdale Center for the Arts, October 8, 2004
Robert Pinsky during a Q & A at Armstrong Hall, October 11, 2004