Good Reads 3: Texas Critics and Authors in San Antonio on Friday

National Book Critics Circle:An Evening of Good Reads

Friday, May 30th, 7:00 PM
@ Gemini Ink, 513 S. Presa,San Antonio, TX 78205. 210.734.9673

The Spring 2008 Good Reads list - the third since the NBCC introduced this alternative to the bestseller list-- will be the focus of a panel at Gemini Ink in San Antonio on Friday night. Panelists include author and poet Sandra Cisneros; Steven G. Kellman, NBCC member, author and winner of the 2007 NBCC Balakian citation for excellence in reviewing; San Antonio Current editor Elaine Wolff; Norma Alarcon, editor and publisher of Third Woman Press; and PEN Southwest book award in fiction winner Rod Davis. NBCC member and playwright Gregg Barrios will moderate the event.

The panelists will discuss the NBCC Good Reads 3 list and share with the audience what they are currently reading. Each will recommend a personal favorite book. This NBCC Good Reads panel is co-sponsored by Gemini Ink Literary Center and the San Antonio Current. The event will also include a drawing of books from the NBCC Good Reads 3 list and those selected by the panelists. The event is free and open to the public. Reservations aren’t necessary, but seating is limited. Light refreshments will be served.

SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT: JAMES ALLEN HALL

Now You're the Enemy, University of Arkansas Press, 2008.

James Allen Hall is assistant professor of English at Bethany College in West Virginia. Now You're the Enemy was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Book Award and a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard/Open Competition Book Award. He's the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and three Pushcart Prize nominations.

A mini-essay from the poet and scholar:

"In The Ruins of Confession"

1. Dear Dr. Freud,

I have had to kill you.

Confessional poetry ain't got a thing if it doesn't swing a taboo over its shoulder, beat it bloody, and throw it into the river. Freud proposes two "universal" taboos: patricide and incest. These, he says, are the driving forces behind the individual's psyche and the blueprints for social organization.

The confessional poem first establishes a power dynamic, then reverses that dynamic to inscribe the speaker with all law-making jurisdiction. In "Daddy," Plath meets both of Freud's taboos head on, committing first patricide then incest. By poem's end, the speaker is a vampire-slayer with a killer lyric vocabulary. The Confessionals understood selfhood as constructed within certain regulatory matrices, those that place the subject before the door, waiting for Law to grant it authority. Poets like Plath one-up Whitman--they "unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs." The I is implicated: "I myself am hell," as Lowell says. The confessional poem is not just "about" taboo: it offers the possibility of revolt.

2. "I" is the greatest lie ever told.

The Post-Confessional poem destabilizes power dynamics by privileging an ecstatic self—one which performs that self while noting its performance. Cate Marvin's "Lying My Head Off" is a perfect example of a Post-Confessional speaker who makes of her admissions a collage, which Marvin then ironicizes. The poem begins by pointing to the speaker's head, "in a dank corner off the yard./ I lied it off and so off it rolled." The headless speaker confesses to hating a beloved, to teaching children obscenities and then buying them alcohol. The poem progresses by offering other versions of what happened, by negating the speaker's original claims, by indicting the self as an unstable vessel for Truth ("I would have sworn in court that I believed/ myself and then felt guilty a long time after"), by becoming "an other self." The self becomes "an other" by learning

another language. It translates easily.
Here's how: What I say is not what I mean,
nor is it ever what I meant to say.
You must not believe me when I say
there's nothing left to love in this world.

Sharon Olds' title poem "Satan Says" operates along similar lines. The speaker, locked in a box, follows Satan's advice in order to free herself. She engages the taboo by using vulgar words, especially to describe her parents' sexual organs, but there's no real confession. When prompted to say "what happened to us in the lost past," the confession is spoken by Satan, that storied liar: "Now say torture." The poem outlines the difficulties of saying the unsayable, of annotating the long silences around fear. These delicious ironies amount to metaphors stacked upon metaphors; we are shown how an ecstatic self lives in unstable times.

3. Tradition and Form

I'm enamored of how formally inventive post-confessional poets have gotten. Certainly, the Confessionals prefigured these kinds of poems: Plath's use of nursery rhyme, Sexton's re-envisioning of fairy tale, Lowell's early gesture in Life Studies at hybrid genre.

Miguel Murphy's poem "Love Like Auto-Sodomy" flirts with taboo in its title, which also sets us up for a love poem. But instead, the poem praises the opposite: "You have to hate// until you hurt no more. You have to be somewhere else./ You have to close your eyes to even bear me at all." The form that we expect (boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy drowns his sorrows at a martini bar where he meets a far more beautiful boy) is refuted. Murphy's confession (that "pelvicly is the only way I know/ to heal") creates surprise at the same time that it updates the tradition.

Michael Dumanis' love poem, "These Amorous Intents," deploys form to ironic, darkly comic, and devastatingly serious effects. In the first section, we meet a voice who promises to do various things for the beloved, but is ultimately powerless to perform more than the speech-act. In the third section of the poem, a Q&A proceeds in which the speaker eludes the Questioner. Its opening question, "Q: Are you sick with self-pity?" anticipates the critiques that Confessional poetry has weathered. The speaker answers with a nice bit of post-confessional sabotage: "At the masked ball, no one noticed me." The speaker evades the confessor.

4. Who You Calling Post-Confessional?

More than a handful of times, I've heard "confessional" bandied about in order to diminish autobiographical poems. No one, it seems, wants to be "merely" confessional--the fear is that one's art is evocative only because it treats powerfully emotional material (i.e., the taboo, the transgressive). The poem is "good," the label seems to say, only because the experience described was harrowing--the poem makes a spectacle of experience, not language. Indeed, this is what Aristotle rants against in his Poetics, saying that spectacle is the domain of stage directors, and thus antithetical to poetry. But for many poets, myself included, the pejorative connotation never made much sense. I washed my eyes in Plath's Collected Poems, and if she was Confessional, then that was what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Jeffrey McDaniel, writing for the Poetry Foundation's blog, identifies post-confessional poems as those which "enter into a place of psychic fracture, often involving family, and elaborate on or develop techniques used by the confessional poets." I'd add that the post-confessional poem often deploys ironic speakers, pastiched forms, narrativity inflected or made entirely by disjunction, and images that temper the autobiographical impulse with the surreal. There's a trend toward multi-vocality in post-confessional work, a preponderance of "I"'s that don't add up. The subject matter need not be traumatic; indeed, it seems that the post-confessional poem first flirts with, then utterly thwarts, the notion of taboo. If Marvin's speaker is/is not to be believed, and if there is nothing left to love, then we are free to love everything, in whatever beautiful language we can cobble from the ruins.

Works Noted:

Aristotle. Poetics. Penguin Classics, 1997.
Dumanis, Michael. My Soviet Union. University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.
Lowell, Robert. Life Studies and For the Union Dead. FSG, 1967.
Marvin, Cate. Fragment of the Head of a Queen. Sarabande Books, 2007.
McDaniel, Jeffrey. "Post-confessional Poetry?" June 17, 2007.
Murphy, Miguel. A Book Called Rats. Eastern Washington University Press, 2003.
Olds, Sharon. Satan Says. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Harper Collins, 1981.

Works Recommended:

Davis, Olena Kalytiak. And Her Soul Out of Nothing. University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Flynn, Nick. Some Ether. Graywolf Press, 2000.
Graham, David and Sontag, Kate, eds. After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Graywolf Press, 2001.
Rankine, Claudia. Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Graywolf Press, 2004.
Trethewey, Natasha. Bellocq's Ophelia. Graywolf Press, 2000.

An Interview With Kevin Prufer

University of Memphis MFA Student Bethany Reisner recently talked with longtime NBCC board member Kevin Prufer about criticism, his work as editor, and his newest book of poetry, National Anthem, just out to rave reviews.

Q: How did you get into writing?

A: I first wanted to be a fiction writer, but pretty quickly realized that I didn’t have much talent in that direction. I took my first poetry workshop after I finished college, though, and discovered British and American poetry. I wasn’t an English major in college and had only taken a couple English courses, both in American fiction. Studying Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot and Bishop during a one-year stay at Hollins University in Virginia was transformative. I left there determined to become a good poet.

Q: Tell me about your writing process.

I write at night, when the lights are out and the house is quiet. I revise during the day, usually many weeks after I complete a first draft. That way, the poem has had a chance to become unfamiliar, so I can see it as if it’s new.

Q: You wrote very autobiographically in your first book, then later said that personal focus seemed trivial in light of a broader historical world perspective ...

I found that when I swore off writing about myself—my own little frustrations, defeats, and joys—a whole world of better subjects opened up to me. Problems of American Empire, of history or God, seemed, well, so much more vital than, say, my parents’ divorce or the (mostly nonexistent) troubles of my (mostly happy) childhood. But my voice is my own, as are my historical and theological interests. I can never really escape from those, nor would I want to.

Q: Does your latest work, National Anthem, continue this theme?

Yes, absolutely. Though I felt as I wrote it that I was writing individual poems (as opposed to a cohesive book), the collection, as the title suggests, is largely political, largely about questions of citizenship, empire, nationhood, etc. Put another way: the book seems to me to be about the space between personal experience – mortal fears, for instance, or romantic or political ambivalence – and enormous social/political forces, the expansion of empires (ours and empires past), movements towards war, etc. How can we bring these two vastly different perspectives into some kind of agreement? (Of course, we never really can….)

I think (and hope) that National Anthem's political ambivalences will resonate with readers, especially in this very political year. From my view out here in the rural Midwest (and just down the road from Whiteman Air Force Base, where, just moments ago, I heard another B2 bomber taking off) we seem to be living in a troubled, imperialistic, complicated, sometimes inspiring time. National Anthem is mostly about that. Now I'm struggling with a draft of a new, very different kind of collection of poems tentatively titled Little Paper Sacrifice. At the moment, though, I'm just beginning to get a sense of what that book will look like.

Q: You do many different things -- editing, criticism, writing poetry -- how do they overlap and affect each other?

I read a great deal of poetry, both as Editor of Pleiades and for the Board of the NBCC. I also run the Pleiades Review of Books, which focuses primarily on new small-press poetry. And I write several reviews of new poetry each year for other publications. Writing and editing reviews can complicate my life as a poet. I think it’s important that critics hold poetry to the same standards as any other art form, that we say clearly to potential readers when a book isn’t working and that we explain why. Poets and publishers, I find, aren’t always used to receiving critical reviews, no matter how respectful—and I’ve often felt repercussions. (We’re a small community, and there’s an often wonderful (but sometimes debilitating) niceness that pervades it. As to my own poetry: my other jobs don’t affect it a bit.

There’s little in the world more important than the exchange of good thoughts. I think poetry is one of the most vital, beautiful, and efficient ways we have of communicating complex ideas. I write because I want to participate in that vast interchange. I edit and write criticism because I think it’s important that important ideas find an audience.

Q: What’s it like being a poet on the NBCC Board of Directors where poets are the minority?

You’d be surprised. Secret poets are everywhere. Nevertheless, one of the things I love about the Board is that everyone on it is a devoted and serious reader. That, after all, is what this is all about. An intelligent, sharp reader is worth a bucket of poets when it comes to the work of the NBCC.

Q: You focus a lot on finding up-and-coming authors who haven't yet been introduced to wide audiences -- you edited The New Young American Poets anthology, Pleiades (which includes 120+ pages of reviews of small, independent-press books in each issue), and The New Young American Poets. What's your selection process? How do you find good little-known writers?

At Pleiades, I have a core group of about 25 very sharp reviewers, most of them interested in reviewing poetry books. I email them a list of the hundreds of books we receive each quarter and they select those they’d be interested in reviewing. Since we don’t pay reviewers (we survive on grants and donations, alas) I like to let them select books that interest them. I do, however, suggest titles to reviewers and sometimes veto reviews of books that might not be of interest to our readers or for ethical reasons.

For writers of poetry, however, I try to remain as open as I can to each writer’s project. What, I ask first, is this poem trying to do. Then: is it successful? Then: Is it worth doing? I work very hard to keep Pleiades (or The New Young American Poets) from identifying too closely with any one aesthetic, school, or style.

Q: Do you worry about the literary community’s possible skepticism about your decision to back certain lesser-known authors, or does the anticipation of discovering the next Troy Jollimore overshadow that?

I love working with lesser-known authors. It’s why I edited The New Young American Poets and (with Joy Katz) Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems. It’s why I read so much. One of my great joys at Pleiades is publishing a truly amazing unsolicited submission by a poet I’ve never heard of. (We have an ongoing feature at Pleiades right now, in which established poets introduce the work of largely unpublished writers. Look for coming selections by NBCC finalists D. A. Powell and Carolyn Forché; their selections are a secret for now.)

Q: So what's your take on the current state of American poetry?

I think we’re living in a confusing but exciting time. It’s easy to argue that most poetry being published today isn’t that good, that too many in the “poetry community” have allowed themselves to be divided into various, introspective “schools” and “aesthetics,” that few people read poetry and almost no one reviews it. And all this is true. At the same time, I have only to pick up new books by writers like Mary Jo Bang, D. A. Powell, Carl Phillips, Rachel Zucker, James Richardson, Victoria Chang, and so many others and, well, it’s hard not to think that, despite many problems, we’re still in a good place. It just takes a bit of unburying to know it.

Marie Arana Leaves Washington Post

Marie Arana, longtime NBCC member and editor of the Washington Post Book World, has accepted a buyout and will be stepping down. Journal-isms quotes Arana saying, "The Post has asked me to accept a contract to write for them after I leave my position on Dec. 31, which I will do. I'll be looking for a fellowship position (or some such like) at a university and writing a book about Simon Bolivar ... My second novel (4th book) comes out in January. I'll be writing, rather than editing, in the future." We wish her all the best -- the world of criticism will miss her. For a thumbnail account of her career click here (and scroll down).

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] David Leavitt Recommends....

NBCC member fiction finalist David Leavitt's pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:

Marshall N. Klimasewiski, "Tyrants."

"Tyrants" is a collection of great range and breadth and imagination. Like Alice Munro, Klimasewiski writes stories on a novelistic scale, encompassing great swaths of history while carrying the reader all over the world--sometimes in a balloon.--David Leavitt

Sally Williams Leaves the Star-Tribune

This just in from Minneapolis, announced by the Star Tribune:

Sally Williams, books editor since 2003, is leaving the Star Tribune. She has accepted a position as director of public relations for Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota. Her last day at the newspaper will be June 3.

In 25 years here (interrupted by three years at the Seattle Post Intelligencer), Sally has been books editor, Pol/Gov team leader, World/Nation team leader/reporter, Social Issues team leader, assistant city editor and copy editor.

Everyone who knows and has worked with Sally will be saddened by news of her departure (even as they will no doubt wish her well in her new job). She has a rare combination of invaluable talents: keen news sense, passionate dedication, unstoppable work ethic, great people skills, high sense of purpose, exacting standards and a wonderfully graceful and humane writing style.

She also was a prime mover in the programming of Talking Volumes, working with partners to program stellar lineups for that visiting-author series, and writing memorable profiles of writers from Russell Banks to Anchee Min and, this week, Michael Ondaatje.

One duty of the books editor is herding the scores of books that arrive daily. Said Sally, "I will not miss pushing that books cart around, but I will dearly miss everyone in this building."

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] Beth Gutcheon Recommends...

NBCC member Beth Gutcheon's pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:

"Beginner’s Greek" by James Collins.The marriage story hasn’t been done this well since Jane Austen, and lord knows, a lot of us have tried. It is deftly plotted, sweetly funny and very very smart. Really delicious.

I’d love to see a list like this once a year or so of the old/ out of print/ however one wants to put it books we are reading. I see the drawback, there would be no critical mass anywhere, but for instance, a reader sent me a disgusting old copy of "Sincerely Willis Wade," JP Marquand, and I loved it, and now I’m reading "Constantinople, the City of the World’s Desire" by Philip Mansel and it’s fabulous. Who knew?--Beth Gutcheon

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] Diane Ackerman Recommends....

NBCC nonfiction award finalist Diane Ackerman's pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists (she wrote the introduction to the book she recommends):

THE SHADOW FACTORY, by Paul West, Lumen Books, Santa Fe.

Prose maestro Paul West, the author of twenty-two books of fiction and seventeen of nonfiction, sad to say, was struck down by a stroke in June 2004, and is still receiving treatment for Broca's Aphasia. He cannot do mathematics or clocks, and he has only three hours of fluency a day, after which language escapes him.

Fortunately, by some miracle, and through superhuman tenacity, he has written a book about his experiences, including the humor, tragedy, and successes of regaining speech. The language is golden, as of old; the humor is infectious and ribald; and the prose style on show is very much his own.

In short, this work from a writer who refused what fate handed out to him, is a unique document and extraordinary. Nothing like it exists in the annals of medicine or literature. It's a fascinating, account, both heartbreaking and uplifting, a powerfully moving book.--Diane Ackerman
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NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] Katharine Weber Recommends...

NBCC member Katharine Weber's pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:

I admired Charlotte Bacon's "Split Estate" enormously, for sensibility, for characters who absolutely live, and for really wonderful writing page to page. It's a novel that keeps offering the reader something that seems familiar but turns out to be strange, time and again. The many convincing surprises make this one of those life-improving novels that make you happy as you go about your day that you are in the middle of reading it and will soon be returning to those pages. I don't know why Bacon is not more well known, or why this novel has not made a larger impression since publication, because she is the kind of writer and this is the kind of novel absolutely deserving of a great deal more attention from critics and readers who appreciate excellent fiction.--Katharine Weber

PEN World Voices: Leon Wieseltier & A.B. Yehoshua

NBCC member Leora Skolkin-Smith reports on the conversations between New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier and Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua during the PEN World Voices Festival:

What happens when one’s deeper cultural identity has been irrevocably scattered, reshaped,and claimed? When a diaspora of the self has occurred in a way,but the pieces exiled have been the victim’s own? To be an Israeli who grew up in a time before the state of Israel, before 1948, in a Palestine divided into border-free neighborhoods of Jews, Muslims and Christians can feel like one has lived only in a
fairytale.In this netherland of memory and being, lost cities and forgotten alliances, few writers have the tools with which to create a lasting fiction. The real experience is unreal enough, perhaps, a story few believe anyway, not grounded in contemporary Israel and Palestine and therefore unimaginable to the majority of
people who know this region only through the images of the here and now. A.B. Yehoshua is one of the few writers who has taken this existential challenge on and it is hard to not speak of his work effusively, with words of awe and admiration.

The evening I spent in the auditorium of the Center of Jewish history on Friday (May 1st 2008), watching and listening to the informal, lively discussion between New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, and his old friend, A.B. Yehoshua was yet another experience of awe at this writer’s capacity for depth and mastery. As is always the case, hung photographs on the walls of the holocaust and the rebuilding of shattered lives in the Center played their central part in defining Jewish collective memory. The Jewish Palestinians of the time before 1948, are marginal to say the least. They have not and continue to not carry any weight in the current spectrum of politics. They are light baggage, easily blown to the winds.

Yehoshua was born in 1936 in Jerusalem. He lived at a time before the major Zionist movements in Europe formed the state of Israel.He lived another Israel/Palestine perhaps.

A friendly, warm-hearted and chubby man with wild curly gray hair, he seemed like an unlikely choice for such a dark load. Like the character in his novel, "A Woman in Jerusalem," he “had not sought such a mission now, in the softly radiant morning, (but) he grasped its unexpected significance...” In the beginning of the interview, after asked a few general questions, Yehoshua gave the audience his own version of the history of Israel as a nation. He knew Jerusalem intimately. He stressed that immediately after 1948, when statehood was won, he and many Jewish intellectuals wanted his writing to be about a return to the individual as his own center, to surreal and existential realms. To hear his clear description of an earlier Jerusalem was fortifying and confirming.

Ghosts were resurrected but spoke as truths seldom heard. Before 1998, Israel was still a frontier with opened borders, he explained, Arab Israelis and Palestinians sat and smoked in cafes and nightclubs in Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Israelis went
night-clubbing in Rammallah and in the Gaza strip. The ubiquitous use of the word “zionism” these days is like putting “catsup” on everything. What does it mean? He asked. It was only intended to mean there should be a state of Israel, and it only applied to the formation of the State by 1948. After the State was achieved, it stopped meaning anything. It is just some sauce people throw on everything, he said, just the easiest and most convenient condiment.

What has happened in Israel and Palestine now for Yehoshua is a deadening of human empathy. Israel is now a swelling chaos, like the Jerusalem weather in "A Woman in Jerusalem," which he describes like this: “From the overhang of the handsome tiled roof cascaded not one storm but many, each more torrential than the last. It was
as if the earth, having lost all hope of emptying the sky in a single downpour was draining it in stages.”

"Once when a Palestinian boy was killed, all Israelis mourned and felt pain," he explained, "now they say -- well, why don’t they care about the ones we have lost to suicide bombers?” It’s a different place, he continued, a time of disconnection, historical distortions; the wall between the Israeli and Palestinians is just as metaphorical as it is concrete. And memories of a time when Palestinians and Israelis felt good about each other are rarely conjured up by the new Israelis, a silence around the recent past has been built as strong as that wall. The 1920’s
through the 1940’s in Jerusalem are not alluded except as precursors of the on-going border struggles experienced in Israel today.

Yehoshua calls this deadening of human empathy the ”black plastic that wraps the dead bodies”.Faceless, nameless except to their own side, victims arrive at the cemetery stripped not only of their lives but of any possibility of re-engaging with the living as individuals, real fellow people.

Critical, too, of how some Americans and Europeans claim the Israeli experience without having lived it, he expressed frustration about the fantasy so many have about Israel here in the States. Paraphasing his own words, he told the audience: "Tell them to come and let them see for themselves what strange and very
wrong ideas they have about Israel..."

When asked by an audience member if Philip Roth’s portrait of the alienated Jew who feels he doesn’t belongs in Israel represents the majority of Americans, Leon Wieseltier, laughing, remarked: “No, no not enough of a majority! Look at all the settlers!” And Yehoshua added, laughing too, “Yes, I am hoping many more Americans will start to feel like strangers here, maybe they’ll stopped building settlements!“ No one feels the bitter unfairness of the generalized reproach and impressions that Israel’s innate ”zionist ggressiveness” is of the horrendous state of things more than Yehoshua. But no one feels more strongly that Jerusalem belongs to all three religions, too. For him, Jerusalem belongs to the entire world, not to one group, not even just to the Jews. He has been active in the Peace Talks and critical of the new Israel, he says what only a older citizen of Israel/Palestine who has once been filled with sweeter memories could say: “We need peace because you see, we are neighbors. These Arabs and Palestinians, they are our neighbors. We are not separated by the ocean as you Americans are from from the people of Iraq you are fighting. After 1948, many families were separated and friends turned against each other...”

In "A Woman in Jerusalem," the resource manager of the bakery is ordered to investigate the murder of a firstly anonymous cleaning lady. The woman, it turns out is from Russia, and she wasn’t even Jewish. She was killed by a suicide bomber and the company has no kept records of her employment with them. What unravels is a story
about the loss of some ability to love. She is a beautiful woman and the divorced manager falls in love with the idea of her, from pictures he finds in her lost files, and stories about her. His love is a love he can’t have with the living.

Mr. Yehoshua is married to a psychoanalyst and he spoke profoundly about the necessity of the writer to look internally, to write from a personal “inclination”. To be driven to write what he must, rather to write from a “moral obligation” to society, even as embattled a society as Israel’s. If the “inclination” isn’t
stronger than the “obligation”, he explained, “and all that history feels too heavy.” The depth of that inner look and psychological starting point is vital to the broader sweep from which the novel will grow. The eye of the storm is always personal and begins in the personal, only through that gateway can the writer eventually encompass his surroundings and the society he exists in with all its pressing moral urgencies. Otherwise, we are left only with one-dimensional ideologies in the novel, dogma, the waste products of too many tired minds weighed down by all that history. For Yehoshua, the novel’s purity of vision depends on a
confrontation with and truthfulness about one’s internal, individual life.

No other writer I have read, expresses that purity of the individual self and the cultural collectivity that self must inhabit more poignantly and lucidly than A.B. Yehoshua.--Leora Skolkin-Smith

SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT: DANIEL A. OLIVAS

Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, Bilingual Press, 2008.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of the story collections Devil Talk and Assumption, the novella The Courtship of Maria Rivera Pena, and the children's book Benjamin and the Word. He has a book of poetry forthcoming from Ghost Road Press in 2010, and another short-story collection to be published by Bilingual Press in 2009. A co-blogger on La Bloga (which is dedicated to Chicano/a and Latino/a literature), Olivas practices law with the California Department of Justice in Los Angeles where he makes his home with his wife and son.

A mini history lesson: The city of Los Angeles was once called by the Spaniards who founded it in 1781, El Pueblo Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula. In 1821 Mexico declared its independence from Spain, and the city (and much of what is now known as the Southwest) came under Mexican rule. The year of the Gold Rush, 1848, California (and the aforementioned Southwest) became a territory of the United States after the controversial Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. History shows such a preoccupation with sovereignty, and yet, culturally, the city (and state) has thrived from these various shifts in national identities. This anthology taps into one of those identities: Latino. What will the reader learn about who Latinos are, and more specifically, who California Latinos are?

Yes, I think there is certainly an undercurrent of disruption arising from the forced multiculturalism that is endemic to California's shifting sovereignty. This has resulted, I believe, in a great complexity of experiences which I hope comes through when you read the stories and novel excerpts that make up the anthology. The narratives include protagonists such as journalists, cement pourers, folklorico dancers, curanderos, teenage slackers, artists, wrestlers, saints, priests, druggies, script writers, college students, and even a private detective. Just this listing of characters demonstrates the two worlds (i.e., pre- and post-1848) that are being straddled.

Moreover, I tried to include Latino writers who were not of Mexican ancestry. Thus, we have stories by writers who have roots in Cuba and Brazil. I wished that I had included more stories by other non-Chicanos but much was dictated by what I received in response to my call for submissions. Not surprisingly, I received work primarily from Chicano/a writers.

I also note that the protagonists represent all ages, income and education levels, and various immigration histories. We have gay and straight characters, people who are single or in committed relationships, folks who are political and those who are not. Also, virtually every style of writing is represented which is one of the facets of the anthology that is most gratifying to me. Each piece brings the reader something different from the last one read.

Finally, though it is difficult to pinpoint, the Latino experience in California, in general, and Los Angeles, in particular, is tied rather dramatically to the State's varied terrain (from beaches to mountains to deserts to asphalt), dependence on the car to get virtually anywhere, the freeway system, almost unrelenting sunshine, and the entertainment industry. I don't believe that the stories in the anthology could be transplanted to, say, Denver or El Paso or Las Vegas.

Latinos in Lotusland limits itself to short stories and novel excerpts, including a piece from Robert Vasquez's groundbreaking 1970 novel Chicano, and a piece from a consummate California writer, Helena Maria Viramontes. You also include (among others) three much-celebrated writers in the early stages of their promising careers, Reyna Grande, Alex Espinoza and Manuel Munoz. Why are stories and books such an important component of Chicano/Latino cultural production?

I think that we use storytelling in book form the same way our elders used oral storytelling: to pass on culture, life lessons and a sense of place. In many ways, I think there is more truth in fiction than there is in so-called non-fiction. When someone writes an autobiography, so much is left out, so much is inflated, so much is shaped into what the writer wants others to see. In fiction, all that matters is the story. It's safer because the writer can always say: hey, it's not true, it's just fiction. That sense of safety has allowed many writers to produce some of the truest fiction around.

Your introduction doesn't mention why that word— "Lotusland" —appears on the title. Besides its alliterative value, are you trying to bridge a connection to another state of existing/being or with the Asian populations in the Southwest, which are also sizeable and significant?

As Gary Keller (Bilingual Press' director) and I kicked around ideas for naming the anthology, he suggested that we use a nickname for Los Angeles. The city had been disparaged by many a writer (usually those who moved here from elsewhere) with such nicknames as La-La Land, El-Lay, etc. One such nickname is "Lotusland" which harkens back to the mythological race of lotus (or "lotos") eaters "represented by Homer as living on the fruit of the lotus and living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness and idleness" according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Thus, the term has entered the English language to mean "a place or state of idle pleasure and luxury, contentment and self-indulgence." (Websters New Millennium Dictionary of English.) So, some clever wags have pinned it to Los Angeles' lapel. Similarly, as William Safire noted in a New York Times essay:

"La-La Land is a play on the initials L.A., perhaps influenced by Lotos-land in 'The Lotos-Eaters,' a poem by Tennyson: 'In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined / On the hills like Gods together.' In his 1941 novel, The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a character describe Hollywood as 'a mining town in lotus land.'"

So, I use the name "Lotusland" ironically because, as I note in my introduction: "[N]otwithstanding the fact that the characters who populate this anthology may have feasted on the City of Angel's lotus flowers, they do not live in blissful oblivion and they certainly have not forgotten who they are." I thought long and hard about whether I should explain all of this in my introduction but I decided to allow readers to do a little exploration if they were curious. Many readers who live in Los Angeles chuckle when they hear the title and readily understand the allusion.

(Author Photo: Susan Formaker)

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] Brian Sholis Recommends....

NBCC member Brian Sholis's pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:

Gordon S. Wood, "The Purpose of the Past: On the Uses of History."

The review-essays collected in Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood’s "The Purpose of the Past" chart a turbulent period in the discipline of academic history, during which an old guard defended comprehensive narrative history against younger generations influenced by postmodern theory, sociology, and cultural studies. (This is often distilled as a battle between history “from above” and “from below.”) Wood, a professor at Brown University whose specialty is the founding of our republic, is clearly on the side of tradition, but not with a knee-jerk reflexiveness: His advocacy is for temperance and the appreciation of historical context, rather than any individual position. Time and again, in pieces published during the last quarter-century in magazines such as The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, Wood chastises those who attempt to read the present into the past or vice versa. Though strict, he is also fair, and as he praises some historians (Drew Gilpin Faust, Garry Wills, David Hackett) and criticizes others (Simon Schama, Richard K. Matthews) his consistency grants lay readers fascinating insights not only into aspects of early America but also into how it is presented to us.--Brian Sholis