What shapes a novel beyond its beginning, middle, and end? Does structure trigger narrative? Author of 2011’s genre-defying, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan has said of her process, “I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s the price you pay for doing something different every time.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning Egan explores the role of structure in writing and reading, sharing her perspective on the “rules” and her process in bending them.
This event took place as part of the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival.
Co-sponsored by The New School for Social Research
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Writers discuss Gregor von Rezzori's Bukovina Trilogy
With Michael Cunningham, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Kehlmann, and Edmund White; moderated by Edwin Frank
In the early 20th Century, what is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine was Czernowitz, Bukovina, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth place of the dazzling writer Gregor von Rezzori. For Rezzori, this city was a place full of color and laughter, but also of terrible uncertainty and latent violence, a polarity captured in his Bukovina trilogy Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, and An Ermine in Czernopol.
Some of today’s finest writers discussed Rezzori’s lost worlds and enduring works at the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival.
Writers and journalists speak about children's rights
Explore the history of the Children's Rights Movement and how past atrocities can inform contemporary advocacy on local, national, and global scales, paying particular attention to ongoing violations in Uganda by the Lord's Resistance Army.
May 4, 2012 | 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center | New York City
In her first New York appearance in over a decade, after a reading from her forthcoming novel The Hunger Angel, Herta Müller is interviewed by another literary titan, Claire Messud. This event took place as part of the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival.
Marjane Satrapi in conversation with New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly.
The PEN World Voices Festival event included a screening of Satrapi’s new film Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plums), based on the graphic novel of the same name.
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"The PEN America Center’s organizational focus is the effect of world events on the safety and freedom of expression of writers, so the topic of war naturally looms large in its cultural consciousness. As part of the recent PEN World Voices Festival, Polish journalist and author Wojciech Jagielski was interviewed by Joel Whitney, a founding editor of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics."
(via A Reporter's Perspective on War at PEN World Voices - WNYC Culture)
Over a year has passed since Egypt’s initial uprising, but the country is still facing unstable times and an uncertain future. What is really happening inside the most populous country in the Arab world? How accurate is the American media’s portrayal of events as they unfold? Egyptian-born analyst and correspondent Mona Eltahawy, who spent a decade covering the Middle East as a journalist for Reuters and the U.K. Guardian, shares her expertise on the complexities of the Egyptian revolution.
Co-sponsored by The New School for Social Research
(via PEN.org » Blog Archive Understanding Egypt: Mona Eltahawy, Elias Khoury, and Rula Jebreal)
"There's so much to say...": Writings from the Domestic Workers United Workshop
On Saturday, May 5, I attended a powerful and moving panel by members of the Domestic Workers United, moderated by poet and activist, Mark Nowak. Titled ‘There’s so much to say…,” the event, at the PEN World Voices Festival 2012, gave voice to and showcased the writings of participants who’d completed a poetry workshop with Nowak, meeting Saturday mornings at the Domestic Workers United office, in downtown Manhattan, over the course of five months.
By contrast, the seven panelists on “There’s so much to say…,” Arlene Charles, Yvonne Ennis, Allison Julien, Christine Lewis, Lizeth Palencia, Gricelda Sanchez, and Jeanette Warner are all domestic workers—nannies and housekeepers—in New York City. Some of the participants had never tried their hand at creative writing before this workshop while others, such as Christine Lewis, have been writing for many years.
“I thought I had nothing to say. I thought, I don’t know how to write,” Arlene Charles addressed the audience. “But it was amazing. Saying it out loud and hearing it, I realized there is pain and this is good therapy.
Nowak screened a video segment of the Saturday morning workshops, filmed by the videographer, Olga Oros, in which he guides the participants through creative writing exercises. The sessions appeared to be dynamic and heartfelt. Workshop members sat around a wide rectangular table in a sunlit room, actively sharing their creative ideas while revealing personal and often painful stories.
“Writing gets into the painful parts… It is life,” said an emotional Gricelda Sanchez.
Indeed, it became clear that the workshop had not only taught the craft of poetry, but it had also created a space for sharing anger, frustration, sadness and loneliness, and had enabled some of the women to find their voices. The power of creative writing to illumine pain, to humanize and add dimension to jobs and lives that, too often, go unacknowledged, was made clearly evident as participants read their work aloud.
“Writing is your force!” said one of the workshop participants while another stated, “This is therapy 101! It’s a place for us to let our hair down. We lend support to each other in a creative way.” A third participant said, “It’s very cathartic. As domestic workers, we have a lot to say.”
The poems spoke about the alienating, hurtful and disorienting experiences of working in people’s homes, of taking charge of that most personal space and of their employers’ most precious possessions—the children—and yet being treated as second class citizens or as if they are invisible.
“They don’t care about us,” said one of the panelists, while another said, “They are deceiving people. They only pretend to be your friend. I say to them, I am the employee, you are my employer. I am not your family.”
Allison Julien prefers to keep her personal life separate from work. “The more people know about you, they use it against you,” she said. “At work, I’m a nanny. After work, I’m an activist, writer, social organizer!"
Christine Lewis, who has been writing for many years, and is a veteran advocate for domestic workers, set the record straight during the Q & A session with an audience member who wanted to know about the tales of poverty that had, presumably, made the women come to America to work as nannies and housekeepers: “I came here on an adventure. I came to be part of the New York art world. I never thought I’d be a domestic worker,” Lewis said.
Ennis echoed the sentiment by stating, “Back home in the islands, we are educated women. I am a mother, too.”
Before reading a stirring poem, titled “The List,” inspired by a friend’s job interview for a live-in position that would pay $400 a week, Lewis said, “Poetry is charged language and it’s very complex.” Midway through the poem, which lists the exhausting housekeeping duties required of the prospective nanny candidate, Lewis urged the audience to join her in the refrain, And the four children aren’t even mentioned yet…. urging us to, “Put a little sass in it!”
There were several highly charged moments during the panel and a few participants sobbed while reading their work aloud. In the Q&A session, a woman came up to the mike and spoke for many in the audience when she said, “This has been the most heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching panel!”
When we write, we reach into the raw spaces of our hearts and help them heal. Mark Nowak’s poetry workshop has enabled this tremendous group of women to hone their individual voices and to rally around their collective strength. The Domestic Workers United Workshop panel ended with the emotionally driven choral poem, “They Say.”