Novel of Korean War, Memoir by Former Prisoner Win Literary Peace Prize

The sixth annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize, recognizing "the power of the written word to promote peace," was awarded yesterday to novelist Chang-Rae Lee and journalist-cum-memoirist Wilbert Rideau. Lee received the ten-thousand-dollar award for his fourth novel, The Surrendered (Riverhead Books), and Rideau won for his memoir, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance (Knopf).

Lee's novel unfolds during the Korean War, examining the repercussions of violence in the decades that follow the event. "This is a big novel which steadily transcends any thematic constraints and steps into real art," says fiction judge Ron Carlson, adding, "the dimensions of the book insist on a gritty and complex understanding of our best impulses in the worst of times."

Nonfiction judge Eric Bates says of Rideau's book, completed after the author spent forty-four years incarcerated in Louisiana prisons, "For his reporting alone, Rideau has made a critical and lasting contribution to our understanding of a prison system that long ago gave up on the notion of rehabilitation. But his memoir goes far beyond the limitations of journalism. He brings to his story a deep devotion to the power of literature, drawing on traditions as diverse as Saint Augustine and Frederick Douglass to craft a dramatic and moving tale that is both deeply felt and richly observed."

The winners will be presented their awards at a ceremony on November 13 in Dayton, Ohio, the seat of the historic Dayton Peace Accords, initialed there in November 1995.

In the video below, Lee discusses his winning book with Leonard Lopate of New York City public radio station WNYC.

Patricia Roth Schwartz Isn't Afraid of Doing it Wrong

Writer Patricia Roth Schwartz blogs about facilitating a memoir writing workshop series in historic Seneca Falls, New York.

It’s a beautiful spring day in historic Seneca Falls. We meet in the town Recreation Center, a low brick building on the canal, which connects to the Erie, where lazy houseboats drift by on the gentle green waters dotted with ducks and waterfowl. The room we have has one enormous windowed wall. Four participants, two middle-aged and two seniors, regulars at most of the literary programs held locally, have gathered.

We plunge into our topic: "Telling the Stories of our Lives: Writing the Personal Memoir." After some discussion, we start an exercise. Following the guided visualization, everyone is asked to write from a childhood memory. As we’re beginning, a woman and her twelve-year-old daughter join us, apologizing for their lateness. I initiate introductions, settle the latecomers into chairs, bring them briefly up to speed, then encourage them both to start writing. The mother goes ahead, but the girl just sits, looking scared and confused. We’d advertised the workshop to all ages, but she's the only youngster. Her mother said she loves to write, but right now I know exactly how she’s feeling, afraid of embarrassing herself, of doing it "wrong."

My background as a psychotherapist jumps into play. "I'll help you," I say, and hunker down beside her. "Who were you thinking of?" "My granddad," she whispers. "Okay—great. Can you write him a letter, telling him what you remember?" She thinks about it. "Yes!" Her pen leaps to the page. "Good—good—keep going," I say. "Put in a lot of details, like you were looking at it in a movie."

Before we knew it, everyone, including the girl, has completed a piece. One by one the writers read aloud. When it's her turn, the girl is pleased with and excited by her letter. She shares it willingly, how her granddad would hoist her up on his shoulders when she was really little and carry her around. The group loves it and tells her as much.

"Okay," I finish. "Now when you go home, write it up really nicely and mail it to him!" The young girl beams.

Photo: Patricia Roth Schwartz. Credit: Sandy Zohari.

Support for the Reading/Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

September 26

9.26.11

Transform one of your poems into an artisanal object of some kind using found or recycled materials. Send a photograph of it to editor@pw.org for possible inclusion in a slideshow. Include Artisanal Object in the subject line.

Ashbery Wins National Book Foundation Medal

Poetry and art world icon John Ashbery will be honored in November with the National Book Foundation's twenty-first Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The eighty-four-year-old author of Notes From the Air (Ecco, 2007), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975), Some Trees (Yale University Press, 1956), and dozens of other volumes of poetry and prose will receive the award along with the winners of this year's National Book Awards at the foundation's annual dinner on November 16.

Also recognized will be Mitchell Kaplan, one of the founders of the twenty-seven-year-old Miami Book Fair International and a former president of the American Booksellers Association. Kaplan will receive the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, previously awarded to advocates of the written word such as Dave Eggers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Terry Gross.

The foundation will announce its finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards on October 12 at Portland's Literary Arts Center, with Oregon Public Radio broadcasting the event locally and online. The winning authors will be revealed on the night of the benefit dinner.

In the video below, Ashbery, who in 2008 won the international Griffin Poetry Prize (sponsored by the Canadian organization the Griffin Trust), reads "Interesting People of Newfoundland" from Notes From the Air.

September 22

9.22.11

Read Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” and Wells Towers’s story “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” Both stories integrate the ancient and the contemporary in surprising and disturbing ways. (For another example read Matthew Sharpe’s novel Jamestown [Soft Skull Press, 2007]). Draft a story that does the same thing, blending the past and the present into the fictional elements of plot, setting, dialogue, and character.

Kay Ryan Wins "Genius" Fellowship

This year's MacArthur Foundation Fellows, commonly referred to as recipients of the organization's "Genius" grant, have been announced. Among a class of fellows that includes a virologist, a cellist, an architect, a lawyer for elder rights, an evolutionary geneticist, and a silversmith, poet Kay Ryan is honored for her "deceptively simple verse of wisdom and elegance."

Ryan, who from 2008 to 2009 served as the sixteenth U.S. poet laureate, will receive the five-hundred-thousand-dollar prize, designed to encourage continued work, but with "no strings attached," over the next five years. Author of seven collections, she was honored earlier this year with the Pulitzer Prize for her latest book, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010).

Translator and poet A. E. Stallings, whose work is influenced by her training in classical Greek and Latin, also received the fellowship. Currently living in Athens, Stallings is recognized for "revealing the timelessness of poetic expression and antiquity's relevance for today." Aside from her translations of Plutarch, Lucretius, and other classical writers, her original works include Hapax (2006) and Archaic Smile (1999). A new poetry collection, Olives, is forthcoming in 2012 from TriQuarterly Books. 

For biographies of and interviews with the 2011 fellows, who range in age from twenty-nine to sixty-seven and represent ten states, plus Washington, D.C., Greece, and British Columbia, visit the MacArthur website.

In the video below, Ryan describes the impact of the MacArthur grant, especially for a writer at sixty-five, and where she is in her work, "always just beginning."

September 19

9.19.11

Ruminate on the following lines by Greek poet Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget / falls drop by drop upon the heart, / until, in our own despair, / against our will, / comes wisdom / through the awful grace of God."

Use these lines as the epigraph to a poem. Once you've finished the poem, delete the epigraph.

Patricia Roth Schwartz Tours Seneca County

Longtime P&W-supported writer Patricia Roth Schwartz blogs about the literary happenings across Seneca County, New York.

What can you say of a region that boasts scenic views rivaling those of England's Lake Country? Where grapevines laden with fruit slope down to lakeshores in late summer? Where over one hundred wineries offer tastings, lakeside cafés? Eleven lakes offer angling, paddling, and sailing. Mennonites’ horses and buggies traverse country roads creating a landscape that seems over a century old.

It's a poet’s world. Making connections with other poets and writers, though, isn't easy. Without the kinds of venues more urban areas can sustain, this loose collection of hamlets, villages, townships, and two small cities, Auburn and Geneva, has had no central clearinghouse for writers.

Still, we're out here. Some at local colleges, some transplanted, educated and polished, others untutored having written secretly for years. We are seniors eager to write memoir, teens braving an open mic, mothers with toddlers and manuscripts in tow, retirees finally finding time to write.

The number of literary events, and venues for them, has grown in recent years. Public libraries offer most of the literary programming: readings by published authors, writing workshops, poetry readings. An evening at Seneca Falls Public Library on April 1st, with featured readers and an open mic, was particularly successful. The Seneca County Arts Council which maintains a small space in Seneca Falls full of vibrant artwork, has also hosted literary-based workshops.

Mary Genter, aka "Marabee, your hometown muse," has started a reading series at Riverbend Café in Auburn. Charlotte Dickens of Watkins Glen has curated a P&W-supported reading series, now held in Montour Falls near the southern tip of Seneca Lake, for twenty years. I've begun an open mic series at ZuZu Café in Seneca Falls. Writer/ publisher Steve Tills sponsors events at Buffalo Bill's Family Restaurant and Tap Room in Shortsville; John Cieslinski of Macedon, uses his charming bookstore, Books, Etc., for readings and author appearances. Fatzinger Hall above Waterloo Library, a Victorian lecture hall where Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas both appeared, hosts a reading series.

We learn about what’s happening through e-mails, fliers, news articles, and word of mouth. As a sense of community begins to gel, Tills and I have formed a grassroots organization, the Literary Guild of the Finger Lakes, hoping to bring all of this together. Our inaugural P&W-supported reading, "An Evening of Poetry," at Fatzinger Hall, was attended by poets from Auburn, Geneva, and Rochester.

Should you travel here, look for me lakeside, sipping wine and writing poems.

Photo: Patricia Roth Schwartz. Credit: Sandy Zohari.

Support for the Reading/Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

To Bill, or Not to Bill

We've caught some buzz over the past few days about an organization called the World Poetry Movement holding a Bill Murray Poetry Contest. While there's no promise on the contest website that the beloved actor will actually read the poems written "for" him, our friends in the poetry world are embracing the challenge with whimsyafter all, the competition, which promises one thousand dollars and publication (plus possible "recording"), is free.

Blogger Kelly C at Videogum, who pens a wonky sonnet for the actor, breaks it down, "Well, I don’t know. Obviously this raises a lot of questions that I wasn’t able to answer with a quick look at the website. Publication where? Who would record it and for what? What is this thing even about at all? But it doesn’t matter, because when you win it you will win one thousand dollars apparently, from someone, and who couldn’t use an extra one thousand dollars from someone?"

The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog gave the contest a shout-out too, though, unlike Ms. C, no staffer took a stab at a Murray tribute poem. However, someone does hope to have arrived at the winning title, courtesy of Murray's Herman Blume: "Yeah, I Was in the Shit."

Whether or not you get in on the action (entries are due on September 30), check out Murray's poetry reading for construction workers on a break from building a new home for New York City's Poets House in 2009. (Perhaps the Rushmore-esque music will inspire a your Murray muse.)

A New Literary Agency Announced

Rachel Sussman and Terra Chalberg befriended each other a decade ago as young editors at Scribner. Later, Chalberg joined the Susan Golomb Literary Agency as an agent and director of foreign rights. (Susan Golomb is the long-time agent of Jonathan Franzen.) Sussman moved on, too, becoming an agent for the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency, where she worked for six years.

Yesterday, the two peers announced the launch of a new literary agency, Chalberg & Sussman, which will offer an "unwavering commitment to helping emerging and established authors reach a broad audience across multiple platforms." With Chalberg managing the agency’s foreign rights alongside an international group of co-agents, the agency already has an impressive list of clients, including Margaux Fragoso, author of the New York Times best-selling memoir, Tiger, Tiger (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Hal Herzog, professor of psychology and author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals (Harper, 2010); and Andrew Porter, Flannery O’Connor Award-winner for The Theory of Light and Matter: Stories (University of Georgia Press, 2008), among numerous others.

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