Dirección General De Juegos De Casino Y Máquinas Tragamonedas
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Dirección General De Juegos De Casino Y Máquinas Tragamonedas
22 • The Writer’s Chronicle • Volume 43 Number 2 An Interview with Patricia Hampl by Katherine Jamieson P atricia Hampl is the author of eight books, most recently The Florist’s Daughter, a family memoir about “middle class people, living in the middle of the country, in the middle of the century.” Her work has been described as “delightfully fluid, artful without being arty, ever attuned to ambiguity.” The Los Angeles Times has called her “the queen of memoir.” Her last four books have been on the 100 Notable Books list of the New York Times Book Review. Ms. Hampl graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with an MFA in poetry in 1970. She first won recognition for A Romantic Education, a cold war memoir about her Czech heritage, which has shaped the rise of autobiographical writing. Her fiction, poems, reviews, essays, and travel pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, the New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. Ms. Hampl is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where she teaches in the MFA program, and is a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program. In 1990 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Katherine Jamieson: As an opponent of the Vietnam War, you have written about the impact the war had on your generation: “We had lost the national connection and were heartsick in a cultural way.” How do you think the wars are impacting the youth of today? What does this generation’s reaction to war indicate about American society? Patricia Hampl: I’m not sure I’m the one to tell you what they’re thinking—the generation now sitting in these chairs in the Iowa Union, the way we did during the Vietnam War years, should answer you. But I do think it’s worse now—more heartbreaking because the problems have leached into a much larger part of the society. Not just the culture, but also the economy. I was thinking about Lyndon Johnson, whom people like me got out of office. Yet his great push, Katherine Jamieson is a graduate of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Narrative, and Terrain, and are forthcoming in poemmemoirstory. Some of her other writings can be found at <www.katherinejamieson.com>. I sometimes have thought of Iraq as the credit card and Walmart war because a lot of the people joined the National Guard in order to improve their lot in life. his great platform, was the War on Poverty. He’s looking pretty good now! I’m married to a man who was sitting in the Iowa Student Union about a generation before I was, during the McCarthy period. He says that this is definitely worse. I mean, think about it. Guantanamo? A while back, the University of Iowa published a small, beautifully done book of poems from detainees in Guantanamo—an historic publication, with an introduction and all kinds of wrap-around materials to help you read these poems. They were written not by professional poets, but by detainees who turned to poetry out of their desperation. This book was reviewed in the New York Times negatively. The poems weren’t up to scratch. A complete misunderstanding of the documentation going on here. This disjunction between documentary work and aesthetics was shocking to me. It would be as if saying that words scratched on the walls in Dachau were somehow not quite up to professional standards. Jamieson: Where do you think the awareness and resistance to this war is coming from? What’s the nexus of it? In your generation, it was the youth; in this current generation, it’s hard to pinpoint who’s speaking up. Hampl: There isn’t much resistance at this point. One thing that is different too is that it isn’t generational anymore. My generation persuaded everybody not to trust the government. Not always to good effect, unfortunately. Culturally speaking, it wasn’t as if my generation was entirely about barricades and fighting. This same disjunction that I just described existed not just in politics, but also in documentation and in art and aesthetics. I can remember when a friend of mine who had been to prison as a draft resister published his first book of poems, and it was reviewed in the American Poetry Review. The reviewer said that, unfortunately, “he traded on his prison experience.” This was a criticism. When you write about your grandmother or grandfather, or look out the window at a tree, are you trading on your “window experience,” your “grandchild experience”? We don’t have a place for thinking politically in our literary culture, and this is very odd given the example of Whitman. Literary culture, since I’ve been publishing, has largely been interested in talking about process. Nuts and bolts, and sometimes about theory. But we don’t seem to have a way to take a position as a citizen. Jamieson: A citizen and an artist. Hampl: There were certainly many examples during the Vietnam War, people like Robert Bly, of course, Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, Galway Kinnell, Donald Justice. I could go on and on. Robert Creeley, Ginsberg. All of these people, who had aesthetic differences across a wide range, got together and went all over the country doing “Poets Against the Vietnam War.” When they were doing that, they were encouraging young men to turn in their draft cards, which was a felony. They had no way of knowing if they would be arrested. They weren’t, as it happened, but they didn’t know if they would be. The draft in some ways made it easier for us to protest the Vietnam War. I sometimes have thought October/November 2010 • The Writer’s Chronicle • 23 Jamieson: When you say mercenaries, are you talking about Blackwater, or these hired firms? Hampl: Mercenaries. I won’t call them what they want us to call them—“private security firms” or “independent defense contractors”—any more than I will use the term “ethnic cleansing.” If there’s one thing that writers should hang on to, it’s the use of language. Look at what they’re calling torture, the terms they’re coming up with: “harsh interrogation,” “enhanced coercive interrogation technique,” “sleep management.” Words that obfuscate, that veil. Jamieson: You’ve talked about how remembering is a political act. Hampl: It’s an act of the imagination, but since when is the imagination not the real resource for one’s ethics? The imagination is where empathy happens. If I can imagine that you might be pained, wounded, harmed, by something I would do or say, and if that has meaning for me, then that’s the beginning of empathy. It takes imagination to do that, because left to my own devices, I want to eat the whole sweet roll. I want everything for myself, and you can just take care of yourself, kiddo. And that is the tragic direction we have taken our great birthright of individualism. It is the great American gift to the world, the idea that the individual matters. But we’ve cast away Whitman’s vision of “the dear love of comrades.” We’ve acted as if, I get to carry my gun, and if you don’t have health care, there must be a reason that you don’t have a decent job. It must be your fault. A lot of these economic problems are making inroads into the middle class, and of course everyone likes to think they’re the middle class, including the wildly rich. Jamieson: I’ve heard the criticism that everyone uses the term “upper-middle class,” but no one ever admits to being part of the upper-class. Hampl: Those categories which gave people, among other things, a sense of solidarity, connection, commitment and empathy, and self-connection with a bigger thing, are becoming really brittle, or already have turned to dust. Maybe that’s why a lot of people turn to these mega-churches, which many of us find repellent, both politically and aesthetically. They just seem to be an extension of the mall—you liked the mall, well come to this mega-church and you’ll feel right at home. But really, they exist for a reason, and they’re serving a function—what is it? It’s a cracked attempt to make some kind of communal connection that is not so easily found elsewhere. We can’t even get together to get decent mass transportation. We would rather get in a car and sit PHOTO BY BARRY GOLDSTEIN of Iraq as the credit card and Walmart war because a lot of the people joined the National Guard in order to improve their lot in life. They wanted that SUV or they wanted to put an addition on the house for the kids. Some consumer or service issue. They were trying to make ends meet, maybe get college benefits. There’s a quality of life that they were trying to achieve, and they bet on the odds. We also have to remember the huge numbers of mercenaries that we have. It was a much more ideological war with Vietnam, whereas now there’s no way to get around the oil. Patricia Hampl there, wasting gas while we’re stalled on the highway. I’m speaking now, even of Iowa City, but certainly of a metropolis like St. Paul-Minneapolis where I live. To get mass transit in this country is a huge struggle, a huge fight. I think that all this connects to our inability to have grasped Whitman’s idea of the “dear love of MFA in Creative Writing IndianaUniversity NowalsoofferingadualMA/MFAinCreativeWritingandAfricanAmericanandAfricanDiasporaStudies Indiana University supports one of the oldest and most highly regarded programs in the nation, offering a three-year, 60-credit Master of Fine Arts degree and an opportunity to study with a nationally recognized faculty of poets, fiction writers, and authors of creative nonfiction in a close-knit and supportive writing community. • All of our students have full teaching assistantships and tuition waivers; many also receive supplemental fellowships. We offer NealMarshall Graduate Fellowships to incoming students of color. • Graduate assistants have the opportunity to teach creative writing classes during each of their three years in the program, and they teach only creative writing classes during their first year. • Assistantships are available for the editors of our literary journal, Indiana Review, and for the associate director of the Indiana University Summer Writers’ Conference. • Our program is committed to diversity; more than half of our students are students of color. • Third-year (thesis year) fellowships in poetry and fiction are also available. • Recent graduates have won the American Book Award; the Asian American Literary Award; the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction; the Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction; the Yale Younger Poets Prize; the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; the Bakeless Prize in Poetry (twice); the AWP Award in Short Fiction; the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction; the National Poetry Series; Guggenheim, Stegner, and NEA fellowships; and several Pushcart Prizes. FACULTY: TonyArdizzone•CatherineBowman •RichardCecil•RossGay•MauriceManning• AlyceMiller•MauraStanton•SamratUpadhyay (director) For more information contact: Creative Writing Program, Indiana University Ballantine Hall 402, 1020 E. Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington IN 47405-7103 (812) 855-9539 www.indiana.edu/~mfawrite 24 • The Writer’s Chronicle • Volume 43 Number 2 comrades.” He thought our cities should be like great broad-shouldered men with their arms around each other. Jamieson: The issue of leisure figures largely in your work in seemingly contradictory ways. You refer to one of your literary heroes, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lifelong rage against the leisure class, and your own mixed feelings about class growing up in the “middle” in St. Paul. You also quote the nun in Blue Arabesque who says that leisure is the core of contemplative life. How have our definitions of leisure changed in this century? How can a spiritual person ensure that leisure is not apathy, but a serious engagement with the world? Hampl: What a good question! F. Scott Fitzgerald had a lot of fury and resentment against the leisure class. And of course, he was fascinated by wealth and power. Another Minnesotan, Thorstein Veblen, wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, which was published in 1899, three years after Fitzgerald was born. Veblen’s sense of leisure has to do with a leisure purchased at the price of other people’s labor. It’s interesting that it’s used as an adjective there. In other words, to say “leisure class” is not the same as what I mean in talking about “leisure.” In Blue Arabesque, I ask the contemplative nun, what’s the core of your life, how does this work, contemplative life, monastic life? I expect her to say, it’s the search for God, it’s the search for inner peace. But she says the core is leisure. In some ways, what she’s really inviting one to do is to relinquish consumerism, to relinquish greed, to relinquish ambition, in the outer sense of it. None of which I have been able to relinquish, by the way. The idea is that leisure is a kind of openness to the world. We’re having a leisurely moment right now. We’re working in the sense that we’re having a special kind of conversation. But we purposely chose this table, this place, because we could look at the river going by and could just be here. Leisure has to do with just being. Like that line from Wordsworth: “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” But instead to just exist. There’s a quality of refusal to sign up for all the activity on the gerbil wheel, and I think many of us feel that. One of the things Blue Arabesque is about is the pace of contemporary life and the complaint we have against it. Get ahead of the game. Register early to confirm your seat in the Literary Publishing Program. Certificate in Literary Publishing June 6-10, 2011 Department of Professional Studies and Special Programs OVERVIEW of LITERARY PUBLISHING LITERARY ACQUISITIONS & EDITING MARKETING, PROMOTION & DISTRIBUTION DESIGN & PRODUCTION for LITERARY WORKS Learn to publish professional literary works and how to start or run a small literary magazine or press in a fiveday intensive Literary Publishing Program at Emerson College. Visit our website for program and registration information. FINANCE, MANAGEMENT & LEGAL ISSUES emerson.edu/ce Office: 148 Boylston Street Boston, Massachusetts Mail: 120 Boylston Street Boston, Massachusetts 02116 Phone: 617-824-8280 Jamieson: Which seems to only be intensifying. Hampl: There are also more gerbils than there used to be. The demographic has changed. More people, more speed, more people trying to get to the same place—and the place is exactly the same size that it was before. I notice that rapaciousness on the highways. They call it “road rage,” but really it’s everything rage: it’s “getting-on-the-elevator-rage.” Leisure allows you not to rush. It allows you to let the other person go first. In our world, there’s an element of delicious sinfulness in the idea of leisure. I should be working, I should be doing something. In that regard, if you can find leisure, you have participated a little bit in the supposed pleasures of the leisure class. People talk about it now, the smaller carbon footprint. It has to do with deciding what you don’t need. They say the happiest person is someone who desires nothing. I also haven’t quite signed up for that; I’ve got a lot of desire in my heart. But a little of this kind of thinking can make the difference. Jamieson: When you were working with the nun, Donnie, in Virgin Time, were you aware that she had scaled back her desires? Was that part of her spiritual practice? Hampl: Well, monastics sign up for a particular way of life, and every hour is, in a sense, spoken for. Typically, the contemplative nuns, the ones that I know, have a fantastic interest in the world, and they read a lot. People come to them. There’s an oasis quality to their life. People who live at the oasis and water the camels get to see a lot of the world go by without leaving. That’s the way they are. On the one hand, this contemplative nun doesn’t go to Nordstrom’s to see what the new clothes are, and whether the boots have square or pointed toes this season. That’s taken care of, in a way. On the other hand, she has a fantastic interest in what’s going on in individual lives and in the world. There’s a line in the Gospel when Martha complains to Jesus that her sister, Mary, isn’t helping with the clean-up and the dishes; she’s sitting there having a conversation instead. Jesus says, “Martha, Mary has chosen the better part.” There’s been much discussion in women’s and feminist circles, as well as scriptural study circles about that. And lots of jokes too. The nuns have chosen the better part. They may not be doing all sorts of things that other people do, but they also have the freedom of their minds in a way that most people don’t. We look and we say, oh my god you don’t have any kids, you don’t have sex, where’s the fun? Yet when I’ve stayed at monasteries, I’ve never laughed as hard as anywhere else in my life. I guess I would say what comes with this kind of leisure is relish, enormous relish for life. Jamieson: It seems like a misconception that there is a great loss and a great sadness associated with contemplative life. Hampl: Yes, well look at the Dalai Lama, Mr. Contemplative. He’s always smiling and laughing, almost inappropriately. Anybody not like the Dalai Lama? There’s therapy for that. He is another example of relish. Jamieson: You mentioned that your next book, The Virtue of Heresy, is about a priest who has stayed true to the Catholic Church, balancing his faith with an understanding of the flaws of the church. Hampl: Actually, the book I’m working on now is The Art of the Wasted Day—more on leisure and with Montaigne and the idea of essay-writing at its center. October/November 2010 • The Writer’s Chronicle • 25 s a r a b a n d e b o o k s Leisure allows you not to rush. It allows you to let O u t ta k e s the other person go first. In our world, there’s an element of delicious sinfulness in the idea of leisure. I should be working, I should be doing something. But I do plan to return to the heresy project. The priest in the heresy book has a kind of wry, wicked humor. I too am a practicing Catholic and curious about why I am. It connects again to this notion of being part of something bigger than oneself, or putting your faith only in yourself. In a way, I’m speaking in favor of religion instead of spirituality. I know that most people, including atheists, have no serious problem with the word “spiritual.” But the word “religion” makes people crazy. It makes me crazy too, especially at this moment in our history, which is a very different moment from when I wrote Virgin Time. We can point to a lot of reasons to get rid of religion, including fundamentalism. Books on atheism have been extraordinarily popular lately. One of them, God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, was a National Book Award finalist. It was as if a little salute had to be made to this strand of cultural thinking and passion at the moment. The idea that ridding ourselves of religion would resolve base instincts is as absurd as thinking religion can save us from ourselves. We have had a couple of major attempts at running the world with an overtly atheist polemic. The Soviet Union and the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and, of course, China. Let’s count up how many people were murdered, tortured, abused, and ruined using that as the inner engine compared to religion. I think we’ll find some parity. We have to quit thinking that if we can just do away with God, then we’ll do away with evil. Atheism doesn’t bother me. It’s a belief system. I’m an American, I believe everybody should be able to have his or her own belief system. What surprises me is the virulence, and the inability to see one’s own atheism, when it comes out that way, as being anything but another fundamentalism. Also, I don’t see that atheism has the capacity, any more than “spirituality” does, to draw people together for the greater good. In that way, I would say contemporary American spirituality, individualistic spirituality, and passionate atheism are quite alike in their inability to address our real problems, the problems of empathy and community and relationship. Jamieson: Given the invocation of religion in this current war, how can we understand that in relation to this conversation? Hampl: Religious people need to reclaim their own traditions. I belong to a faith tradition—Roman Catholicism—that is repellent in many ways, repressive and encouraging of denigration and giving nonhuman status to whole numbers of people, some of whom are in my family. I have an adored gay niece. We all have these examples. I’m furious a lot of the time. However, that means I’m mad at the family. I’m mad at the larger Catholic family. When people ask me, they seem to not understand why I would go to Mass on Sunday, why I would hang in there with this thing. But I’m an American, and most of my adult life I have not been in register with what this country has been doing with its foreign policy, but that doesn’t mean I suddenly decide I get to be a Canadian. I’m not a Canadian; even if I moved to Canada, I wouldn’t be a Canadian. If I were to pick a more aesthetically and politically appealing religion, I’d probably go to Buddhism. But that’s not the point of religion for me. The point of religion is connecting with my part of the story. For instance, I don’t think that Christianity will ever recover its sovereignty, certainly, but also its selfsatisfaction or even its honor after the Holocaust. It is Christian Europe—no matter how many history books slice it any which way—it is Christian Europe that did that deed. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t priests and nuns and plain, ordinary, churchgoing Catholics and Lutherans—think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer— who lost their lives and put themselves in enormous jeopardy to save people. They did. But still, European culture, which was largely Christian, the tradition out of which I come, is never going to recover from that terrible wrong. I wrote an essay in I Could Tell You Stories about Edith Stein, a contemplative Carmelite nun of Jewish heritage, who eventually died in Auschwitz. When she saw everything that was beginning to happen she said, “All this will have to be atoned for.” As someone born right after the Second World War, I was born into a period of atonement, whether people are actually doing any atoning or not. This, for me, is not the time to leave the ship, not the time to depart just because it doesn’t appeal anymore. On the other side of it I would say, why would I deny myself the glory of the Scriptures, the beauty of the way that the liturgical year is organized? Both of those things, both the negative and the positive, keep me in the middle. Jamieson: In The Florist’s Daughter, you write about your father’s belief in the necessity of beauty in life, how it is the “highest token of reality.” In your other memoirs, you have recounted your own faith in beauty as a transcendent force in the world. How do you see the connections between beauty and faith, aesthetics and religion? Hampl: Beauty is a much more homely thing than we usually think. I think of it as having a lot to do with our capacity to give meaning to the minute, to the hour, to the day, to the week, to the season, to the year, to the period of our lives. Charles Wright Images by Eric Appleby Outtakes marries a selection of neverbefore published sestets from Charles Wright with original design from Forklift, Ohio’s Eric Appleby. Reproducing Wright’s original manuscript—with editor’s notes intact— Appleby evokes both the emptiness and fine-grained texture of extraterrestrial space. In poems that are rueful, but never grim, we are given a meditation, a guiding of oneself consciously, gracefully, toward death. De at h O bscu ra Rick Bursky Rick Bursky is a master of dark improbabilities and essential strangeness. His poems lead askew alleyways of situation, feeling, and thought to what is original, unparaphrasable, and revelatory in these poems and our lives. —Jane Hirshfield www.sarabandebooks.org 26 • The Writer’s Chronicle • Volume 43 Number 2 Religion has the capacity to sacralize time. Particularly monotheistic religion. As a result, if you sacralize time, you have the liturgical year, and the liturgical year has enormous beauty. Not because every part of it is a festival. Some of it is about fasting, some of it is about grieving. Some of it’s about torture and cruelty. For instance, in the Christian tradition, the whole period known as the Tridium—it goes from Thursday night, the washing of the feet, into Gethsemane and the torture of Jesus, “the Passion,” the Crucifixion, through the burial, and finally the Resurrection. All have been given their due. In that regard, it’s like our lives, like an alternate image or photograph of our lives that we can look at and we can have a relationship with. To my mind, that is beauty. Not all the brocaded stuff that the Pope wears, the funny hats and the cross-dressing and all that. I like ceremony, but I’m not talking about beauty as the bells and smells in religion. I think about it as this desire to sacralize time and the ways we do that, either through language or through liturgical rites and processes. faculty poetry nonfiction fiction Charles Baxter M. J. Fitzgerald Ray Gonzalez Patricia Hampl Julie Schumacher Madelon Sprengnether In our world, there’s an element of delicious sinfulness in the idea of leisure. I should be working, I should be doing something. In that regard, if you can find leisure, you have participated a little bit in the supposed pleasures of the leisure class. Jamieson: How are you able to handle the ways in which the church goes against your politics? For instance, how the sexual abuse scandals have been handled? Hampl: I rage about it. Jamieson: And the new Pope? Hampl: The Pope wears Prada, what can I say? He does, did you see his shoes? I just rave like a maniac. It’s sort of like Thanksgiving dinner, talking about this family—I’m never coming back again. Of course there’s that which only draws you nearer. In the ’70s, I went to Czechoslovakia to write A Romantic Education, and saw people living in a totalitarian regime and yet living beautiful lives. If I hadn’t had that experience, I would not have been able to stay in the Catholic church. Because it’s a totalitarian regime, and like that regime in Czechoslovakia, real and vibrant people are experiencing Catholicism differently underneath the brittle carapace. Jamieson: I think a lot of the connotation of religion is around stricture, what you can’t do. M FA recent visiting writers Junot Díaz Nuruddin Farah Louise Glück Adam Hochschild Tracy Kidder Maxine Hong Kingston Paul Muldoon •three years D. A. Powell •urban campus Richard Powers •fully funded fellowships Claudia Rankine or teaching assistantAdam Zagajewski ships for all students •Dislocate literary journal •annual hunger benefit reading •recent graduates publishing books with Coffee House, Counterpoint, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Knopf, Milkweed, St. Martin’s, Scribner, Shaye Areheart/Random House, Simon & Schuster, Tin House, W. W. Norton Hampl: For me, there’s a great importance to the liturgical year. The nuns we were talking about earlier are never further than a couple of hours away from some of the greatest poetry in our tradition, in our civilization. The center of their lives is not the Mass, or the Eucharistic sacrament, really. In terms of sheer time spent, it’s the Jewish Psalms. Those are the greatest poetry, they have the deepest sense of rage, fury, envy, and sublime wonder. It’s an emotional ricochet through everything you could possibly feel as a human being on the planet. They live that everyday, and they read those 150 psalms in order over and over again. It’s an extraordinary drama, really. I grew up with a good touch of that in old St. Paul, which really was a Catholic town. I didn’t really know any “non-Catholics,” as we referred to them. That was everybody else. Jamieson: Another non… Hampl: Yes, I write nonfiction about non-Catholics. These wonderful holidays were taken seriously. There was Halloween, and we did all that, but the next day was All-Saint’s Day, and we had that day off. You had to go to Mass, but otherwise it was a free day, and you could eat your candy. The next day, which is November 2nd, was All-Soul’s Day, and that was the day you pray for all the dead people. There was a sense of season. Marilynne Robinson has written brilliantly about it in The Death of Adam. She has an essay about the loss of Sunday as a leisure day; the loss of the Sabbath and what that has done to us. It isn’t just the loss of free time, it’s the loss of a chance to honor our deepest humanity, which is to rest. Our deepest humanity and divinity, really, because what does God do on the final day? He rests. We deny ourselves that, and we deny our brothers and sisters that. I may get my day off, but I want to go to the mall and have somebody wait on me who’s mfa program application deadline December 1, 2010 http://creativewriting.umn.edu/ [email protected] 612.625.6366 “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” -Kurt Vonnegut BUTLER UNIVERSITY MFA PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING POETRY AND PROSE For two decades, Butler University has distinguished itself as a center for the celebration of literature and writing. The Butler University Visiting Writers Series has brought nationally and internationally acclaimed writers to Indianapolis, often on a weekly basis. Our campus is vibrant with nationally prominent dance, music and theatre programs. Please join us as we create a new home for the graduate-level study of writing in the Midwest. English Department 4600 Sunset Ave. | Indianapolis, IN 46208 (317) 940-9803 | [email protected] www.butler.edu/mfa-writing DIRECTOR Andrew Levy PERMANENT FACULTY Dan Barden Hilene Flanzbaum Chris Forhan Susan Neville RECENT VISITORS Charles Baxter Frank Bidart Michael Chabon Michael Cunningham Edwidge Danticat Junot Diaz E. L. Doctorow Dave Eggers Mary Gordon Jorie Graham Mary Karr Galway Kinnell Philip Levine Joyce Carol Oates Zadie Smith Art Spiegelman Sarah Vowell C. K. Williams RECENT WRITERS-INRESIDENCE Nick Flynn Katie Ford Jane Hamilton Mark Kurlansky Thomas Lux THE WRITERS STUDIO at BUTLER UNIVERSITY October/November 2010 • The Writer’s Chronicle • 27 Beauty is a much more homely thing than we usually think. I think of it as having a lot to do with our capacity to give meaning to the minute, to the hour, to the day, to the week, to the season, to the year, to the period of our lives. working for minimum wage. Then I’m part of the leisure class in that negative way. What tradition do you come from? and more than that, but at the same time, I feel like there’s all this other work and ferment going on— why would I miss out on that? Jamieson: I was baptized Episcopalian and grew up Methodist. Now I’m a student of Zen Buddhism. A lot of what you’re saying reminds me of Buddhism, actually. Jamieson: I’m constantly struck by the vivacity of the Buddhist monks and nuns that I know. They’re doctors, they’re veterinarians, they’re coming from engaged lives in the world, and they’re making informed choices to leave that world. I think there’s a sense, sometimes, from the outside world that, well, maybe she didn’t have anything else going on so she became a nun. Hampl: You know, all the contemplative Christian monasteries that I’ve gone to since the mid-’80s have the set-up for the Zen meditation, the mats and the pillows. They have absolutely borrowed the technique. Thomas Merton is really the marker-point. I gave a talk about The Asian Journals recently at Notre Dame. In 1968, he made an historic trip to Asia and he died over there, of course. But his trip made the big link between Eastern and Western contemplatives. The nuns that I know, the Poor Clares, will go on Buddhist retreats and have Buddhist nuns come to them. It’s so typical that it’s not even remarked on. Vipassana—they love that, and other kinds of Buddhism. They’ve had Buddhist nuns come and stay with them; they have gone and stayed with Buddhist nuns in China. I always say, join the monastery and see the world. They’ve been everywhere. These contemplatives are cultural ambassadors, going both ways. This is what I mean when we talk about the strictures of Catholicism. That’s one thing, but there are also real people living real lives. I think so much of Catholicism needs to be rapped on the knuckles important thing they can do in the MFA program is to make literary friends. What’s really important is the people who are sitting next to you and around you. These are the ones who will sustain you because the world out there isn’t necessarily going to do that. The other place is in books. You will find the people who are speaking your language. Also, it allows you to be with the greats before you feel yourself to be great, even though you have that desire. It’s very difficult for a young person to understand that it’s a good thing to have a feeling of wanting fame or greatness. It isn’t simply ambition in some kind of rapacious way. Keats talked about it, and he, of course, never got to be more than young. It’s all about having the imagination to want to do the best, to want to achieve. In a way, a writer has to want to be famous, has to want that because it’s the only way to say you want to do the best work possible. If there isn’t a reader on the end, it is rather solipsistic, the whole relationship with art or words. That relationship, that intimate feeling of connection with literary heroes, becomes a fraternity or sorority you can enter into, a brotherhood or sisterhood that you can confer upon yourself before Georgia State University Hampl: Right, it’s a very exciting life. I can say that almost journalistically, having observed it and written about it for many years now, and having grown up with these nuns. They’ve changed over time as we have. I’m also struck oftentimes by these big arguments about Muslim veils on women. In my childhood, if somebody had suggested that the nuns at St. Luke’s Grade School rip off their veils, we would have considered that terrible. An affront, injustice, a kind of assault. Jamieson: The literary hero plays a big part in your writing, whether it’s Fitzgerald, Mansfield, Whitman, Milosz, or Plath. Is it important for young writers to have literary “saints” as you have called them? How do you think the choice of these particular touchstones of the literary world has impacted your writing? Hampl: Oh, I think it has. Can you go through life without friends? I tell my students that the most Earn your creative writing MA, MFA, or PhD in in Atlanta, an international city with a vibrant literary culture, and great art, music, and food. For more information, visit http://workshop.gsu.edu. Faculty 2009–2010 Visiting Writers David Bottoms Rodney Jones Beth Gylys Alissa Nutting John Holman Natasha Trethewey Sheri Joseph Terrance Hayes Josh Russell Leon Stokesbury R. S. Gwynn Congratulations to Josh Russell on the publication of his novel My Bright Midnight Creative Writing Program Department of English Georgia State University PO Box 3970 Atlanta, GA 30302-3970 http://workshop.gsu.edu CWadAug10.indd 1 8/27/2010 8:56:23 AM 28 • The Writer’s Chronicle • Volume 43 Number 2 They say the happiest person is someone who desires nothing. I also haven’t quite signed up for that; I’ve got a lot of desire in my heart. But a little of this kind of thinking can make the difference. you get your NEA grant or your first contract. It’s a way that you can belong, it’s a very special way of reading. In fact, I would say the most important thing that happens in these writing programs is not the actual product of the thesis. I know I would pay a certain amount of money to get someone to steal my thesis out of the Iowa Library. The thesis is often not the important thing that happens. It’s the quality of mind you bring to bear on the reading. The intensity you bring to the reading. That’s the thing that’s going to make a big difference to you as a writer over the long term. Jamieson: I remember that you mentioned the fallout from writing about your mother’s epilepsy in the essay “Other People’s Secrets” in I Could Tell You Stories. Have you ever had negative repercussions from your writing about other people? Hampl: Oh yes, I’ve lost friendships, and sometimes in the weirdest way. Don’t think that you can write your way around hurting someone. Even if you want to betray your own truth. The person you think is going to be hurt won’t be, and the person it never occurred to you would have a thought about it will never speak to you again. I’ve had that experience more than once. I also had a friend break with me because I didn’t put her into a book. She felt betrayed. Czeslaw Milosz once said, “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.” Jamieson: What do you think of that? Hampl: My family had a kind of humbleness about itself. They didn’t get on their high horses. And then, of course, my mother adored the whole idea of writing, so the more I could whip it up, the better. She just didn’t like her epilepsy being mentioned, and of course that’s what I had to mention. Let’s see, what would Mother like me to not write about? Jamieson: You have referred to memoir as the “quest literature of our time” and distinguished between memoirists who write narcissistically versus those who represent the self as “communal,” as Whitman did in “Song of Myself.” Hampl: If we divide the two camps of memoirs into being based either in psychology or history, I from The Florist’s Daughter by Patricia Hampl T hese apparently ordinary people in our ordinary town, living faultlessly ordinary lives, and believing themselves to be ordinary, why do I persist in thinking—knowing—they weren’t ordinary at all? What’s back there? Back there, I say, as if the past were a location, geographic rather than temporal, lost in the recesses of old St Paul. And how did it become “old St Paul,” the way I habitually think of it now, as if in my lifetime the provincial Midwestern capital had lifted off the planet and become a figment of history, and from there had ceased to exist except as an invention of memory. And all the more potent for that, the way our lives become imaginary when we try most strenuously to make sense of them….. Nostalgia, someone will say. A sneer accompanies the word, meaning that to be fascinated by what is gone and lost is to be easily seduced by sentiment. A shameful undertaking. But nostalgia shares the shame of the other good sins, the way lust is shameful or drink or gluttony or sloth. It doesn’t belong to the desiccated sins of the soul—pride, envy. To the sweet sins of the body, add nostalgia. The sin of memory. Excerpt from The Florist’s Daughter, copyright © 2007 by Patricia Hampl, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. This material may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. belong on the history side. I’m interested in memoir largely as a feature of history, so that I’m interested in reading and writing works that somehow fill out the bigger picture. Of course, there are psychological aspects to it. Having said that, the book that I just did is most highly personal, about my family, which is inevitably psychological. However, I clung to my beliefs about memoir having to do with history by really seeing us as features of a middle-class family, in the middle of the country, in the middle of the century. That middle-ness and that ordinariness were what I was trying to reveal. I couldn’t have written it if I didn’t believe there was that bigger context. At a certain point you don’t need to write about the self. And I never did go to memoir for that purpose. I think poetry, maybe, as a young person, was a bit of that for me. Perhaps this is because I’ve always lived in the “flyover,” the place where you don’t feel that you’re significant or that there’s any history. I’ve always been drawn to history and to a sense of documentation. Jamieson: Is that why you were drawn toward memoir rather than fiction? Hampl: It’s a mystery to me because I adore fiction. And there weren’t any memoir courses, and I didn’t think of memoir as something I wanted to write. I drifted into it by accident. My first book didn’t even have the words, “A Memoir,” on it. There weren’t coming-of-age memoirs then. Now people come to our graduate program at twenty-two and say, “I’m working on a memoir.” It still surprises me. But the literary landscape has changed since I first began working in this way, and memoir has now become a “field.” Jamieson: It changed a lot because of your work. Hampl: It was an idea in the air. I was interested to hear David Hamilton say the other day that the year A Romantic Education was published, Richard Rodriguez’s first memoir, Hunger for Memory, was published. I had remembered that they came out around the same time, but I hadn’t realized it was the same year. I think what we were seeing there was a zeitgeist. A kind of cultural change that just happened and that veered off in that direction and I followed it, as many others have too. Jamieson: How do you help your students break out of a psychological self-focus in their writing? Hampl: I encourage attention, descriptive writing. Not just looking to the past, not trying to understand it, but to attend to images almost as if they were photographs, and to write those. To discipline yourself to say what you see, rather than what you feel. Let the feeling flow through the seeing. I think it’s a liberation. The way we were talking about meditation earlier. One of the things that meditation tries to liberate you from is the terrible strictures of feeling, of the emotional batting about of rage and joy and anger. Mostly anger and frustration. All that thrashing around. Describing what you see liberates you from those feelings that are strictures. They feel like your reality, but they aren’t your reality. Your reality is your ability to see and say. But we think our reality is our ability to feel. Try just off-setting that a little, and saying my truth is saying what I see. It offsets the self, just a bit. I’m so far from being able to do that in what we affectionately call “real life.” But in writing, I do AWP have a sense of the discipline of it.