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Writers and Occupy Wall Street: A review of Reading + OWS Discussion

What do raps about the working class, Shakespeare monologues and stories about the south have in common? What responsibilities do writers have within the OWS movement?

On Friday, November 4, New School Riggio Writing and Democracy students along with friends gathered to find out during an event entitled Reading + OWS Discussion While the Reading is a regular event, the discussion about Occupy Wall Street was added as an acknowledgement that the movement is impacting lives.

Archive by Mario Alberto Zambrano
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Book Review: Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Midway through Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, she recognizes tone as though it were a found object held in her hand— a photograph of her daughter Quintana Roo, who died in 2009. It’s not stoicism that keeps her from staring at it but more of a kind of nimbleness (or agility?) of mind, flipping through a book of sketches of when Quintana was three years old, of when she got married—the stephanotis woven into her braid—and ultimately, when she passed away.

Archive by Mario Alberto Zambrano
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We The Animals, Book Review/Interview – by Mario Alberto Zambrano

Justin Torres is the author of We The Animals. His stories have appeared in Tin House, Granta, Gulf and Glimmer Train, along with other publications. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

He will be giving a reading on Monday, September 12 at 6:30 pm at The New School, moderated by Jackson Taylor, associate director of the School of Writing.  Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, room 510

As you begin reading We The Animals by Justin Torres it’s as though you hear a voice speaking from a lowly-lit room, lips close to the mic, beating out rhythms of familial images, both beautiful and grotesque, with a drumbeat at the end of every phrase, like rock-n-roll, like the wheels of a locomotive proving the force of its momentum: “We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of forks against the table, tapped our spoons against the empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riot.”

The narrative propels us with the voice of a sincere boy, the youngest of three brothers, son to a white mother, most of the time exhausted between graveyard shifts, and a machismo Puerto Rican father referred to as Paps. “Mutts,” he says to his boys. “You ain’t white and you ain’t Puerto Rican. Watch how a purebred dances, watch how we dance in the ghetto.”

It’s a slim book, less than a hundred and fifty pages. But even so, verse and metaphor are so precise, so well stitched that there aren’t any loose threads for meandering prose. We veer our attention towards the depths of how the story holds, not so much with length but with a sense of connection. One feels it when coming to the end of a sentence, when meaning punctures the semblance of human condition and a mirror is raised. You see yourself–I saw myself–and herein lies Torres’ gift, his economy of language that when strummed hits emotions with indomitable pitch. He’s a sort of Leonard Cohen capable of telling a round emotion in a single lyric.

But the issue of length also relates to a matter of time, like when one is swept up when seeing someone at first sight. If the connection is strong enough, well, you sense something immediately. But more often than not it takes days, weeks, to feel as though something has gone past the skin, straight to the heart; that’s when the undeniable attraction and connection is felt.

This book does that in an instant.

But it’s also in this instant where I feel it hesitates, where a few more pages (a little more time) would’ve offered a deeper connection or a longer affair with the reader. The intimacy and openness of the main character doesn’t resist sharing familial relations or sexual fantasies. He soon escapes the room he’s invited us into, almost as if he tells us his name, shows us a bruise, smiles innocently and then runs out the door — leaving us wanting to know where he’s off to. Because of this reluctance (in allowing us to stay with him), the tension never breaks and we are left curious from one page to the next.

Torres knows what he’s doing; we never cease to pay attention. The amalgam of curiosity and compassion elicited is what makes the novel one of the most tender pieces I’ve ever read. His chapters are confessions of the most pure and dangerous experiences told from a young boy, and it hardly bleeds, hardly needs to. The pages are sore and bruised with an honesty that escapes its own brevity, ending with a subtle and unexpected brilliance that is nothing less than inspiring.

*Please continue here for the interview:

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Archive by Liz Axelrod
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Rough Cuts, End Thoughts and Poetry – Liz Axelrod

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it. – Ernest Hemingway

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper. – T.S. Eliot

Every disappointment is an opportunity in disguise. You’ll overcome this and move on to better things. This is what your friends tell you when you get those awful declines and rejections. Yes, it may be true and yes it may help to soothe the deep hole under the diaphragm that gets larger with each rejection letter, each ending, each failed appointment, each time we’re told, So sorry, yes, you were excellent, but there were others before you, better candidates. Yes, you’re at the top of the list, but we only have so much room. Try again next year.

I ask myself each time I’m rejected by a literary journal, magazine, an online outlet, a reading series, the school I love, the men I want to love— Why continue? Why not just give up and settle?

But this is what scholarly pursuits, writing, and I suppose even life is all about—Blind 
submission, acceptance, rejection, not-so-blind submission, rewards, and then some more rejection.

Since I read my first book and put my first words on the page (in red crayon) I’ve been on this path of exquisite torture. For every success, for every featured reading and published piece, there are seventeen rejections. A professor once told our class she papered her bathroom wall with her rejection letters. She’s got two published novels now and a slew of awards, so I guess the effort was well worth it. But how do we continue to find the courage to put ourselves out there and keep from falling into the pit of desperation and despair? How do we handle the fact that this is a solitary effort and maybe only a handful of our contemporaries have even an inkling of understanding the pressure? I’ve written way too many poems about why I drink too much, and my self-medicating habits don’t even come close to some of my fellow writer friends. There are days I just throw my hands up in the air and want to scream when the words won’t come, and days when I just sit and stare at the blank page, eyes and fingers crossed…

However, this is not about success or failure, it’s about lessons learned, and the will to go forward. It’s not about intelligence, ego, jealously, or empathy. It’s about shared experiences with fabulous, talented professors and fellow students, and mostly, it’s about growth. Our 12th Street team grew tremendously over the past two years and two issues. We sat at the table together and drank wine, poured over submissions, devised our strategy for the journal, and then worked to create the best undergraduate literary journal in the country (as awarded by AWP this year!). We have much to be proud of and will be leaving a strong legacy to uphold.

Real writers never settle (though we do tend to overindulge). We polish and perfect, re-write and edit, beat ourselves up over syntax and language, cry over misprints and typos and then start with a fresh clean page. So, with this in mind, I’m writing my farewell letter as Editor-In-Chief of this website and as Managing Editor for the last two issues of 12th Street Journal. My years at New School in The Riggio Writing & Democracy Program have whittled me down to a fine tuned, open mouthed, well honed, Honors Graduate and yet I still feel unfinished, in need of strong cuts and edits. I’ve been trying to take some time for growth, give space for new opportunities and learn to see just where those cuts and edits make the most sense.

The new team is getting set to take over and I’m getting set to let go, but first, I want to present you with a taste of what we came out of the program with. Following are poems by 2011 Riggio Graduates – Sylvia Bonilla, Rebecca Melnyk, Luke Sirinides and me. We all possess creative strengths and weaknesses, we all owe much to the Riggio Program, to the concepts of Writing and Democracy, to our shared experiences, rewards and disappointments, and we will all move forward in the writing world in our own individual forms.

To the next group coming on board this fall, I offer my warmest wishes for a wonderful learning experience, a shoulder to lean on when the going gets rough, and my support, encouragement and aid wherever and whenever needed in order to continue this most worthy and excellent endeavor.

Always be a poet,  even in prose – Charles Baudelaire

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Archive by Liz Axelrod
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Lynne Tillman: Imagination, Art & the Internet

Interviewed by Liz Axelrod, Editor-In Chief

“She could do with her body what she wanted, everyone knew that; the body was just a fleshy vehicle of consequences. Her mind was virtual—free, even, to make false separations”— From “The Substitute” a story in Lynne Tillman’s latest collection, Someday This Will Be Funny.

As a New School Professor, Lynne Tillman brings a fresh angle to her courses. In her close reading seminar, students look at writing from many different angles: through the camera lens, via the film director’s eye, and into the novelist’s vision and writing process. As a fiction writer and essayist, Ms. Tillman’s work brings to mind freedom of expression, masterful creation and a love of language. Tillman’s novels include No Lease on Life, Cast in Doubt, Motion Sickness, Haunted Houses and American Genius, A Comedy. Her first collection of short stories, Absence Makes the Heart was followed by The Madame Realism Complex and This Is Not It. Her nonfiction work includes The Broad Picture, a collection of essays that were originally published in literary and art periodicals, The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967, and The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.

Lynne Tillman will be reading from Someday This Will Be Funny at the 12th Street Online Launch at Barnes & Noble on Thursday, March 31 at 7:00 p.m., and discussing writing and media with Ross Kaufman, an Academy Award Winning documentary producer whose short film “Wait For Me” can be found by clicking on the Audio and Video link above.

12th Street Online crafted this interview over the internet, via email.

12th Street Online: You’ve studied theories of different media, such as film and photography, as well as writing. How has that affected how you approach the scope and scale of your work?

Lynne Tillman: All art forms have specific materialities, problems –scale, for instance, in a photograph, framing in both film and still photography. Painting is usually done on a flat surface, in a rectangle or square. Then there’s color, positive and negative space. Questions of time exist in all forms. So, thinking about these questions in various art forms and practices, I might subject my writing to them; I can borrow or steal an idea and try to adapt it, or be helped by ways visual artists have made their work. Other imaginations soothe me, and spark my own.

12th Street: Do you find that your stories favor certain “styles”—narrative distance from the subject, pace, length, time-frame, genre, etc., or does the style vary depending on the story?

TiIlman: I try to find a shape or style that fits the story I’m telling. But the story I’m telling necessarily develops along with the way it’s being told. Usually I have no idea of how I’m going to write it. I’m hoping to find it as I proceed, word by word. I consciously try to come up with ways of approaching a story that challenges me, in any way I can, mostly to keep myself interested.

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