Early Wednesday Evening at Grand Army Plaza: PEN World Voices Festival presents Boris Akunin at the Brooklyn Public Library's Dweck Center

(Video courtesy BPLVideos)

Tuesday Evening in the West Village: Elaine Brum reading at the PEN World Voices Festival Literary Safari at Westbeth

(Video courtesy PEN America)

Thursday Morning at Instituto Cervantes: PEN World Voices with Bernardo Atxaga, Randa Jarrar, Roger Sedarat, Francisco X. Stork & Cathy Park Hong

This morning we went to historic and beautiful Amster Yard in midtown to a PEN World Voices Festival

panel held at Instituto Cervantes. Titled Writing, Speaking, Dreaming: Authors Talk About Languages, this was a special program for high school students - but luckily for us, they also let in at least one PEN member who hasn't belonged in that category since the Johnson administration. The panel was moderated by Cathy Park Hong

and featured writers Randa Jarrar, an old friend whose work we've loved for years (she read from one of our favorite sections of her novel A Map of Home);

Roger Sedarat, a great poet whom we had the pleasure of working with at Borough of Manhattan Community College;

Francisco X. Stork;

and Bernardo Atxaga.

There was also the empty chair that is at every PEN World Voices Festival event to represent our writer colleagues in repressive regimes who are in prison or detention.

We're very pressed for time this week, with classes ending at one college where we're teaching and dealing with a lot of grading finals and research papers, and lots of teaching elsewhere -- so with her kind permission, we will defer to il miglior fabbro, our fellow PEN memer Lyn Miller-Lachmann.

Lyn is the author of Gringolandia, which Kirkus Reviews called a "poignant, often surprising and essential novel" and School Library Journal termed "a rare reading experience that both touches the heart and opens the mind." Here's Lyn's report, far better than anything we could come up with, from her blog at the PEN website (she has reports of other Festival events that are equally wonderful):

The 30 or so students from Enterprise, Business, and Technology High School in Brooklyn got stuck on the L train but arrived just in time to join a group from Fox Lane High School in suburban Bedford at a panel of authors who grew up speaking and writing in multiple languages. The students—all English Language Learners from China, Nepal, Yemen, Ecuador, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic—heard the perspectives of immigrants and the children of immigrants, those whose home language was suppressed, and those who have sought as adults to embrace the language of their parents.

Moderated by Korean-American poet Cathy Park Hong, the panel titled “Writing, Speaking, Dreaming: Authors Talk About Languages” included novelist Randa Jarrar, the daughter of an Egyptian father and a Palestinian mother; poet and translator Roger Sedarat, the son of an Iranian father and a U.S.-born mother; novelist Francisco X. Stork, the son of Mexican parents whose Anglo stepfather adopted him and brought him and his mother to the United States; and the Basque poet, novelist, and essayist Bernardo Atxaga. Although the focus of the program was language, bicultural identity was an important theme for both Sedarat and Jarrar.

After giving the young audience a taste of their writing, Jarrar, Sedarat, Stork, and Atxaga described their experiences as outsiders. Texas (my home state) proved an unwelcoming place for Jarrar, Sedarat, and Stork. Stork talked about how Mexican-American students in his El Paso school faced corporal punishment for speaking Spanish; it made him feel as if his own language was “not worthy of being spoken.” Even now as a writer, he feels the need to demonstrate his mastery of English.

For both Jarrar and Sedarat, the exclusion was as much political as linguistic. Sedarat attended school at the time of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Jarrar during the First Gulf War. They had the names, faces, and languages of “the enemy.” Bullying at school and death threats over the phone made life difficult and even dangerous. Sedarat’s parents discouraged him from exploring his Iranian identity, which led him to explore it with increasing passion and vigor. His journey to find himself eventually took him back to Iran and to the awareness that he belonged to two worlds but would never be a full-fledged member of either. For Jarrar, writing became her way of fighting back against invisibility and exclusion.

Atxaga’s experience of two languages may have occurred in fascist Spain, but his experience of oppression paralleled that of the three writers who grew up in Texas. (As a native Texan, I’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions.) During his nearly forty-year regime, dictator Francisco Franco sought to eradicate regional languages, such as Basque and Catalan. One day, a policeman caught Atxaga’s mother speaking Basque in a supermarket and ordered her to speak only Spanish, because “we are in Spain.” Since the speakers of these languages were often some of the most ardent opponents of fascism during and after the Civil War, Franco’s agenda was clearly political as well as linguistic—to wipe out the language was a way of wiping out resistance. Atxaga’s writing in Basque became his way of asserting his resistance.

All of the panelists agreed that being different, being an outsider, makes one a natural observer, and the ability to observe closely, to see things other don’t see, is the essence of great writing. They sought to inspire their audience of students struggling to learn a new language; for each of them, having two languages has proven an advantage. Sedarat considers himself a literary emissary, picking up the style and themes of literature of one country and bringing them to another. Stork’s ability to express himself in Spanish allows him to explore and express emotions that would be difficult to describe in English.

Each author encouraged the students to write their own stories. Jarrar wrote the book she wished she could have read as a teenager. Sedarat sees writing as a way of clearing up stereotypes, and Stork added that through his novels, he rights the wrongs he sees in society, most notably changing the image of Latinos by means of characters with whom readers can identify. Axtaga and Jarrar cited recent English-only laws in Alabama and anti-immigration laws in Arizona, respectively, as two wrongs that call for a response. And moderator Hong had the last word, reminding the audience how they can fight back against the injustices in their lives through writing, and they can make their voices heard.

- Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Thanks to the panelists and especially to Lyn for that eloquent and elegant report.

Late Tuesday Afternoon in SoHo: PEN American Center Annual General Meeting

At 5 p.m. today we were at the SoHo offices of PEN American Center for our annual general meeting of members. We got the privilege of joining PEN American Center in 1982, when the publication of our second hardcover book passed muster as the second of "two books of literary merit" required of members back in those days. (We are members not only of PEN American Center, the largest of the nearly 150 PEN centers around the world but we also belong, from our Arizona home, to the Los Angeles-based PEN Center USA made up of writers west of the Mississippi.)

This was actually our first general meeting. Of the 3,400 professional members (writers, translators and editors) and more associate members, there were at most 60 or 70 members present today. We assume that like most organizations of its kind, PEN American Center needs to have an annual general membership meeting, and although much of the work of the meeting is the formality of announcing the result of our election of officers and trustees, it was great to feel a part of the organization and hear some interesting stuff about the wonderful work it does, both in the U.S. and on behalf of writers all over the world where freedom of expression is under siege. Its publications are also invaluable.

PEN American Center Executive Director Steven L. Isenberg and President Kwame Anthony Appiah welcomed members and introduced a score of people on the Center's staff, whom we've always found to be amazingly hard-working, dedicated and helpful.

Anthony said that it had been "a very exciting year" for PEN: "We searched for and found a great new Executive Director, Steve Isenberg; we worked hard and in new ways to support Liu Xiaobo and other writers in prison around the world; and we created another acclaimed and well attended World Voices Festival." He then called upon three members in the front row who were the proxies in the election, and they in turn announced the results, which were not a surprise, since everyone ran unopposed, we think, but can't recall because we voted by mail weeks ago.

Anthony Appiah was re-elected to a second (maximum) one-year term as President. Also reelected were Laurence J. Kirshbaum as Executive Vice President; Jessica Hagedorn as Vice President; Maria B. Campbell, founder and director of an international literary scouting agency, as Treasurer; and our friend Roxana Robinson as Secretary. Victoria Redel was newly elected to Vice President, taking the place of A.M. Homes, whose term on the board was up. In his second year, Anthony said, he hopes to expand PEN’s campaigns to protect freedom of expression, win new financial support, and increase the visibility of PEN in the literary world and beyond. He also hopes to lead PEN through "a strategic review" of everything it does; the last one was six years ago.

Also re-elected to PEN’s board of trustees were Ron Chernow, Beth Gutcheon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, Jaime Manrique, Claudia Menza, Michael F. Moore, Steven Pleshette Murphy, Susanna Reich, Esmeralda Santiago, John Oakes, Walter Pozen, Hamilton Robinson, Jr., Elissa Schappell, Annette Tapert, Lynne Tillman, Monique Truong, and Danielle Truscott. Wendy Gimbel and Hannah Pakula were newly elected to the board.

Steve Isenberg then spoke about the annual fiscal report for the 2009-2010 year (he took over as executive director after the year had ended last June 30) and discussed how PEN American Center deals with the challenges of these hard economic times for everyone, which has made life difficult for all organizations dependent upon fundraising. He spoke about the many wonderful programs of the Center and then intoduced two directors.

Larry Siems spoke about the Freedom to Write Committee. In a bleak year for freedom of expression around the world, with outrageous like the continued imprisonment in China of Liu Xiaobo, Larry spoke about some successes: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton signing orders effectively ending the exclusion of Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan from the United States and the releases, under international pressure by PEN and others, of journalist Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, who had originally been sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, and Ilham Tohti, a member of the Uighur PEN Center who was detained in Beijing during the unrest in Xinjiang Province.
Caro Llewellyn gave us an exciting preview of the coming PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, of which she's director. There's a lot we can't talk about right now due to a press embargo, but we'll just say that we wish we could go to almost every event and you probably will, too. (Too bad we have to work.)

Paul Aiken, executive director of The Authors Guild (we've been a member of the Guild since November 1978, when we were eligible upon signing our first book contract), was our guest speaker. We thought he'd talk about the Google Book Settlement (which we support) but instead he spoke on e-books and the future, concentrating on the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad and their different models for publishers and authors. None of it was news to us (we read the excellent blog eBookNewser from MediaBistro) and we felt Paul demonized Amazon.com a little too much and treated Apple as a corporate savior for authors and book publishers, but that seems to be standard these days.

As Paul had to rush off to a parent-teacher conference, Anthony and Steven wrapped up the meeting asking for questions or comments.

One longtime member, active in the women writers' group, discussed issues of older writers who are not as technically proficient and who may not, as she does not, have a computer but who are still good working writers. We sometimes forget there are a lot of people who make valuable contributions who are not online; she probably spoke for other members present, some of whom were even older than us.

Soon the meeting was formally ended and the PEN members started enjoying the food and drink present and chatting informally.

Forgive our usual horrrible blurry photos. Although in recent months, pics from this blog have been taken by websites of Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice, we are obviously ten times the writer that we are a photographer (not that that's saying much).

Speaking of better writers, they opened the box of brochures for this year's World Voices Festival and distributed them to the members.

It was really thrilling to see who'll be coming from all over the world to speak this year. Some of our favorite writers will be there; this very term we're teaching the work of an American writer we love who'll be giving the fifth annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture and there's a panel for high school students that features two of our friends that we definitely plan on attending.

We'd love to be the first to announce this year's PEN World Voices Festival schedule of events and participants, but Caro Llewellyn has sworn us to secrecy until Thursday's official unveiling of the schedule at the big announcement for the press at Instituto Cervantes.

But it looks to be the best PEN World Voices Festival ever, and it's one more reason we've been delighted to pay our annual dues for 28 years as a member of PEN American Center.

PEN World Voices Festival: Small World, Big Changes, a program for high school students

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Friday, May 2, 2008:

PEN World Voices Festival: Small World, Big Changes, a program for HS students


Small World, Big Changes: A Program for High School Students began a bit later than its scheduled 10 a.m. start time due to problems in the subway system which caused various participants and audience members to be delayed. (I was grateful for this, since I'd never experienced a half-hour ride on the L train from Williamsburg to Union Square before this morning and was late myself.)

This event was co-sponsored by the Consulate of Spain and held in the Manhattan branch of Instituto Cervantes, the amazing organization started by the Spanish government in 1991 to promote the study and the teaching of Spanish language and culture. The Instituto's basement auditorium where the panel took place is below Amster Yard, that rare public Manhattan courtyard garden tucked into the middle of a block. I hadn't been there since 1974, when I discovered as a haven for a Brooklyn College MFA student working six hours a day as a midtown messenger for The Village Voice.

With students from the High School for Public Service, Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies and High School for Social Justice making up most of the audience, I sat with Laban Carrick Hill and a couple of other people of a certain age in a front corner as Stacy Leigh, Director of PEN Readers & Writers, our literary arts enrichment program for underserved students and schools, went to the podium onstage.

Stacy noted the empty chair at the table for the panelists, representing one of the persecuted writers of the world, was for scholar Lin Jinhua, Executive Director of the China Development Strategy, arrested in April 2005 on charges of "leaking State secrets" to a Hong Kong based-reporter. After a secret trial lasting only 90 minutes, Lu was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison and is reportedly being held incommunicado in Beijing City jail.

Then Stacy introduced the panelists:

Marina Budhos, author of Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers and several novels, including the recent Ask Me No Questions, named one of ALA's Best Books for Young Adults 2007;

Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie and Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion, awarded the American Book Award;

Patricia McCormick, author of My Brother's Keeper, Cut, and Sold, winner of the Quill Award for Young Adult/Teen literature in 2007;

Pam Munoz Ryan, the 2007 Author Recipient of the National Education Association's Human and Civil Rights Award, whose more thirty books include the bestselling Esperanza Rising and Becoming Naomi Leon; and

Jutta Richter, award-winning German author of more than twenty books, including two books translated into English, The Cat: Or, How I Lost Eternity and The Summer of the Pike.

Marina, the panel's ringleader, then had each author go to the podium and discuss their work and read a short excerpt from one of their books.

Michael discussed being one of eleven kids in a family in the South Boston housing project growing up – or not, as several of his siblings died from poverty-related illness, suicide or violent crime – in a culture controlled by the Irish Mafia in a neighborhood culture of welfare, drugs and dysfunction that I'm sure some of the kids in the audience could relate to, although they might not have expected that white kids like Michael had experienced.

He talked about how, in writing his memoirs, he broke the neighborhood's code of silence surrounding conditions in Southie and how death threats necessitated his leaving the area that he still loved because the flip side of the area's insularity was a solidarity and sense that everyone there was connected.

Michael read a section of Easter Rising about his first, grudging visit to a Beacon Hill psychotherapist, to whom he'd been sent by the doctors tired of his coming to the ER with symptoms that had no physical cause; this was immediately after the violent deaths of two of his brothers. It was a beautifully-wrought passage as the young Michael struggles to tell the therapist about his siblings' deaths, telling her he'd "gotten over it" when clearly he hadn't.

Patricia then got up to talk about Sold, her novel about child trafficking, an issue she discussed in some detail, telling how destitute rural families in developing nations unwittingly sell their kids into sex slavery thinking that they are making a better life for them in the big city.

She discussed her experiences talking to girls in Indian brothels who are locked in rooms, drugged, beaten and raped several times a day. As became clear in the Q&A session later, a number of the students had read Patricia's book. I could tell some were really affected by some of what they'd read and heard by their comments after the event.

Patricia closed by reading a passage from the novel in which her 13-year-old Nepalese protagonist Lakshmi, sold and forced to work in a brothel, envies an 8-year-old "David Beckham boy" (he wears a T-shirt with the soccer star's picture on it) who goes to school and can actually read the books she so desperately wants to.

Next up, Jutta said she started writing at 15, when she was a German exchange student in the very unfamiliar culture of Detroit, where the family she stayed with would not let her read or listen to German and the only way she could access her native language was by writing it herself.

The students were impressed that Jutta managed to get this early book published when she returned to Germany. She read a passage from The Cat, or How I Lost Eternity, featuring a young narrator always yelled at for being a lollygagger and late for school. Each day she gets waylaid by encounters with a cat who is as willful as she is and who seems to have a clever retort to all of her comments.

Pam, at her turn at the podium, discussed Esperanza Rising as a fictional retelling of her grandmother's childhood riches-to-rags story as she immigrates to California with her brother and their mother, a Mexican patrician fallen on hard times. She also discussed some of the reaction to her book that she didn't expect: because Esperanza's family doesn't take part in the strikes among migrant agricultural workers, union members were upset with her.

The passage she read was one in which Esperanza boards a train, not in the first-class cars she's used to, but in one filled with "peasants" she doesn't want to associate with. On a train ride in which the girl experiences a world of poverty she'd never seen up close before, Esperanza begins to understand by the end that she and her family are no longer rich but are themselves "peasants." When she sees rich people ignore a crippled Indian woman beggar but a poor woman who has befriended her mother give the beggar something, Esperanza learns that "the rich take care of the rich and the poor take care of those who have less than they do."

Finally, Marina got up to discuss Ask Me No Questions, the story of two sisters from Bangladesh growing up in post-9/11 Queens as undocumented immigrants whose father is arrested and detained in the anti-Muslim hysteria after the World Trade Center bombing.

Marina read a passage in which her protagonist Nadira learns how to "forget that you don't really exist here." At Flushing High, with a large population of immigrant students from Bangladesh, China, Korea, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, the policy is "Ask me no questions" (still true today, according to my friend who teaches English there who has repeated what Marina said the teachers in her novel say: "We're not the INS") – but it's also clear that sometimes young girls want to ask questions.

After Marina put a couple of questions to the panelists – about balancing their desire to teach the world about young people's experience with injustice and their need to create art; about doing research and whether it can ever hamper a novelist or memoirist – the kids in the audience and a teacher or two got to ask their questions.

They asked the writers how they handle a bad day when they don't find writing easy; how they react to criticism of their books; how they balance feeling hope and feeling despair; whether they feel differently about their books when they read them after publication; what they like to read when they're writing their own books; what they do to keep readers interested; and what motivated them to start writing in the first place. The answers from various panelists were honest and insightful.

As someone who's taught urban high school kids (one year in Phoenix was all I could manage) and community college students, I know that two hours can be a long time for teenagers, especially some boys, to sit quietly and listen passively. But the audience members were exceedingly polite and quiet and for the most part seemed interested (although I noticed several had fallen asleep at various points and the boy behind me muttered, "Boring!" during one of the more convoluted answers to the discussions).

This was a worthwhile event although as a teacher, I guess I would have liked more audience involvement a bit earlier. In some ways the focus was a bit too much on the authors and not enough on the kids – many of whom, I'm sure, have their own stories to tell.

Also, some things can't be taken for granted when you talk to young people. For example, Pam offhandedly mentioned her book "about Marian Anderson" (it's When Marian Sang: The True Recital of Marian Anderson) without explaining who Anderson was. I would be very surprised if many students – who probably have a hard time saying exactly when the Civil War happened – had ever heard of Marian Anderson or knew her story.

But then, I am pretty sure none of the twentysomething hipster novelists in New York whose readings I attend have heard of Marian Anderson either. Maybe they need to read a few more books?