Askold Melnyczuk | AmbushArts.com: online art magazine, forum, and community for artists

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ISSUE 3 | SPRING 2009

Let Us Talk About Sebald

A POGROM IN GAZA:

Fragments Around a Photograph

After the thunder: that’s what pogrom means.

And what did the thunder say?

Let us talk about Sebald. Dissect Damien Hirst. The economy. Changes in migration patterns of Canadian geese. Abatements. Compare prices on yurts. Anything. Let us talk about anything except Gaza. Emily Dickinson. Nationalizing the banks. Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. Race. Let us talk about Race. Promise me one thing: say not a word about Gaza.

You must promise, and you must keep that promise. Why? Do you really need to ask why? What must be spelled out in an age when building prisons has been a growth industry—until the collapsing economy made paying for prep schools for perps prohibitive? What happens in Gaza stays in Gaza.

In a few paragraphs a photograph will appear in place of words. But the reader must be warned: the picture may offend. Others who have seen it have been offended by its use here. It has been declared manipulative and objectifying. The individuals it shows have been declared representative rather than singular.

It’s also possible that our ability to make common-sense connections between a representation and the represented has been atrophied by over-exposure to images, as well as to theories of art and photography. Learning to “read” a photograph, we have forgotten how to see it.

This heightened sensitivity afflicts only our more sophisticated connoisseurs. Our mass media continues to protect the general public from most images of the daily atrocities inflicted by our warriors abroad. Who knows what might happen were these to filter into our consciousness on a daily basis? Only in the last months have the prohibitions against printing photographs of coffins of our “war” dead been lifted.

The death of John Travolta’s son elicited an outpouring of sympathy from compassionate souls worldwide. One of CNN’s top stories on January 9th was a video i-report headlined: Losing a Child: You can’t breathe. It featured moving stories replete with baby pictures from parents who’d lost children. Fathers and mothers described in painful detail what it felt like to hear the news, they spoke grippingly about the physiological manifestations of grief, the screaming, the seizing up of the heart. They spoke about the persistence of sorrow over years. They described turning deeper into their faith for consolation.

That same morning in the New York Times on line there was a story about Red Cross workers in Gaza discovering four children next to their dead mothers in a house the ambulances had been trying to reach for three days. They were denied access by the Israeli military. Because of berms built by the military, the ambulances themselves weren’t able to reach the wounded and they had to be taken out by donkey cart. The Times quotes the Red Cross spokesman: “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded.” They then tried to prevent the Red Cross from assisting them.

Of the over 1300 casualties in twenty-two days of Israeli shelling, some three hundred were children.

Maybe the poet Bill Knott had it right: “The only response to a child’s grave/Is to lie down and play dead.”

But why talk about Gaza? What can we do about Gaza? But what can we “do” about Sebald, Damien Hirst, or Emily Dickinson? We often talk about a thing not in order to “do” something but simply to understand it better—in order, through communion or, less portentously, by connecting with others to create a community of meaning; or, put it this way: a community where meaning, a search for meaning, remains an active enterprise. Meaning in this sense cannot be the neutered, soul-destroying, “new critical” meaning of an autotelic entity but rather what emerges when a thing—a poem, a news story, a fact on the ground—is reflected on by several people who have encountered a phenomenon they wish to understand. “Meaning” in this sense involves recognizing relationships between things: between those seeking to understand a thing, and the object of understanding, since everything exists in relationship, even those things whose primary relationship appears to be with silence.

Hermann Broch’s last novel, The Guiltless, examines the personal lives and attitudes of apolitical individuals in Austria in the teens and twenties. In an afterward to the book, he writes that it was precisely such self-absorption, such unwillingness to pay attention to public life which made all that followed possible. Political indifference, he asserts “is ethical indifference, hence closely related to ethical perversity.” He observes that one of the purposes of his book is to reveal how “the politically guiltless bear a considerable share of ethical guilt.”

Such ideas did not begin and end with WWII.

One of the most arresting, disturbing and beautiful books of poetry to appear in recent years is Kevin Bowen’s Thai Binh/Great Peace, published by Bill Corbett’s Pressed Wafer early in 2009. The collection, Bowen’s seventh, has something of the grace, delicacy, obliquity and precision of Pound’s Cathay, the way each word and every line are shrouded in their own silence. Here’s “Road to Xa Ma” in its entirety:

A trail of ants climbing

an alley wall.

Tango music drifting down

from a roof-top restaurant.

Red plastic chairs set out

by a roadside stand.

The old routes again.

Red dust crawling up.

Columns of ghost soldiers

saluting the road.

A sacred mountain lifts its head.

Nui Ba Den. Its perfect prayerful shape.

Quan The Om Tien Dieu Dai Si

The old gods and goddesses come back.

By a cave that once led to a hospital,

a young monk sits by a fire.

Beside him an old monk is making tea.

“We are speaking French,” he says.

In the far mist, the distant border forests.

Ten Bien. Xa Ma. The old jungle headquarters.

The car pushing through check points,

wipers fighting a late afternoon downpour.

By the roadside, shirtless soldiers

kick a soccer ball in the mud.

Beyond the gate, the long timbered shelters,

slanting grey trenches set in cement.

Fading sunlight filtering down trails.

Wooden markers set where generals fell.

By a spring near a clearing, a tree split in half by a bomb,

quietly growing back.

Each couplet is like the rung of a ladder, carrying our eye up with the ants to the roof-top restaurant, then down to the tree, and by implication to its deep roots, which are what allowed it to survive the bombing. Bombs, preferably dropped from places far removed from their targets, are the weapon beloved by philistines, who believe above all in the surfaces of things.

Bowen’s poem proceeds through indirection, by showing us images of surfaces, of the things the narrator encounters along the road. Yet each image implies roots in the past, in history, in an invisible world of prior events and beliefs. Red plastic chairs now stand on roads soldiers marched down; an old monk, representative of an ancient faith, speaks French, the language of the colonizers; wooden markers “where generals fell” are contrasted to the far more durable roots of the tree. As in Pound’s enigmatic “The Return”, here the “old gods and goddesses come back” too.

There are times, however, when obliquity won’t do, when looking directly at the thing itself is called for. Here too Bowen shows how language can help us to see what the naked eye itself might be unwilling and certainly unhappy to gaze on. In a poem titled "At the Tay Ninh Hospital", the speaker looks at a twenty-six year old farmer whose legs have been amputated at the knees, an arm at the elbow, eyes black holes—dismembered and blinded when his plow struck an unexploded grenade, his “body now takes the form/of the plow he once pushed.” He is neither the only nor the last victim of these afterthoughts of war, since there’s “tons of ordinance/buried in the earth like this.” The visitors to the hospital wonder: “What’s the answer?” we ask the doctor.” “’Shallower plows,’/is his slow response.”

Cathay revised by Wilfred Owen.

You often read laments of parents who would have sacrificed their own lives to save the lives of their children. What about those parents who risked their children’s lives for the sake of strangers? “Whoever destroys a soul,” reads a famous passage in the Jerusalem Talmud, “it is considered as if he destroyed and entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I wonder if that’s what my grandfather believed when he decided to hide Jewish friends during the German occupation of Peremyshl, risking the lives of his three children, his seven-year old daughter, sixteen-year old son, my twenty-year old mother, my father, and their cook? Yet the pundit Friedman, writing in the Times immediately after the massacre, found it in his heart to wonder if perhaps Israel finally succeeded in teaching Hamas a lesson.

The crimes committed in Gaza were enabled by a belief in such autotelic entities as an “Israeli” or an “American” or a “Palestinian”—as if each of those labels had any absolute meaning, as if national identity superceded common humanity. Yet these identities and these labels are deliberately crafted and cultivated, nurtured and maintained, to keep us at each other’s throats. When we lose sight of this, all kinds of criminality become possible.

We returned from spending the holidays with my family in New Jersey to the news of this Christmas pogrom. It reminded me of several conversations I had with an uncle the day before. I was telling him about traveling to Vienna to read at their Book Fair. “Vienna,” he said, wistfully. “I remember Vienna.” Over the years I’ve listened to countless war stories, and I had the sense I was about to hear another. “I’ll never forget it,” he said, staring at the wall. “Going down to the shelter under the church. American bombs dropping. My mother alternately pacing and panting beside us, breathing heavily, trying to stay calm so as not to frighten me and my two brothers. I was twelve, the youngest. My father had been arrested and sent to Siberia. Then the smell, the fires. The city smokey the whole day. I’ll never forget Vienna.”

How unlike my experience, I thought. Eventually the smoke clears, and people move on. They put their grieving behind them. Countries once proudest of their military now celebrate their painters and composers. Vienna’s huge museum complex is a model for the rest of the world.

In a famous cartoon example of gallow’s humor, we see a man strapped to an electric chair. The caption below has him saying: “This will certainly teach me a lesson.”

My father often described how, after partisans had killed a German soldier, the Nazis would retaliate by lining up ten villagers gathered at random and executing them. Ten to one, he said, underscoring the barbarity. To keep the people terrified.

Journalists and human rights workers describe the malnutrition of the children, the ruined economy, the hopelessness of the people of Gaza. These are the same people the Bush administration compelled to have an election. Then, when the people, who suffered inside the giant prison for years, chose Hamas, they were summarily told they had made the wrong choice. That came as no surprise with consequences that will play out for years if not decades.

You never really know what people will make of their experience. My uncle survived the bombing. He met my aunt when both of them were young people going to college in New York City. He later learned that she too had been in Vienna during the bombing. She was seven when the thunder spoke to her. After he graduated with a degree in international relations, they married and he went to Washington to work for military intelligence. Part of his job was helping to select targets for the U.S. Airforce to bomb in Vietnam.

We have to wonder what the twelve year-olds in Gaza have learned about the world.

Obliquity may be the handmaiden of sophistication but sometimes indirection seems not simply beside the point but downright obscene, an evasion serving only the self-regarding delicacy of the most privileged among us. The lapse into allegory and implication practiced of necessity by a Kafka is the maneuver of a man before an abyss—it is an abyss whose return we risk inviting if we deliberately adopt the same rituals. So let us for once face directly what it is we are talking about here:

Askold Melnyczuk

Boston, MA - USA

Artist statement: While fiction occupies most of my time, I’ve also written and published essays and editorials since the age of sixteen. The need to respond immediately to events of the moment is second nature.

The attack on Gaza began just as I was heading up to teach at a low-residency MFA program. Over the next ten days I don’t think the subject came up for discussion for more than five minutes—a wry crack here and there was all we could muster; there was no public acknowledgment of what was happening—I don’t of course know what kind of private conversations were held behind the scenes. I found myself steeped in an isolating horror and anger at my own silence. Was it simply that it felt awkward bringing up matters of Israeli abuses of power with Jewish friends? Was it that it made no sense for us to talk about it—since there was little we could do? Maybe. Yet it’s hard to imagine feeling a comparable awkwardness if the aggressor had been Italy or Germany or Latvia. I began writing this piece there.

There are several reasons I responded so intensely to the assault. One is that, as the child of Ukrainian immigrants, I have heard no end of stories about the brutal logic of occupation. My parents fled a city that had been divided between Nazi and Communist forces: each imposed their own form of oppression on the native population. Certainly the research that’s been done in post-colonial studies has yielded a wealth of information about the way in which colonizers almost invariably begin to dehumanize the colonized in order to rationalize away their own ruthlessness. The behavior of the British in India, Kenya, and Ireland; of the Belgians in the Congo; of Spaniards in Mexico; of Europeans toward native Americans: all suggest that the relationship invites a denigration of the subjugated. Their weakness must be pointed out to them over and again, to keep them in line.

Moreover, my engagement with Tibetan Buddhism provides me with a steady reminder of the consequences of the world’s second-oldest “occupation”: the repression of native traditions by the Chinese raises few protests among those eager to engage Chinese markets.

Now I admire the way most of my writer friends resist the glibness of political posturing. Their fear of engaging in empty rhetorical gestures, however, may also encourage a constriction of our sense of human possibility. In fact I believe awareness and subsequent concern actively create the cultural atmosphere in which we all live and breathe. Any kind of activism—from phone calls to congressmen to letters to the editor—has, from my observations, tangible effects on the behavior of our body politic. We are not as powerless as we think; neither are we as powerful as we might hope or imagine.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve not allowed ourselves to contract too far into our privileged privacy—or maybe I worry about my own inclination in that direction and that’s what drives me to comment freely about the behavior of entities beyond my immediate sphere of influence. The cover of a posthumous collection of essays by the late Susan Sontag includes a reproduction of a note to herself scribbled on a sheet of paper: do something/do something/do something.

Our imagination fails us often and too easily when we fail to recognize the interconnectedness and interdependence which are the pre-conditions of our personal sense of independence.

Finally, a trip I took with several other American writers to visit Palestinian refugee camps in the wake of Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2007, during which I had the chance to walk through one of the poorest of the camps in the company of the journalist Robert Fisk (Chatila, where occurred the massacre that’s the subject of the Academy-Award nominated movie Waltzing with Bashir) left me viscerally aware of the trap in which a stateless people find themselves. The way Palestinians have been portrayed for decades by Western media has been disturbingly one-sided. Thanks to our silence, several decades of human rights’ abuses have been committed: the assault on Gaza, with all its civilian casualties, was an escalation made possible only by our indifference. “A genuine revolution of values means…” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., “that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole…”

This piece was my attempt to register my anger at the crimes committed, to do something.

Bio: Askold Melnyczuk’s most recent book, The House of Widows, was an Editor’s Choice for one of the “distinguished fictions of 2008” from the American Library Association’s Booklist which said of it: “A big novel…about love, war, duty, honor, betrayal,history, and politics…Hard to put down and harder to forget.” The LA Times noted “Melnyczuk is a master at sustaining intrigue…a beautiful novel and redemptive in its own way.” His second novel, Ambassador of the Dead, was an LA Times Best Books of 2002; his first, What Is Told, was a New York Times Notable Book. In 1997 he received a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fellowship in Fiction, as well as the McGinnis Fiction Prize. In 1972 he founded the literary journal Agni, for which he was given the PEN Nora Magid Award in 2002: “Agni has become one of America’s and the world’s most significant literary journals.” Co-editor of From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine, he has also edited books on the painter Gerry Bergstein and the activist poet-priest Daniel Berrigan. He has published fiction, poetry, essays, translations, and reviews in The Nation, The Boston Globe, Grand Street, The New York Times, The LA Times, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, and many other places. He has taught in the Maximum Security Prison at Walpole, as well as at Harvard, and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston and in the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars. In 1997, working with PEN-New England, he established the Jeremiah E. Burke Writing Center at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester. In 2007, Melnyczuk, along with several other American writers visited Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. His essay about the experience, “Daytripping Chatila”, was selected as a “Notable Essay” in the Best American Essays, 2008.

More work by this artist:

The House of Widows

Ambassador of the Dead

What Is Told

Several works at Agni.

"The Dimensions of Silence", "And So", "Forsythia", and "Swan Song" at Ploughshares.

Interview

Last December, Israel launched a military campaign in the Gaza Strip, beginning a 23-day war that claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians, destroyed thousands of homes, and displaced tens of thousands of residents. Though “Let Us Talk About Sebald” addresses one of the atrocities that occurred during this conflict, the essay seems to be truly aimed at the human capacity for wickedness and our response to that behavior here in the United States. In your opinion, why do events like the massacre in this essay fail to provoke the average North American into political action?

Of course, little seems to provoke large numbers of North Americans into spontaneous political action without massive organizing efforts. In this case, however, I suspect the added layer of indifference has something to do with the broad ignorance, even among highly educated citizens, of the situation in which Palestinians find themselves. The general set of associations with the word Palestinian remains the label “terrorist” or “suicide bomber.” It takes work to imagine beyond the inherited stereotype.

You attended college during the Vietnam War, a time when student protests significantly affected the outcome and duration of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Since then, you’ve taught at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts. In your experience on campus and within the academic community, how has political activism among students and faculty changed since the Vietnam War?

Both students and faculty these days are much more contained, much more career-oriented, much less willing to enter into vigorous (but possibly divisive) discussions about political matters. There are exceptions. The outrage over Bush and Cheney's crimes over nearly a decade was wide enough to propel Obama into office, against most expectations. But, unlike say students in France or Spain, the students I work with here try to keep the world outside the university at bay. And I understand why, though the reasons differ from institution to institution. At a place like UMass Boston, where the population includes a high percentage of working class students and first generation immigrants (our ESL classes are bulging), students feel intense economic pressure to focus on what brought them to school in the first place. I suspect the lower cost of living in the sixties and seventies, made us less worried about what we’d do when we got out of school. The basic expenses of living in the city are so prohibitive these days, it’s a wonder anyone leaves home. Moreover, the willingness and ability of the media, to cover political events then, made more citizens aware of what was happening in Vietnam. Today hardly anyone registers that there’s still a war going on in Iraq—one we started, on false premises, and which has led to the death of over a million people, as well as the displacement of 1.5 million more. To put that in what I once called “American numbers,” pro-rating for population differences, that’s equivalent to displacing fifteen million people here. Yet Iraq is rarely in the news, beyond a page 8 article noting that another 20 or 30 people were killed by a car bomb. If that information isn’t reaching the population, then what is there to react to? Embedded journalists, no photos of returning coffins…these decisions to control the flow of information reflect lessons learned by the right wing from the tragedy of Vietnam. Celebrity culture has further debased our national consciousness, and it’s here to stay.

In your artist statement about this essay, you submit the possibility that many of us in the U.S. have “allowed ourselves to contract too far into our privileged privacy.” Do you have any suggestions for reversing this process both on a personal and community level?

You know, I’ve heard many kinds of analysis of why newspapers are failing, and of course a large part of it is due to the development of new technologies…such as the one we’re using now. But has anyone pointed out the possibility that, if the newspapers had continued giving us NEWS rather than government bulletins, many of us would have remained faithful to the medium—indeed, the energies that went into creating so many on-line sources of information were surely fueled in part by a desire to get information to people which they weren’t getting from much more conservative sources…like the so-called liberal New York Times and Boston Globe. If you compare the Globe’s coverage of Vietnam with what it did on Iraq, you see a story of principles abandoned. While I expect I’ll continue to read newspapers for the duration, I will always supplement my reading by regular visits to alternative media sites, including Al Jazeera, as well as sites like TruthDig and CommonDreams. I don’t think I need to suggest that to your readers—I suspect they’re doing it already themselves, and know plenty of sites I don’t. The new media have already helped change the political landscape—a lot’s been written about how skillfully Team Obama deployed the web. Locally, of course, one wishes schools were freer in their curriculum on current events. And of course one can always keep goading one’s self to learn more—and then to talk about what one discovers with friends. Politics need not be a divisive matter—I bet most of us would quickly agree that what we want is a society where the principles of universal human rights are actually adhered to by the government. Friends urging each other on to register their protest against government abuses of these rights can change the world—as they have in the past.

You also mention a trip you took to a Palestinian refugee camp in 2007. Could you talk a little bit about that experience and how it altered your perception of the Israel/Palestine conflict?

Traveling through Syria and Lebanon in May 2007 was a revelation. We arrived in Beirut the day a radical group in a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli took over the camp, which made it hard for us to visit all the places originally on our itinerary, but through my friend Peter Balakian I was able to connect with the great British journalist Robert Fisk (whose masterpiece, The Great War for Civilization, should be required reading for all Westerners interested in getting a better sense of “why they hate us”—of our complex and generally dastardly behavior in the ‘Middle East’) and he took two of us through Shatila, a refugee camp inside Beirut where a horrific massacre had taken place in 1982. What we saw was extreme poverty; what we learned was how cruelly Palestinians have been treated by their Lebanese “hosts.” Living in these camps, with 50% or higher unemployment rates, the residents were essentially born into prisons. Barred from working most jobs outside the camps, unable to attend public schools and thus forced to rely on UN-organized institutions with severely constrained resources, you have a population with a strong historic grievance growing up in conditions that give them absolutely no hope in the future. In Syria we visited three different camps where conditions were substantially better (Syria gives its Palestinian guests many more rights than the Lebanese allow them, for all kinds of reasons)…yet the fundamental sense you had was that the people in these camps remembered being forced out of their homes by Israeli soldiers, and none of these sixty-year old resentments had died down at all. Who thought that ignoring such a problem would make it go away? Finally, without a state to advocate on behalf of its citizens, the Palestinians in the best of circumstances in the camps still faced outrageous difficulties—they couldn’t travel, of course, because they had no passports, since they weren’t citizens…And so on and so on. What is there for people to do in such circumstances except remember better days and dream of the right to return?

Your latest novel, The House of Widows, came out last year. Could you share a little about the book and what compelled you to write it?

HOW is a novel about a man facing a moral dilemma. He has been given information about a crime—many crimes—and it is up to him to decide whether to make this information public or bury it. If he blows the whistle, he will be seen as betraying one group of people; if he doesn’t he’ll betray a whole other set—as well as his own by now shaky principles. He works in the American Embassy in Vienna, a city whose rich history lends itself to all kinds of intrigue. The book is about how the main character, James Pak, resolves this dilemma.

He does it in a way that’s quite personal, by reflecting on what he has seen of the world, and on what his own personal and family history have taught him. His father’s suicide, as well as his father’s earlier experience in the British Army, play a large role in how James thinks about his situation. His own experience includes a stint at Oxford where he had a brief affair with a Palestinian woman named Selena, as well as a meeting with family members in Ukraine who work in the sex trade…Alas, the book is not as salacious as the summary makes it sound.

As has happened with my other novels, I set out in one direction and then the book and its characters took me into another one entirely. I had originally begun it as a kind of road story about a young man traveling through Europe for the first time. Then, as I began to find out who he was, I found myself again driven to try to understand the larger forces that conspired to put him into such a difficult situation. In a way, the essential issue he’s dealing with is whether, in saving one person you invariably sacrifice another. Is that the only way to frame the matter of loyalties both personal and national? Or is there another way to approach who we are and who we might be?

Both The House of Widows and this essay seem to stress a global “interconnectedness” where silence in one part of the world can become a quiet permission for human rights abuses in another. Here in the U.S., we have the luxury of freedoms and resources that the citizens of many other countries do not. Because we are in a position to act and have the means to do so, do you feel we have a greater obligation to get involved when world affairs turn sour?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

In addition to writing fiction and essays you’re also an accomplished poet. How has your experience with poetry influenced your prose?

Ah poetry. I’m always fighting against the impulse to read prose with the ear. So much of what I respond to as a reader is the rhythm of a sentence—and yet there are many writers I love and admire, from Doris Lessing to Dostoevsky, who care less about such effects, and probably don’t see them even as ancillary delights.

As the Founding Editor of Agni, one of the most respected literary journals in the country, what were some of the decisions you made early on that you believe contributed to the magazine’s success?

Persistence persistence persistence. If I can do it, anyone can. Luck. Finding myself in Boston in the eighties and nineties when the city was, to my mind, in the middle of a great literary revival, with Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, and Seamus Heaney around and Pinsky about to arrive, and so many amazing characters already here or passing through—Susanna Kaysen, Ha Jin, Tom Sleigh, Sven Birkerts, Jumpha Lahiri, James Carroll, Martín Espada, Fred Marchant, Bill Corbett, Melissa Green, Lucie Brock Broido, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and so on. I remember meeting Richard Yates at a party, attending lectures and readings by Cheever, Mailer, Calvino and Milosz—ideas mattered to these people. Their example gave you faith. Boston was for a time quite magical and bohemian in just the way one had always imagined literary life might be, where you found yourself surrounded by people to whom literature mattered as much as it did to you. It was also, in those days, affordable. Don’t know how people without trust funds manage it these days.

But I did develop a line that functioned as a kind of guiding editorial principle: an editor’s job, as I saw it, was to enter a room and listen to what was being talked about, and try to figure out what people were not talking about, and then to start talking about that…

How has the market for literature in the U.S. changed since you first got involved in 1972?

Well most obviously the Web has changed things in ways I need not repeat to the choir. Moreover, lower production costs have made it possible for anyone, nearly anyone, to become a publisher, and when you walk into a bookstore you think nearly everyone has….It’s impossible today to get your mind around what is “out there”—maybe it was never really possible to do this, yet by the mid-seventies there were still only a couple of hundred lit mags around, and only a handful of small presses, so you sure felt like you knew what your generation was up to….Today, who would dare to claim to have read enough to offer credible generalizations? Corporate publishing has of course made a mess of the “industry”—there’s an excellent piece by Elizabeth Sifton in a recent issue of The Nation about that. The best and worst of times, always.

In your nearly four decades with the magazine, you’ve likely read more unsolicited submissions than you’d care to remember. Do you have any advice for writers when it comes to preparing a submission? Are there any cautionary tales you’d like to share?

You have to be pragmatic about this part of your life. Write your hardest, and when you’re done send the work out into the world confidently and if it comes back, go right back out there with it. Don’t agonize over rejection. Send to places you’ve been reading for a while, a few venerable places, and a few new places which seem to be doing interesting things with which you feel kinship or what my old friend Liam Rector used to call rapport. In sending cover letters, mention only relevant things like publications, and then trust the work. Don’t look back.

Whether teaching creative writing at a major university or a maximum security prison, what are you most concerned with imparting to your students?

Hard to sum it up—human exchanges are such complex and personal things. I remember I found the prisoners in Walpole in many ways more open to learning than the students at Harvard, which maybe shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did.

For my part, at the most basic level, I want to convey that this craft of writing can be developed only through intense commitment to it as a craft whose techniques are somewhere between auto and quantum mechanics. And that in pursuing it you are bound to discover things about yourself and the world around you which can help you to live more fully and feel more connected.

In your experience as an educator, what are some of the lessons your students have imparted to you?

They remind me regularly of something you mentioned above—the interconnectedness of things. I see it in their lives, when I talk to them, and then again when I read their stories. And I see it in their interest in the art of fiction, which connects them to a great practice, an old discipline, which is, as John Gardner once put it, nothing less than “an ancient mode of thought.” Their interest and enthusiasm remind me that this is a living discipline which remains unthreatened by other forms of social change, and is as relevant as ever.

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