Amy Hempel: March 15, 2010

Report by Sara Sands:

With her long, white hair framing her face, she looked exactly like the photo on the cover of The Collected Stories.

But her voice – serious but playful, frank but inviting – spoke to Amy Hempel’s power as a writer, reader, and overall master of her craft.

As the 25^th Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence, Hempel read seven of her short and short-short stories to about 200 people on Monday. The reading ended with a brief Q&A session that provided yet another means for the audience of Tulane affiliates and community members to connect to the critically acclaimed writer.

Hempel began the night with a reading of “The Harvest,” a two-part story published in her second book At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom. In both her anecdotes before the story and the story itself, Hempel entertained, engaged and amused the attentive crowd.

By her third story, “Memoirs,” a one-sentence narrative that Hempel celebrates as her “shortest published story,” it seemed as though she was engaged in an intimate conversation, sharing her secrets with a group of friends.

In addition to “The Harvest” and “Memoirs,” Hempel read “The After Life,” which was published in Playboy; “Weekend,” a story from her third book Tumble Home; and three new works entitled “I Stay with Syd,” “The Correct Grip,” and “Sing to It.” The questions that followed her reading included queries on the challenges of teaching, the importance of setting in stories, and her favorite recent reads.

During the reception, Sarah Manthey, a senior and English major, commented on just how enjoyable the reading was. “She created a very intimate atmosphere even though there were a lot of people. It just felt very natural, like she was talking to the audience.”

As this year’s Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence, Hempel joins a growing list of stellar visiting writers, including recent guests Claire Messud, Elizabeth McCracken, and Curtis Sittenfeld.

Edmund White 02/01/10

Report by Katie McGinnis:

When contrasted against the commanding power of his work, Edmund White is surprisingly genial in person. Students, faculty and community members were treated to his reading on February 1st in the LBC’s Kendall Cram Room. White read from his famous work City Boy, an autobiographical documentation of the New York gay scene in the 1960s and 70s, and then answered audience questions.

Edmund White has lived an extraordinary life, which needless to say has influenced his writings. Born in Cincinnati, he was raised in Dallas, Texas with virtually no connection to the art scene. He explained that the first published writer he met was in New York when he was thirty, and that before then he had fantastical expectations of writers. He thought them to be sacred, wealthy people who never left their limousines. However, what White proves is that writers are everyday people, with pasts of struggle, hardship, and self-discovery.

Penniless, White moved to Paris, and then to Rome. He returned to America after going broke again by “taking people out to dinner.” After this, he drove a fruit-juice delivery truck to support himself in New York until finding a job with Time Life Books. His first job as a paid writer, he said, was writing three one-thousand page textbooks on history and psychology.

The subject of City Boy is uniquely important to White. He described his first biography, My Lives, as difficult to construct because it required dividing his life into sections and drawing conclusions about choices in his life, which he often found himself unable to make. City Boy is not only an autobiography, but a sketch of a New York that has been forgotten to history. In terms of sexuality, White said, “the 80s were a total step backward.” The freedom allowed during the previous thirty years, when AIDS was nonexistent, religion lax, and society accepting, was gone in a moment.

In the years to come, many of the most outspoken members of the gay scene succumbed to AIDS, allowing a very different crowd—which demanded not just acceptance, but the rights to marriage and adoption—to take the stage. He suggested that the rally we see today for equality of marriage and family is “not always what it used to be like.” City Boy documents this, and also explores the literary fixations of New York in the 60s and 70s – when it was, White says, “a junkyard, with serious artistic aspirations.”

During the Q&A session, the author provided words of wisdom to the new generation of writers sitting before him. He expanded on a statement made during a dinner with students, when he asserted that being a writer means being a failure. White explained that “writing does not fit into normal life” and that one must “make time for it by taking away from other things.” He bravely claimed that when “a writer is born into a family, a family is destroyed.”

White also warned about the uniqueness of our literary generation: more is being produced than is being read. Aside from technological phenomena such as blogs, the tradition of the past—where friends would hurry out to read a book so they could discuss it—has degenerated into our present literary world of numerous genres produced in unreadable amounts. “The world is becoming more fragmented,” White contended, “not specialized.”

Personal Essay Symposium 10/03/09: Meghan Daum

Report by Sara Tobin:

Writer Meghan Daum opened the “Less-Than-Secret Lives” symposium on the personal essay Saturday Oct. 3 with a reading from her most recent work, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House.  The book is a collection of personal essays that explores the concept of “home” in the many places she has lived, from New York to Omaha to Los Angeles.  Daum is also the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth and the novel The Quality of Life Report, and her articles and essays have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker.   She currently lives in Los Angeles and writes a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times.

The selections Daum read from Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House focused on her parents’ background, her childhood home in New Jersey, and her life in New York City as a young adult.  Both Daum and her parents were obsessed with the myth of New York as a place full of bohemians, intellectuals, and artists, which did not reflect much of the reality of the pre-Giuliani and pre-gentrification city in the 1980s.  She manages to get out of suburban New Jersey and become a real New Yorker who loves the city, but the lifestyle leaves her with crushing debt that forces her to eventually leave it.

After the reading, Tulane Creative Writing Professor Paula Morris interviewed Daum about the art of the personal essay and its importance as a branch of literature.  Daum said that the personal essay should reveal everything about the narrator and nothing about the author, and that it should tie into something larger culturally.  She also considers her status as an outsider in the various places she’s lived as important to her work, and said that writers always have to be outsiders to see with “a fresh pair of eyes.”  When asked about the place of the personal essay in the “Age of Over-sharing” with platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Daum said that she found the unfiltered “first thoughts” people express through these mediums are “unproductive and uninteresting.”

My Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House will be released in June 2010, and Daum’s column can be found in the Los Angeles Times every Saturday.

Jonathan King visit

Report by Jonathan Magoon:

On Wednesday night, several students from Paula Morris’s screenwriting class, myself included, had dinner at Antoine’s with writer / director Jonathan King. King, known best for his first feature 
Black Sheep (2006), a sheep zombie (that’s right, sheep zombie) horror film, was passing through after screening his latest film, Under the Mountain, at the Toronto film festival. Paula Morris was able to lure King to New Orleans, en route to another festival in Austin, as she knows King’s sister. Apparently, everyone in New Zealand knows one another. [PM note #1: Rachael King is a well-known New Zealand novelist. Also: both Rachael and Jonathan have numerous connections with Bret and Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords.]

Jonathan King has a great deal of experience with both writing and directing, and he was able to share some helpful insight with us. He talked about his experience directing music videos, television commercials, and short films, all of which helped lead him to his first feature film. He has written numerous scripts, with many never ending up as films. With his writing partner, Matt Grainger, he wrote the screenplay for The Tattooist (2007). This film was originally set in Samoa and New Zealand, but when the producer found Singaporean investors, the screenplay had to be rewritten so part of the film was set in Singapore.

We also talked about the craft of story itself, and the motivating idea that provides a ground for the writer to work in. In Black Sheep, Jonathan found a broad, interesting story which he was able to develop without having to add on anything artificial, and Jonathan talked about this as the most important part of writing for film. The film needs to flow naturally, within itself (within its larger story form), rather than moving from small idea to small idea. We also talked about the challenges of writing an original story compared with adapting a novel, as Jonathan has done with Under the Mountain. [PM note #2: this is a classic New Zealand children’s book, written by the great Maurice Gee.]

The evening ended with a discussion about the current state of the film industry. Jonathan talked about how few distributors are buying much at festivals right now, and how traditional modes of distribution and acquisition of independent films or scripts have changed dramatically since the 1990s. Hollywood, also feeling the recession, is focused on remakes, sequels, and comic book adaptations, because no one wants to take risks on unproven material. As we ate an enormous baked Alaska and felt depressed, Jonathan suggested that this is the perfect time to improve or reinvent old Hollywood (or independent) methods, and that we are in the unique position to create this ourselves.

[PM note #3: this dinner was funded by my Duren Professorship. Many thanks to Newcomb-Tulane College for making this possible.]