Tomorrow (Saturday, November 21) I’ll be moderating a discussion with Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG to talk about some interesting intersections between fantasy/science-fiction and life in the big city. It’s going to be a free-floating conversation, really: We’ll talk about imaginary cities like Jeff’s Ambergris or Jeffrey’s Well-Built City, and urban planning theory—realized or unrealized—which is crucial to Geoff’s The BLDGBLOG Book. So we’ll probably hit upon J.G. Ballard at some point, and I wouldn’t mind if Mervyn Peake came up, but honestly you should just come join us and see what happens. It’ll be at the Borders at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle; we’ll start at 5 p.m. with some short readings and move into the conversation from there, and then I’m told we might conceivably go drinking afterwards.

I first heard about Laura van den Berg two years ago, when she won the first Dzanc Prize for a project she had developed to teach creative writing in Massachusetts prisons. At the time, she was putting the final touches on the stories that form her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, and, well, here we are. I’m loving these quirky stories and the women who are trying to make their way through a world that’s just like ours, only sometimes a fraction weirder, from the professional Bigfoot impersonator of “Where We Must Be” to the botanist looking for a rare flower on the shores of Loch Ness in “Inverness.” Van den Berg was kind enough to share her thoughts about one of her favorite stories in this short essay.

Perhaps it is because I’ve been reading the reviews of Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, or because I’ve been teaching her work in my classes this semester, but there are details from her brilliant short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” from the collection Like Life, that I just haven’t been able to get out of my head: that sad plastic baggie at the movie theater, Earl’s grotesque naked woman costume, the Illinois towns with names like “Oblong” and “Normal,” the earrings that stick out from the “sides of [Zoë’s] head like antennae.”

“You’re Ugly, Too has all the trademarks of a first-rate Lorrie Moore story—the dark wit, the well-observed characters, the arresting voice—but the reason this one remains my favorite of her oeuvre can, I think, be partially attributed to the way the story’s intense emotional power rises to the fore midway through the story like a jolt of electricity. For all its cleverness, the stakes for Zoë are deadly serious; her life, in respect to both her physical self and her psychic self, are at stake.

The scene I most love dissecting in my classes is the conversation between Zoë and Earl, a man she meets at her sister’s party in New York. The scene is phenomenal at rendering the tiny connections and disconnections, the coded bids for dominance, that can occur within a single conversation. And it is in this scene—which builds to a story Zoë tells about an acclaimed violinist who returns, disgraced, to her hometown and takes up with a local man who, after she commits the apparently unforgivable sin of not wanting to drink the night away with his buddies, informs her that “‘you may think you’re famous, but you’re not famous famous.’ Two famouses. ‘No one here’s ever heard of you,’” prompting the violinist to go home and shoot herself in the head—that the intensity of her rage surfaces. To tell this suicide story to Earl, a man who tries, at every turn, to keep the conversation on light and flirtatious ground, is the social equivalent of pulling a knife on him. This is the moment in which Zoë’s wit crumbles and her emotional wounds, her fury over all the injustices and humiliations, large and small, that life has thrown at her, burn brilliantly to the surface.

For me, this is the scene that makes the story, and I love it for a lot of reasons. It’s funny and volatile and it breaks my heart. This is a moment when Zoë drops the social niceties and sets herself, metaphorically speaking, on fire—a sad but also deeply compelling event to witness. It is also a human moment that I have always felt a pull toward, in my own work and in the work of others—that instant in which people on the edge decide to start burning it all down. But going beyond the story’s artistic merit, “You’re Ugly, Too” remains one of my favorite stories because it was the first work of fiction I really connected with.

Having not read much except the high school staples, I arrived at college, at the undergraduate fiction writing class I took on a whim, with no sense of what contemporary fiction looked like. “You’re Ugly, Too” was the first story we read for class and immediately I felt as though my world had been irrevocably tilted. Here in the pages of the impossibly thick anthology we had been required to purchase was an emotional reality, a way of seeing, that I recognized. Zoë and her troubles have lingered with me like a first love—perfect in its own strange way and completely unforgettable.

So, what’ve you been working on lately?

Two new musicals and a new play. Bruce Lee: Journey to the West has been a dream of mine since the mid 1990’s; I’m currently working with composer David Yazbek (The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), director Bartlett Sher (South Pacific, Joe Turner) and choreographer Dou Dou Huang (Artistic Director of the Shanghai Song & Dance Ensemble). My other musical is Pretty Dead Girl with composer Anne-Marie Milazzo (East Village Opera Company) and director Leigh Silverman (Well, Yellow Face), an Amelie-like romp about sexual fetishes and suicide. My play, tentatively titled Chinglish, is a bilingual piece about a non-Chinese businessman trying to make a deal in a contemporary Chinese provincial city.

We all know that writers can be exceptionally good at procrastinating when they should be writing. What do you typically do to procrastinate?

Come up with ideas for movie pitches.

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure that most people would be surprised to know about, be it in literature, food, music, or what have you?

Adolescent pop music (e.g., Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Lily Allen); on learning of this proclivity, a friend described me as having “the soul of a thirteen-year-old girl.” Also, porn—as revealed in my recent play, Yellow Face.

Do you listen to music when you write? If so, what’s on your iPod right now?

I can’t listen to music when I write; it’s too distracting. Based on the previous question, however, I think you already know what’s on my iPod.

What did you do this morning?

Put my wife on a plane to L.A. to attend the first birthday party of her best friend’s daughter.

(photo from UCLA’s Asia Pacific Arts)

So, what’ve you been working on lately?

Another novel—different scope and mood from the last one.

We all know that writers can be exceptionally good at procrastinating when they should be writing. What do you typically do to procrastinate?

This week I spent far too long watching YouTube clips of old Sandra Bernhard appearances on Letterman. I just couldn’t get enough.

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure that most people would be surprised to know about, be it in literature, food, music, or what have you?

I feel no guilt, have prepared no surprises. I have impeccable taste. We all do. Having said that, I really liked the movie Smiley Face.

Do you listen to music when you write? If so, what’s on your iPod right now?

I rarely write with music on—if I do, it’s to something without words. A friend gave me a CD called Work which has stuff by Arvo Part, John Adams, Luciano Cilio, and Cluster & Eno. I found I could write with it on. And I will occasionally turn on my Buddha Machine, which is a little device that plays prerecorded, lo-fi loops. But generally, music is too distracting if it has any meaning or intentionality for me. Curiously, if I’m writing at a café or some public place and there’s music on—even, or especially, music I don’t like—I can write quite happily, since I have no control over it.

What did you do this morning?

Fed breakfast to my son, then met up with my parents who were in town. Then I read a chunk of a book I have to review.

This Saturday, November 14, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop will be hosting Page Turner, its first literary festival—an all-day lineup of panels, readings, and award presentations at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena featuring a slew of great writers. I’ll actually be taking part in the festival that afternoon as the moderator of a panel on “queering the Asian-American coming of age story” with Alexander Chee, Abha Dawesar, and Rakesh Satyal, so I hope New York area-readers of Beatrice might be able to come by and say hello. In the meantime, it’s my good fortune to be able to share with you some mini-interviews with a few of the other authors who will be appearing at the festival. (Thanks to Ken Chen and Vyshali Manivannan for putting these together and sending them my way.)

Let’s start with Porochista Khakpour, the author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects. She’s one of four writers who’ll be taking part in a panel called “The New Eclectics,” which promises to be one of the funniest segments of the festival. She lives in New York City except when she’s out in Pennsylvania teaching creative writing at Bucknell.

So, what’ve you been working on lately?

Grading! Also working on my second novel, doodling some essays, trying to resurrect hopeless short stories.

We all know that writers can be exceptionally good at procrastinating when they should be writing. What do you typically do to procrastinate?

If it’s not the internet or just worrying a lot, then it’s the best case scenario: turning from one form of writing to another. I really only got into essays and creative non-fiction as a way to avoid writing my second novel. Journalism, in general, has always been my way out from fiction. Writing to avoid other writing… I keep the cheating in the family.

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure that most people would be surprised to know about, be it in literature, food, music, or what have you?

Nobody is surprised to discover my destructive love affair with the Internet. But sometimes, people are surprised about my genuine appreciation of less-than-high American culture: hair metal, bacon (especially since I’m a vegetarian!), Bubbalicious, Danzig, Gatorade, bad beer, radio hip-hop, and last but oh-so not least: Mickey Rourke. Also, I am crazy about old Choose Your Own Adventures.

Do you listen to music when you write? If so, what’s on your iPod right now?

I never listen to music when I am actually writing. But, I listen to music when I am thinking about writing. I am currently listening to Erik Satie, The Game, Bach, the most recent Metallica, and The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” on repeat. I’m all over the place; it’s probably a good thing for my next novel that I don’t listen to all this stuff when I write.

What did you do this morning?

Woke up strangely late and ate a bowl of cereal with hemp milk while worrying about stuff. Went to therapy. Worried about how I sounded to my therapist. Graded papers. Worried about my students. Went to CVS and ran into students. Worried about whether I offended them by cutting it short and also if $45 is too much to spend at CVS on basically nothing. Then, emails and more Internet-addiction quality time and some worrying about my Internet addiction. Then: afternoon. Question expired!

Here’s the opening lines from If I Were Another, a posthumous collection of the lyric epics of Mahmoud Darwish, as translated by Fady Joudah:

…As I look behind me in this night
into the tree leaves and the leaves of life
as I stare into the water’s memory and the memory of sand
I do not see in this night
other than the end of this night
the ticking clock gnaws at my life by the second
and also shortens the life of this night
nothing of the night or of me remains to wrestle over.. or about
but the night goes back to its night
and I fall into this shadow’s pit

I invited Joudah to discuss his connection to these poems, which span fifteen years towards the end of Darwish’s life, a time during which, as Joudah explains, Darwish began to feel that he had truly come into his voice… which is true, but as Joudah reveals, that doesn’t mean that voice wasn’t capable of changing even further…

It was 1983 when the great Greek poet Yanis Ritsos, introducing Mahmoud Darwish to a packed amphitheatre in Athens, Greece, first used “lyric poetry” to describe what Darwish’s art had embarked upon since an early age. But it took Darwish a few more years to believe that he has achieved a mastery of the lyric epic to a level he would not disclaim later on as he did with many of his earlier poems (and in that W.H. Auden strikes an echo). And so it was with the 1990 collection, I See What I Want, that Darwish had reached new heights with his lyric epic.

It was more than 10 years ago, while rummaging through my uncle’s library, during a visit to the UAE, that I came across Mahmoud Darwish’s most recent book then—Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1996)—and immediately fell in love with its vision of memory, myth, and place, the personal and the universal. I can’t remember whether my uncle had a second copy, or he simply let me have the only one he possessed; had he not, I would have stolen it anyway.

Subsequently I went out and bought the two thick volumes that collected Darwish’s poems from 1966 through 1992. The last two poetry collections in the second volume were sister collections, composed entirely of lyric epics: I See What I Want (1990) and Eleven Planets (1992). Thinking about Darwish’s poetic shifts over the decades of his writing, I realized a few years ago how necessary it is to compile a collection that would bring together, from 1990 through 2005, in their entirety, a master-poet’s most mature lyric epics: If I Were Another.

Darwish would later claim that Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? is the book that marked his “new works.” But it was Edward Said (in a beautiful essay in Grand Street, “On Mahmoud Darwish”) who, as Ritsos did before him, recognized an earlier shift in Darwish’s poetry. Said realized that since the beginning of the 1990s Darwish had already entered the realm of “late style,” an expression Said borrowed from Theodore Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s brilliant late works. Darwish’s artistic achievement, Said explained, was reaching beyond historical finalities, beyond the “time of ending,” and into “what happens after the ending, what it is like to live past one’s time and place.” In particular, Edward Said emphasized the brilliance of Eleven Planets, and described the “strained and deliberately unresolved quality in Darwish’s recent poetry” as “an astonishingly concrete sense of going beyond what anyone has ever lived through in reality.”

But in reality, Darwish would make another turn in his aesthetic, expand his range, and delve deeper into his late style as he came face to face with death and his deteriorating body in 1998. Mural, the book-long poem in which Darwish writes down his language “to the meter of seagulls in the book of water,” and where he engages Death in a dialogue that has become immortal literature already (and was produced for the stage, and tours the world), comprises the heart of this new translation collection. Mural merges the self with its other in a contemporized Sufi aesthetic, and places Darwish’s life-long development of the poem as theatre in full view.

Still it isn’t just the development of the lyric epic in Darwish’s poetry that I was after. If I Were Another also emphasizes Darwish’s desire for dialogue in verse, an aesthetic evident also since his youthful days. And racing time and death, Darwish had work to do still in myth and dialogue. In 2005 he published his long poem, Exile: a quartet that concludes If I Were Another, and depends on dialogue between the “I” and its feminine other; the self and its companion as they walk back and forth on the bridge of being; the poet and his ancient, poet-shadow as they converse over and about ruins, elegy and affirmation; and, last but not least, Darwish himself in a conversation with his mirror-image friend, Edward Said, about exile and identity.

If I Were Another journeys with the reader through Darwish’s numerous and illuminating transformations of aesthetic and diction. As I reread the book today I realize how I myself have become another in its midst: as translator and as poet, as one bound to the limitations of individuality in time and place and as one free of them: simultaneity and illusion.

I always have a really great time when I schedule a Beatrice party at the Slipper Room, and next Wednesday’s reading with novelists Sarah Hall (How to Paint a Dead Man) and Richard Milward (Ten Storey Love Song) should be no exception. I spent some time with Sarah last year when I interviewed her for GalleyCat, but this will be my first time meeting Richard Milward and I’m looking forward to it—I’m told he’s planning some sort of audience participation element for the event. (So get your drawing hands ready!) And, as always when we’re at the Slipper Room, there will be a musical component to the show; this time around, I was able to lure Gee Henry out of retirement for a short acoustic set.

The Slipper Room’s at the corner of Orchard and Stanton in the Lower East Side. Doors will open at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, November 4; there’s no cover charge for the cash bar. I hope you’ll be able to come!

If you read this weekend’s NY Times Book Review, you might have seen where Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits was hailed as “an absorbing, exhaustively researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in the rise of modern photojournalism.” The book had first crossed my desk a few weeks ago, and when it arrived I had been curious about what had attracted NYU history professor Linda Gordon to Lange as a subject. The answer, which I’m able to share with you now, was surprising—and proof (if any were needed) that a writer should always strive to keep herself open to possibility.

If I were a religious person I might conclude that I was commanded by some greater power to write about Dorothea Lange. One day, around 2001, I got a phone call from a friend in California asking if I’d like to write Lange’s biography. It seemed that a biographer, Henry Mayer, had been planning to write about Lange but died suddenly of a heart attack; friends of his had thought the materials he had collected should be passed on to someone who could use them—and they thought of me.

At first I said no, I’m not a biographer and I don’t know photography. I thought maybe I could help find the right person to take up the project, though, so I began to read a bit about Lange. Soon, coincidences piled up. I had been planning in my next project to write about the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s heroic response to the great depression of the 1930s, and it was the New Deal that gave birth to Lange as a documentary photographer. I had been planning to write about the west—I’m from Portland, Oregon—and discovered that Lange was a westerner and that much of her photography covered the western states, including my own. Another striking piece of serendipity: Her second husband was a scholar whose work I had pored over for my previous book (The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction), never dreaming that he was married to a major artist.

It was a deeper discovery, emotional and intellectual and political, that finally pushed me into the biography, however. Documentary photographers, I think, resemble historians, or at least historians like me. Documentary grows out of artists’ sense of social responsibility rather than the withdrawal from the world that some artists practice. The documentary mode does not usually pretend to ethical neutrality; the motive behind documentary has been to bring social problems to public attention. This fact produces a creative tension, because documentary and history both require absolute fidelity to the facts even as they are both interpretive disciplines.

But I like such tension, just as I like complexity. And Dorothea Lange was as far as possible from simple. She was by no means the saintly, self-effacing personality that many had assumed her to be, extrapolating from her photography. On the contrary: She was passionate and charismatic, driven by ambition, sometimes irritable, often demanding—yet uncommonly sensitive and generous. In short, a personality of intensity and complexity and, therefore, a particularly fascinating subject.

Next Wednesday, October 28, I’ll be hosting the next event in the Beatrice reading series at the Center for Fiction, and it’s an opportunity for me to pay a small tribute to one of my favorite independent publishers, Hard Case Crime. Over the last five years, it’s established itself as a consistently excellent source for hardboiled crime fiction, with a mix of rediscovered gems and sensational new stories (as well as some manuscripts that have been waiting decades to see the light of day), and next week’s reading is a perfect example of how its reputation was built.

It’s been a decade since Russell Atwood debuted with the private eye novel East of A, and we’ve finally got the sequel: Losers Live Longer. Peter Blauner’s Casino Moon was first published in 1994, but as Hard Case publisher Charles Ardai pointed out a while back, “I don’t think it got the readership or the attention it deserved the first time out, in part because the original paperback edition had one of the least appealing covers I can remember.” (That’s certainly been taken care of…) And, finally, Ardai is on hand to tell us about pulp master Lester Dent and Honey in His Mouth, a novel that’s waited more than half a century to see the light of day.

If you’re in the New York area next Wednesday, I hope you’ll join us at 7 p.m. at the Center for Fiction (17 E 47th St.) for a free reading; the books will be available for purchase, and you can mingle with the authors over wine afterwards.

Reading Seth Godin has transformed the way I think about not just marketing but also self-presentation, and Purple Cow has been an especially meaningful book for me in that sense, but I’d also highly recommend his most recent book, Tribes. And it was Seth that led me to Hugh MacLeod, who just published his first book, Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity, which I rank right up there with Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake when it comes to inspiration for creative writers.

I also learned a lot about online writing from The Twitter Book, where Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein lay out some basic principles that, again, helped me get a better grasp on self-presentation and finding my online voice. There’s solid info in there whether you’re blogging for a business or just for yourself.