Billy Collins, Pete Hamill, Philip Levine, Bernice L. McFadden, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead, many others at the 2012 Brooklyn Book Festival

Jonny Temple, Edwidge Danticat, Paul Auster, Pete Hamill at Brooklyn Book Festival
Photo: Joann Jovinelly

More than ten thousand booklovers reportedly attended the seventh annual Brooklyn Book Festival, which packed readings by 280+ authors onto more than 100 panels between 10 AM and 6 PM on Sunday, September 23. While all the readings were free, multiple concurrent events meant no one person could attend more than seven or eight, fewer if you cared to patronize any of the 100 outdoor stalls hosted by publishers, authors, journals, and associations in the square outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz annually awards the “Bobi,” the Best of Brooklyn, Inc. Award, to an author whose “outstanding contributions to literature reflect the spirit of Brooklyn.” This year’s recipient, Pete Hamill, joined previous winners Paul Auster, Walter Mosley, and Edwidge Danticat in participating in the festival.

“Brooklyn is my Old Country, my true home place,” said Hamill, in accepting the award, “the place that shaped me, the place where I learned to read, to listen, to fill myself with visions. The place of music and laughter and decency, punctuated now and then by tragedy. I will carry that Brooklyn with me to my grave.” Asked at a panel where the ideas for his novels came from, Hamill replied, “Anywhere. Walking the dog or overhearing a conversation on the street.” If you read the notebooks of Henry James, Hamill observed, that’s what you will find. “He wrote down something that happened during the day. Then he would explore possibilities. What if the person were a woman rather than a man?”

Many other authors had advice for aspiring writers during Q&A’s following their readings. The “Fiction Triumvirate” panel at cavernous St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church featured authors Bernice L. McFadden, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colson Whitehead. Reading from her story “Black Dahlia & White Rose,” Oates imagined monologues from two aspiring actresses, Norma Jeane Baker and Elizabeth Short, victim of one of California’s most infamous, unsolved murder cases. “How is it that one person becomes Marilyn Monroe and the other becomes the Black Dahlia? That gets to the heart of the great mystery, the phantasmagoria of our existence.”

Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead, Bernice L. McFadden at Brooklyn Book Festival
Photo: Kathryn Kirk

McFadden read from Gathering of Waters, her novel based on the gruesome 1955 murder of Emmett Till. In response to the question “what was the most difficult part of writing,” McFadden replied, “I don’t have a linear process. It’s very spiritual. I know when the end is coming because I get very emotional. Then I have to sit down and work it all through.” Oates, by contrast, said that she “has to get the last line first.”

Whitehead published his most recent novel, Zone One, a year ago, which may explain why his “reading” was more performance art. He intoned the book’s first line, “He always wanted to live in New York,” four times—each time breaking off to riff on the agony of writing (“If you remembered what it was like, you’d never do it.”) , his wife’s reaction to his novel, Sag Harbor (“I liked Lila Mae in The Intuionist better.”), seeing Clockwork Orange at age eleven, and the mystery of R2D2 (“The first Star Wars had the Death Star, light sabers, and hyperspace but couldn’t give R2D2 a voicebox?”) until he was out of time. When it comes to his work habits, however, Whitehead described a very structured routine: “I work up on an outline and plot an assignment for each day, from beginning to end, so I know where I’m going.”

Other panels also offered privileged insights into an author’s work. The “Poets Laureate Past and Present” panel featured Billy Collins (U.S. Poet Laureate 2001–2003), Philip Levine (U.S. Poet Laureate 2011–2012), Tina Chang (Brooklyn Poet Laureate) , and Ishmael Islam (New York City Youth Poet Laureate). After reading his poem “The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska,” which begins “Too bad you couldn’t have been here six months ago,” Collins noted that when poet Howard Nemerov was asked to make up a word to “fill a hole in the language,” he came up with the verb “to azaleate,” meaning “to commiserate needlessly with some visitor about a local natural phenomenon that they either missed because they arrived too late or will miss because they are leaving too early.” Collins then confessed, “I couldn’t have written my poem without that word in the background.”

Levine prefaced his reading of “Black Wine” with a personal revelation:

This reading is a kind of experiment and this poem is about the same experiment and the experiment is sobriety. This is the first reading in about seventeen years that I’ve given sober and for that reason will probably be the worst. . . It may work and then I’ll keep doing it.

Listen to Philip Levine read “Black Wine”



Also of interest:

• Read other accounts of the Brooklyn Book Festival from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and a wonderful montage of images at Mosaic Magazine
• Previous Reader’s Almanac posts about the 2010 and 2011 Brooklyn Book Festivals
• Read exclusive LOA interviews with Pete Hamill about A. J. Liebling and with Joyce Carol Oates about Shirley Jackson

Related LOA works: At The Fights: American Writers on Boxing (includes pieces by Pete Hamill and Joyce Carol Oates); American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom (includes two poems by Philip Levine); Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes an essay by Colson Whitehead)

Eleanor Bergstein on Joyce Carol Oates’s ability to tap the “chaotic and wild places inside us all”

Eleanor Bergstein introduces Joyce Carol Oates
at the New York Writers Hall of Fame gala
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Eleanor Bergstein’s tribute to her friend Joyce Carol Oates. Bergstein is a novelist, screenwriter, and director best known for the movie Dirty Dancing, which she wrote and co-produced.

I honor the work of Joyce Carol Oates for its wildness, its risk, its integrity of emotional detail—for all the things we long for in our own work, and in our lives. Occasionally people flail around in the authenticity of feeling they find in her—assuming it must be drawn from biographical details of living people. Rather instead, her work holds out to us the elegant possibility of owning the chaotic and wild places inside us all, places that accumulate and out of which we try to make a self. She creates characters who are often invisible to themselves at the same time they are harrowingly present to us, people with yearning hearts and chaotic souls desperate to order their lives in the face of the disarray of the outside world.

Years ago, after first reading Wonderland, I flattered myself that I understood the world better. Many years later, I continue to turn to Joyce’s work, hoping to understand myself better. I came upon her first published stories in literary reviews when I was starting out as a writer—and I remember saying to myself, “Oh so there’s that in the world.”

We celebrate the work of Joyce Carol Oates for what she has done—and what she is about to do. Sometimes the work terrifies, sometimes comforts, sometimes breaks our hearts. Hers is not a reassuring world—it shows us landscapes of the soul and of the street that startle us and frighten us.

We try to tame Joyce by making her an exotic. Doesn’t she write rather more than the usual number of books, we say? Might not we call her Gothic? Isn’t there a lot of violence, rape, murder, so much of everything. I think of Blonde, A Widow’s Story, them, Mudwoman, stories that burn off the page, mothers, sisters, Mike Tyson, a scrap of paper on a windshield, that sly humor if one looks for it, the locations of her childhood to which she returns again and again—exotic Lockport? Relentless. One might say check the newspaper if you think Oates is extreme, but this is beside the point. I believe the reason we are alarmed by the bleak and strange world she portrays is because it is located so clearly in our hearts.

I have seen Joyce dance with grace and be wickedly funny and I never try to guess what she will do next. The world she imagines is both ours and only and completely and forever hers. I am honored to present her and her work.

Joyce Carol Oates edited volume #204 of the Library of America series, Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories.

At its June 5 ceremony in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted 14 writers into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2012 included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Elizabeth Bradley on Washington Irving
Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

New York State Writers Hall of Fame: Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Toni Morrison greets fellow Hall of Fame inductees
Pete Hamill and E. L. Doctorow
Ryan Brenizer Photography

On June 5, The Empire State Center for the Book, New York’s affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, held its annual gala at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan. The Center is committed to fostering reading and greater appreciation of the literary arts, and among its initiatives is the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, established in 2010 to recognize New York–based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The centerpiece of this year’s gala was the induction of the fourteen-member class of 2012, which included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Hall of Fame inductees Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Over the coming weeks, The Reader’s Almanac will present remarks offered at the induction ceremony, in which literary scholars, critics, and descendants of the writers honored the inductees. We begin with Langdon Hammer’s tribute to the poet Hart Crane. Hammer is professor of English at Yale University, where he teaches modern and contemporary poetry. He has written and edited several books on Crane, including volume #168 in the Library of America series, Hart Crane: Complete Poetry & Selected Letters.

Langdon Hammer offers a tribute to Hart Crane
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Like many New York writers, Hart Crane was born somewhere else—in Garretsville, Ohio, in his case. He came here to live, quite alone, in 1916. He was 17, just a little older than the century, and he felt obscurely but intensely (Crane’s feelings were usually obscure and intense) that his fate and that of the century were deeply connected with each other and with the capital of modern life, New York City.

On New Year’s Eve of that first year in the city, the new arrival wrote home from East 15th Street: “My Dear Father, I have just been out for a long ride up Fifth Ave. on an omnibus. It is very cold and clear, and the marble facades of the marvelous mansions shone like crystal in the sun. . . . The room I have now is a bit too small, so after my week is up, I shall seek out another place near here, for I like the neighborhood. The houses are so different here, that it seems most interesting, for a while at least, to live in one.”

Crane was peripatetic and lived in many houses in the city. The address that mattered most was 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. It was there he began the love affair of his life with a Danish sailor named Emil Opffer, and where, “living in the shadow of the bridge,” as he put it, he conceived of his epic poem about the visionary promise of America, The Bridge. “That window,” he said about his window facing Brooklyn Bridge, “is where I would be most remembered of all: the ships, the harbor, and the skyline of Manhattan, midnight, morning or evening,—rain, snow or sun, it is everything from the mountains to the walls of Jerusalem and Nineveh, and all related and in actual contact with the changelessness of the many waters that surround it.”

The Bridge begins with an ecstatic address to Brooklyn Bridge in which its Gothic arches suggest a new religion and a new image of divinity. The bridge rises up above not simply New York but the whole of the continent, even the Midwest Crane left behind to make his life here. This stanza comes from the proem:

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

That’s gorgeous poetry, as stirring as any language an American has authored. But it isn’t easy poetry, and The Bridge was a puzzle and a problem when it arrived in most reviewers’ mailboxes. Crane died, a suicide, in 1932. He knew what he had achieved in his poetry. But he must have feared no one would ever recognize it, including the most important audience he wrote for, literary New York. I can just imagine, therefore, how gratified he would be by this recognition tonight. Hart Crane wrote the great poem of New York, and it is right to name him one of New York’s greats.

Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides discuss “why we tell stories” at World Science Festival 2012

From left, Jonathan Gottschall, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffrey Eugenides

On June 2, award-winning novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides joined a panel of three scientists to address the question “Why We Tell Stories: The Science of Narrative” at this year's World Science Festival in New York City. The panel’s moderator, Jay Allison, who produces a popular venue for contemporary storytelling, The Moth Radio Hour, on NPR, described the session’s ambitious agenda: “Why do we have a primal urge to tell stories? Do they help us survive? Do they serve an evolutionary role? What happens in the brain when we tell stories?”

Much of the discussion focused on what storytelling’s role may have played in human evolution. Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, profiled the curious place fiction holds in this context:

It’s no mystery why people would want facts about the real world: who’s sleeping with whom, where the food is—gossip is a natural appetite and a powerful one. It makes sense. But why would we want facts about people who we full well know don’t exist, and events that don’t either. Why would we spend our money, spend our time pursuing those things? That’s just an extraordinary puzzle.

Keith Oatley, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto and author of three novels, devised an experiment to compare the performance of people who mostly read fiction to those who mostly read nonfiction. He asked participants to characterize what emotions they detected—fear, anxiety, desire—in thirty-six pictures of just the eyes of different people. The fiction readers performed decidely better than the nonfiction readers. Oatley’s conclusion: the “more stories—fiction—you read, the better you are at understanding people.”

At one point Oates questioned whether the panel was viewing storytelling too positively. “There are very negative kinds of storytelling. Paranoid schizophrenics have their stories. Sometimes they publish books, like Mein Kampf. And many people are taken in by them.” But Bloom pointed out that one of the most surprising findings independently arrived at in the research of all three scientists was the prevalent appeal of “the sad and the scary,” even at a young age:

The defining feature of many stories is that they involve bad things. Jonathan [Gottschall] sums it up in his wonderful book [The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human]: The core element that they share is trouble. You would expect kids rationally to avoid their worst fears, but they confront them. They dive into them. One solution to the puzzle which Keith has emphasized is that stories serve as a form of safe practice. There are horrible things in the world that we need to deal with. Just like play is often viewed by ethologists as practicing for the future, we practice in our imaginations. Maybe it makes us better prepared to deal with horrible things.

Listening to Eugenides read a passage from The Virgin Suicides prompted Oates to recall one of her motivations for writing:

One of the motives for creating art is a feeling of homesickness, that you’ve lost something. That’s very powerful and haunting and you can’t quite get to it in your conscious life. Through your imagination you’re inhabiting this invisible and palpable place. That’s one of the reasons why people write—that’s why I write--out of loneliness and homesickness you’re evoking this lost world.

The ninety-minute discussion covered much of what moderator Allison outlined—including scans of what a brain looks like when a person is reading Chekhov. Eugenides summed up many of the thoughts expressed during the evening in his closing comment:

I think it’s persuasive that stories exist to impose a meaning in a meaningless world, or a world we could fear is meaningless, regardless of the content of the story. The fact that there seems to be an order, and some sort of organization in the story is what we get from the story. It’s kind of our nutrition. As literature goes on, writers begin to distrust the simplicity of the stories that were written before and they have to start writing the little train that tried but couldn’t because all the other stories were about the train that could. . . . 

I just happen to be reading an Alice Munro story last night called “Cortes Island.” It’s about a young woman who’s kind of becoming a writer. She’s in a marriage that’s perfectly acceptable and new, but there are hints that it’s not going to be great in her life and she’s begun to read a lot and write and she gets interrupted now and then in her reading and the line is something like: “she would be interrupted at the point of astonishment the book had brought her to, the giddiness of gulped riches.” I’m often asked why I read. It’s sort of that astonishment that books bring me to and “the giddiness of gulped riches” that I get from reading. That’s going to have to be there in a hundred years in whatever form stories take or how they are delivered.

Also of interest:

• Watch a video of the entire discussion on the World Science Festival website
• Read the exclusive LOA interview with Joyce Carol Oates, editor of Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, about Shirley Jackson
• John Cheever on “Why I Write Short Stories” (PDF) 
• Kurt Vonnegut on “the only thing you can teach” writers, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The “Best” Short Stories? Two lists—one recent and one from 1914—show their strengths and limitations, a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (includes “Family” by Joyce Carol Oates); At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing (includes “Rape and the Boxing Ring” by Joyce Carol Oates)

Alan Heathcock on James Salter, Joy Williams, Cormac McCarthy, and the works that inspired him to become a writer

Volt by Alan Heathcock
(Graywolf Press, 2011)

We asked Alan Heathcock, who this year published Volt, his debut collection of stories, to join our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, poetry, history, and essays and tell us which works have influenced his writing. He responded with quite a formidable roster:

James Salter, Dusk and Other Stories. Salter is often heralded as one of the greatest composers of prose in American letters. Though I find his sentences to be admirable in their gorgeous simplicity, I feel not enough attention has been given to his incredible gifts as a storyteller. I’ve read and studied the stories “Dirt” and “Dusk” many times, and count the enigmatic and undeniably compelling “Akhnilo” as a perfect study in suspense, and one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read. 

Joy Williams, Taking Care. I read this collection when I was a young man deciding what to do with my life, the thought of being a writer a pale flicker behind my left eye. These stories were taut and often brutal and always true and unflinching. I was riveted, delivered into full empathy with these badly behaving characters. Then I read “Winter Chemistry,” which begins as a coming of age story about two girls infatuated with their chemistry teacher, and ends in stunning violence, a story that moved me so deeply that the flicker roiled up into a flame and I knew, closing the book, I must pursue the life of a writer. 

Chris Offutt, Kentucky Straight. I’d long been exposed to the warm and cozy stories of Garrison Keillor, stories that didn’t exactly resemble the small towns I’d known, the towns where my family had lived for generations. When I read Kentucky Straight, I was bolstered into not writing the friendly myth of small towns, but to strip away the romantic veneer and expose the truth. Offutt’s stories dealt with religion and violence, grudges and love, all without a single trick of prose, or even the slightest desire to taint the beauty of the unpretty lives of those who reside in these troubled hollows. 

Joyce Carol Oates, Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories. While teaching at Boise State University, I had a macho ranch-raised kid declare he never read women writers because they only wrote meek stories about domestic life. To combat his ignorance, I gave him the story “Upon the Sweeping Flood” from the collection of the same name. The story—about a man who drives headlong into a hurricane only to become stuck in a farm-house with a teenage boy and girl—rages with the ferocity of a great storm and ends with possibly the most shocking violence I’ve ever read. It made the ranch-kid eat his hat (and words). Oates has written many great books, and this one, though not discussed as often as her award-winning novels, is, in my opinion, her best work, and deserves to be mentioned as one of the best collections of stories in the latter half of the twentieth century. 

Brian Moore, Black Robe. I’m fascinated by “pioneer” stories, stories where characters are stripped away of all community and civility and forced to face the truth of their own humanity. In Black Robe, a young Jesuit missionary must make his way to a mission deep in the northern wilderness. He must endure weeks of traveling through hostile country ruled by the Huron, Iroquois, and Algonkin tribes, his spirit challenged at every bend in the seemingly endless river, at every sleepless night, at every life-threatening confrontation. Redemption is eventually won, in a riveting tribute to courage and faith. 

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. A virtually plotless novel about an aging pastor, soon to die, delivering his begats in the form of letters to his young son. With this description, I put off reading this novel for a long time. I need action, I thought. I want plot. I need bombast. Yet, what I hadn’t accounted for was a depth of truth telling and wisdom I’d never experience in fiction. Would that be enough to draw me in, to hold me rapt, to alter the way I understood myself as a moral creature in a world that has often felt unquiet? Yes, and yes, and yes. If I can accrue a fraction of the insight Robinson delivers through her character, Pastor John Ames Boughton, then I will have had a life well lived. 

Cormac McCarthy, The Road. For me there's Cormac and then all of the rest. I’ve read, and admired, all of his novels, and think several of them to be perfect. His aesthetic accomplishment with Blood Meridian is, I believe, unrivaled, and the depravity of the psychopath in Child of God is as unnerving as anything I’ve ever read. But The Road reads like scripture, making me consider the world anew, striking so deep into my psyche it stirs emotions I’d long denied existed. Inspired into ambition, I finished this novel and immediately began to read it again, knowing that to write a book like The Road would be my life’s work. Onward.

Reviewing Volt for The New York Times Book Review, Donald Ray Pollock wrote, “There is no glamour here, no contemporary angst or frivolity; apart from the occasional cellphone, in fact, little of the modern world is apparent. . . Heathcock’s prose, spare and muscular yet poetic, fits the foreboding, God-fearing nature of the stories. “ On NPR Michael Shaub reported, “There's nothing easy about trying to distill tragedy and pain into the space of one short story. In Volt, Heathcock does it eight times, with a remarkable sense of compassion, and a deeply felt understanding of the mechanics of mourning.” Heathcock’s stories have won the National Magazine Award in fiction, and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology. Currently a Literature Fellow for the state of Idaho, Heathcock teaches fiction writing at Boise State University.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Karen Russell on how Joy Williams writes the unspeakable
• Other “Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Lev Grossman, Adam Levin, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Timothy Schaffert, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Emma Straub 

Related LOA works: Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight (includes an excerpt from James Salter’s autobiographical first novel The Hunters); American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (includes “Family” by Joyce Carol Oates)