This year’s conference faculty includes Sally Ball, Robert Boswell, Bernard Cooper, Denise Duhamel, Carolyn Forche, Pam Houston, Adam Johnson, Mat Johnson, A. Van Jordan,  Antonya Nelson, Alix Ohlin, Jem Poster, Melissa Pritchard, Jeannine Savard, Eleanor Wilner and Xu Xi. Additional guests include: Norman Dubie, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Cynthia Hogue, T.R. Hummer, Tara Ison, T.M. McNally, Sean Nevin, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Alberto Rios and Peter Turchi.

Tuition rates are $375 for four days, plus $125 for Master Classes, with discounts available. The early registration deadline is Oct. 31, 2011, and the final registration deadline is January 27, 2012.

For more information, visit the conference website: Desert Nights, Rising Stars.

AWP photo by Josie Keenan

But when I asked the young man what sort of writing he was working on, he gave me statistics about his social networking instead–how many followers he had on Facebook, his blog, Twitter, etc. Then he quipped, “I’ve already got a great audience, I just need to write something to publish.” He was only half joking.

I was reminded of this incident while reading the Times this morning. In her wonderful article “In a Data-Heavy Society, Being Defined by the Numbers,” Alina Tugend meditates on her own obsession with “followers” and “fans,” as well as how metric-sensitive we’ve become as a society. She even admits to signing her sons up for Twitter–neither of whom uses it–simply to give her numbers a boost.

This is particularly true for writers, it seems, because our work is so often measured by stars or “likes” or retweets. In the article, the author quotes Robin Black, author of the collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, who recently blogged about the ways in which a writer can become so wrapped up in the various ways of measuring a book’s success that she loses focus on the work itself. Black says to Tugend, “Twenty years ago, maybe every Sunday you looked at the New York Times best-seller list…Now you can torture yourself 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It becomes an exercise in scab picking.”

But what if the obsession with numbers becomes so pronounced that it not only distracts us from returning to our work, but prevents us from doing any writing in the first place?

Image Credit: mapsofworld.com

My first reaction was mixed; while I am not a blind fan of Roy or Chomsky or Ali, I have in the past agreed with some of their concerns about—for example—U.S. foreign policy. And I do have strong feelings about the government of Sri Lanka, about the war that ended in 2010, about repressive governments and freedom of speech all over the world. By the time the war was reaching its horrifying climax, no reasonable person, whatever their cultural allegiances, supported the Tamil Tigers’ methods (or perhaps I should say that I do not consider reasonable those people who remained supportive of those methods until the end). But it should not take cultural allegiances—which I have aplenty, being Tamil myself, and having grown up in another country that blatantly discriminates against Tamils and other minorities—for anyone who has followed the history and progression of the conflict to know that neither side has been blameless.

Yet the Reporters Without Borders petition made little sense to me on the most basic level: shouldn’t a literary festival be the last thing one should boycott in a country with a poor record of press freedom and human rights? I could see an argument for boycotting investment, or perhaps even tourism, but a literary festival? Really? Why sabotage an opportunity for free speech when they are so rare?

Image Credit: GLF web site

I decided on my own to ignore the boycott; then, early on the morning of the festival’s official opening, Shyam Selvadurai, this year’s curator and a writer I greatly admire, sent an email that confirmed my misgivings about the petition and strengthened my resolve to support the festival in any way I could. “I am a well-known Sri Lankan Tamil writer who has written in a very political way about the civil conflict in Sri Lanka,” Shyam wrote. “Why didn’t Reporters Without Borders think that my opinion needed to be sought? It feels, from my point of view, that they are guilty of the very same silencing they are fighting against.” He went on to say:

My own appointment to the position of Festival Curator embodies what the festival stands for. I am Tamil and the festival takes place in Galle, the deep Sinhala south, which has seen some of the worst violence committed against Tamils. I am, in addition, openly gay, and in fact was the first person to come out publicly in Sri Lanka. This, in a country where homosexuality is still illegal.

Shyam’s own identities aside, the program he put together deliberately included a BBC Forum on civil war—featuring, among other speakers, Chimamanda Adichie and the Sri Lankan human rights activist Sunila Abeysekara, an outspoken critic of her country’s government—and a “spotlight on Malaysia” in recognition of my country’s own struggles with ethnic tension and conflict. (I had been invited, along with my fellow Malaysian writers Tash Aw, Tan Twan Eng, Shamini Flint, Farish Noor, Tripat Narayanan, and Omar Musa, for precisely this reason.)

V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan / photo credit: Preston Merchant

My friend V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan has written a powerful, poetic critique of the boycott for the Millions; there’s nothing I can possibly add to her response, which made me want to cry and cheer simultaneously when I read it. What I can say is that I fell completely and unexpectedly in love with Sri Lanka, with its urban and seaside landscapes, its people, its food, the vestiges of its colonial past in architecture and culture. All this, all of it reminded me of Malaysia as I knew and loved her best, twenty-five or thirty years ago, the Malaysia of my early childhood, still unspoiled by malls and self-conscious consumerism. And the similarity was not just a figment of my imagination; my compatriots made the same observations. I’ve visited India twice, each time hoping to feel at home, to find familiar elements and faces and ways of talking or seeing the world, and while this has happened to a limited extent in south India, it was nothing like what I felt in Sri Lanka, that almost painful nostalgia, like stepping through some cosmic peephole into my own past. Even the Viceroy Special, the 75-year-old train the festival had chartered to transport participants from Colombo to Galle, felt familiar: the smell of the upholstery, the limp white sandwiches.

Sri Lankan food, too, seemed to have less in common with the austere vegetarian cuisine that dominates Tamil Nadu than with what I’d grown up eating in Malaysia: the spicy sambols, the abundance of fresh and dried seafood, the dodol made with coconut milk and palm sugar, the pittu and string hoppers that were a staple of my childhood thanks to the vendor who bicycled around our neighborhood at dusk. On our last night we had dinner at the Closenberg Hotel in Unawatuna, where every last detail—the dark wood of the furniture, the greying white paint that covered even the old round light switches, the geckos on the ceiling—recalled the Station Hotel in Ipoh, the old FMS Bar and Restaurant, the family house of my oldest aunt and uncle in the far north of Malaysia.

Courtesy Closenberg Hotel web site

Like Sugi, I had encounters that could only have happened at this festival, in Sri Lanka, to someone with my particular background and baggage, a unique confluence of circumstances I would have missed out on if I’d decided not to go. Not just the exchanges with other authors after their events or over rice and curry like my mother and aunts make them, but, for example: the aunty and uncle (the kind who are not related, to paraphrase Sugi) who briefly adopted Shamini Flint at the closing luncheon, upon learning that she was of Sri Lankan Tamil extraction, and mysteriously convinced the kitchen of the Jetwing Lighthouse to produce a plate of coconut pancakes (which were, incidentally, identical to a confection we Malaysians know by a Malay name) especially for her. “But I’m not Sri Lankan Tamil,” I had to confess when I joined them at their table and was pressed to partake of the pancakes, “I’m just a regular Indian Tamil.” “Never mind,” said aunty, “never mind. We are all Tamils just the same. You sit down and eat too.” Which of course would be what she would say; there is no other possible response in the aunty script.

As part of this year’s festival, Shyam Selvadurai had also started a program to bring in Tamil students from the north, who shared accommodation and meals with Sinhala students from the south. These students then attended sessions dealing with multiculturalism and civil conflict, including the round table on “Writing Malaysia” at which Twan Eng, Shamini, and I read and spoke about our work. “Your presence at the festival,” Shyam had written in his email to all this year’s participants, “will contribute to this broadening of young minds.” And while we believed him, because we believe in the power of literature to do exactly that, it never hit home quite so effectively as when small groups of shy Tamil students would approach me or Shamini to introduce themselves, to ask questions, or, really, just to sit and smile at us. I recognized these moments for what they were, having not so long ago sought them out myself: that recognition, that glow of, Oh, you’re just like me, and you’re a writer. So it can be done. Whatever the inherent limitations of that conclusion—because of course, being a writer takes a lot more than being just like anyone—and however unaware one is of those limitations, it still remains a necessary milestone for those of us who grow up in the shadow of the West, who even now do not look or talk or think like the people in most of the books we grow up reading, and who, for this and other reasons, think of being a writer as something reserved for them, the ones with the power, the lucky ones whose stories the whole world wants to hear.

After our “Writing Malaysia” round table, I donated a copy of my novel to another initiative supported by the festival: the Books United Project, which collects book donations for the Jaffna Public Library. A major repository and powerful symbol of Tamil literary culture since the 1950s, the library was burned in 1981 by an organized mob that included police and government-sponsored paramilitary groups, in the spate of inter-ethnic violence that eventually led to the civil war. My donation was the tiniest of gestures, one copy of one novel that most Sri Lankans have never heard of, but it felt significant, particularly in light of the call for the boycott, and I was glad for chance to do it.

Traveling with my 20-month-old daughter, I didn’t manage to attend as many events as I would have liked, but among the most memorable ones I did attend were moderated conversations with Chimamanda Adichie and with Mohsin Hamid. Both writers impressed me with their honesty and insight on a subject close to my heart, the intersection of politics and fiction. I was sad to have to miss events by—among others—Lawrence Hill, Jung Chang, Judy Fong Bates, Ranjini Obeyesekere, Pauline Melville, Louis de Bernieres, William Fiennes, Sarah Dunant, and the fabulous British poet Daljit Nagra, whose first poetry collection, Look We Have Coming To Dover, is one of my favorite collections of recent years. But if I couldn’t hear them on stage, I could and did sit with several of them in taxis and at meals, for leisurely chats about everything and nothing, which is always, in some ways, even better. The best thing about traveling with my daughter? Everyone, even a literary superstar, loves a baby, especially one who politely requests to view their belly button at lunch. Ah, babies, the great levelers. It’s difficult to dwell on status or hierarchies in their presence: my fondest memory of the lovely Pauline Melville is the analogy she made between the sound of my daughter’s mild distress and the cooing of doves.

I won’t lie: I do think the atmosphere of the festival was somewhat dampened, at least initially, by the withdrawal of Damon Galgut in response to the call for a boycott and of Orhan Pamuk and Kiran Desai due to a misunderstanding about the former’s visa status. Certainly they were some of the biggest names, and some people must have attended the festival just to hear them. But I felt amply justified in my decision to attend after the brave, moving closing speech by Geoffrey Dobbs, the founder of the Galle Festival. We’re not going to let Reporters Without Borders or anyone else close us down, said Dobbs, and the irony was not lost on us: free speech must prevail in the end, against the NGO that claims to fight for press freedom.

Doves credit: Flickr

Further Links and Resources

Read the Guardian’s coverage of the Galle Literary Festival.

Keith Taylor / photo Robert Turney

I was amused when Fiction Writers Review asked if they could post this piece on reviewing poetry after the criticism panel at AWP. I thought perhaps they might be asking me to map out the territories of irrelevance that are awaiting even those who review fiction, given the rapidly changing world of literary publishing. After all, outside the literary journals catering almost exclusively to the initiated—an exclusivity that demands a previously acquired expertise or at least an attitude (and that is even more evident in the blogs)—poetry seems to be reviewed less and less. I’ll admit that my evidence for this is what my scientific friends call “anecdotal,” but it seems obvious to me that there is much less attention to poetry than there was even five years ago. The poetry reviewer can still get the occasional assignment to review a new biography of one of the great dead, or perhaps do a profile of a Poet Laureate or Pulitzer winner, particularly if there is something weird about them—and, thank God, there does seem to remain something just a little weird in anyone who devotes his or her life to poetry. We might even get to write about a poet—probably a young poet—who has a dynamic stage presence. But the chance to review a new collection of poems in a place where several thousand people might read it, and to actually be paid something for our labors, has almost disappeared. In the fairly recent past many people still considered a knowledge of the poetry of the moment—even if that knowledge came only from reviews or the occasional poem appearing in a high brow magazine–as an essential element of the life of the mind, or at least as an important ingredient of contemporary culture. If there ever was a consensus about that, it has been forgotten.

There are probably many reasons for this lack of attention in the larger cultural life, but it must surely have something to do with a perfect storm combining technological change, the change in educational curricula necessitated by that technology, and the difficulties of the postmodern idiom in much of our poetry, an idiom that is also probably necessary. I should say that I am not particularly disturbed by this. When people ask me if I think poetry is dying because of the new technologies, my response is—Our art survived even the invention of writing! Next to that the invention of the computer seems like a small variation.

The future and purpose of the poetry review, however, has changed, or perhaps has accepted its most narrow definition. When I was just beginning to publish my poetry in small regional journals in the mid 1970s, it seemed an obvious extension of that process to write the occasional review. I was trying to learn things, trying to figure things out about the art, and organizing my thoughts in a review helped me do that. I had just returned to the United States after several years in Europe, and was reading the work of ethnically identified writers with a new interest. The first review I did in 1976 was of a small press book by the Native American poet, Carroll Arnett. I sent it off unsolicited to Joseph Bruchac at The Greenfield Review, and he accepted it almost immediately. I even got paid for it. I was shocked. I could present an opinion—hopefully considered, although still quite tentative—of a small book most people hadn’t heard of, nor were ever likely to see—and that opinion would be rewarded. About the same time I was trying to figure out what so many poets of the generation before mine were trying to do with their plain spoken poetry. I’d just spent years reading French poetry, and this American thing was very different. I wrote a review of a book of interviews and essays by David Ignatow—a poet who deserves to brought back into the conversation—and sent it off to New Letters, edited in those days by David Ray. Once again, it was accepted immediately, and I received a check for $5. Not long after, I thought I might try to do more with this thing and approached a newspaper—it might have been The St. Louis Post Dispatch—and actually received an assignment. I had those tear sheets from the two literary journals to show the editor there so he took me seriously. I might have been paid $25 for that review. Oh, brave new world that has such money in it! I went for a decade, maybe two, where I was able to get recognizable checks from places like The Detroit Free Press, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, among others. The reviews I wrote for those places were not usually of poetry, but could occasionally get one in, and the discussion of the art was always taken very seriously.

Image Credit: Flickr

Once I had proved myself in this way, I started getting more chances—including the opportunity to do the longer review/essay that continues to be in the better literary journals. I wasn’t so much interested in the serial review—one reviewer doing several new books one after the other (the kind of review that Poetry does so well)—but wanted to find patterns in the books given to me for discussion, some way of relating the books and their authors to a larger question. Those questions were usually the ones worrying me in the making of my own poetry. Some readers might have thought I was shoe-horning books into some preordained rubric, but I was deeply motivated to do those pieces. I wrote them for places like The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry Ireland. More recently, The Boston Review has given me room occasionally to expand at some length about single authors and their books. What I’ve noticed over the years, is that when I write for these places I assume the audience knows and cares about the nuances of contemporary poetics. I may have to do an explanation of the way Carl Phillips, for example, uses association in some of his poems and the way someone else, maybe Michael Collier, avoids it, but I expect the audience to have some knowledge, even to take sides. And I absolutely know that audience to be a very small one, each member initiated to some degree.

I wish I didn’t feel that. I wish I were speaking to a much larger audience. I wish I were hooking some new fish for the art to feed on. But I know I’m not. When the internet became a place to find both reviews and blogs about poetry, I was hoping that there would be a more expansive tone to the discussion of contemporary poetry. Instead, I found just the opposite. The sense of speaking to the club is even more pronounced in almost all the internet discussion of poetry. The sense of the different clubs is even more pronounced than it is in the literary journals. Now I love all that discussion, of course. I’ve tried my hand at blogging (for the Michigan Quarterly website, and for Dan Wickett’s site associated with Dzanc Books), although I still feel very wooden at it. I’ve reviewed a couple of times online—and was even wonderfully edited by Matt Bell at The Collagist.com—much more severely and judiciously edited than I have been the last couple of times I’ve written for a major newspaper. The paper just doesn’t have the staff for it anymore, but Matt Bell is a smart and indefatigable young writer. But I haven’t been paid for this online work—and I’ll admit that does change my attitude toward the work.

Image Credit: Flickr

By and large the poetry blogs—my own first attempts at it, included—have that casualness, that sense of immediacy, that the medium is famous for. Even though those words seem to never disappear, they are available only if you make a particular effort to find them. They seem casual, throw away, light weight. They can be fun, but they don’t seem to be creating the critical context by which a culture understands poetry—the old model that put the reviewer in the forefront of serious criticism.

That said, something like Ron Silliman’s blog, among a few others I read, has become absolutely essential. Now most of us who would go to Silliman’s site, know that here is a blogger and poet with a definite attitude. He is after all, one of the founders of LANGUAGE Poetry. Yet, the blog is wide-ranging and generous even as it can be quite direct in its criticisms.

But what of the future of reviewing poetry? The growth of the writing programs has assured a steady stream of initiated readers. Small presses continue to do small books of poetry—and I’m guessing that will continue, even if done only out of some marginal and antiquarian motivation. We will continue to find ways to present and value “books” online. Initiated readers will want to find out about all that poetry—although I suspect suspicions about the reviewer’s motivations will continue, even grow. This is not new—the author of that first book I reviewed, Carroll Arnett, was a teacher of mine. I gave the book a very good review.

I wonder if young poets will still think reviewing is an essential part of the process of making poems. I don’t know. These new ways of discussing the art might make that question completely unnecessary. I fear, however, that that will be a loss, even if only a temporary one, a diminution of attentive reading and yet another victory for the various literary fashions that seem to be continually swirling across the surface of the art.

Editor’s Note:

It is our great pleasure to publish this essay by special guest Keith Taylor. Taylor coordinates the undergraduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan and directs the Bear River Writer’s Conference. He has published eleven volumes: collections of poetry and short fiction, edited volumes, and translations. His work has appeared in such publications as Story, The Los Angeles Times, Alternative Press, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, The Iowa Review, Witness, Chicago Tribune, and Hanging Loose. His most recent book, If the World Becomes So Bright, was published in 2009 by Wayne State University Press. His next collection of poems, Marginalia for a Natural History, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011. Ghost Writers, a collection of ghost stories co-edited with Laura Kasischke, will also be published in 2011 by Wayne State University Press.

An earlier version of “Some Thoughts on Reviewing Poetry in 2011″ was delivered as part of the 2011 AWP panel “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com,” moderated by Jeremiah Chamberlin. Joining Taylor were Charles Baxter, Stacey D’Erasmo, and Gemma Sieff. The goal of the panel was to examine how criticism is changing in a literary landscape increasingly dominated by new media, as well as to discuss how books get reviewed and by whom, why vigorous reviewing is necessary, and ways to write reviews that matter. It was a vigorous discussion, both during the talks and after. And so in the spirit of continuing that conversation, as well as bringing it to those who weren’t able to attend the panel, Fiction Writers Review has been publishing these talks by the panelists throughout this week. Here are the previous ones:

I was surprised by this idea when I began to encounter it, perhaps because I didn’t do an MFA. I have a master’s degree in English, and when I finished that in 1988 I went to work at the Voice Literary Supplement, where I stayed until 1995. I worked at Bookforum from ’98-’99, and in all the years since, I’ve continued to have a long, productive relationship with literary journalism, and, indeed, with journalism in general. This didn’t seem as strange a novelist’s path then as it does, perhaps, now—growing up, I read Didion, I read Tom Wolfe, Mary McCarthy was famous and wicked and revered; even Jo in Little Women wrote for newspapers, Hemingway wrote for newspapers, Whitman wrote for newspapers, so did Djuna Barnes; Truman Capote was worshipped for In Cold Blood, and on and on. The idea here—which was an idea like any other, no better and no worse—was that writers were worldly people whose points of view on worldly things were interesting; also, that you could make money by writing (this, I thought, was a miracle, to make money appear out of the air); also, that to be a writer was to be part of a big, teeming cultural conversation. This cluster of ideas was still very much part of the culture in the late ‘70s, when I was coming of age.

So when I landed, or maybe careened, into the VLS in my mid-20s, I was overjoyed to be let loose at the newspaper that was then the big, fat, weekly newspaper for smart people, and I wrote long, long essays about books, reviewed books, assigned book reviews to amazing people, started conversations in print about books, and it was a wonderful time. Many, many extraordinary people wrote for us in those years: Angela Carter, Paul West, Lynne Tillman, Elizabeth Alexander, and critics such as Hilton Als, Manohla Dargis, Paul Berman, James Wood, Anne Powers. It was great. I learned how to teach writing by editing. I learned how to write essays by writing them and by being edited, and under the urgency of a ticking clock that was not only temporal but monetary: if you didn’t file, you didn’t get paid. And I learned what I very much needed to learn, which was that writers, even the fiction writers I revered, were very human, very alive, very flawed, often very charming, and generally in struggle.

The writers I knew then weren’t my teachers. I was their then-young editor, which was sort of like being an apprentice lion tamer tossed into the cage with the lions. They were, to say the least, not on their best behavior with me, twenty seven years old and barely out of grad school. I’ll never forget Kathy Acker, whom I admired very much at the time, screaming at me on the phone (an actual phone, on the desk) from London that I was horrible, that I didn’t like her work, that I was an idiot, because, I think, I had asked her to change three words in a review she had written that was maybe 200 words total. Another time, quite a prominent psychoanalyst, a woman I also admired very much, who had published a book that had some crossover appeal, nearly skinned me alive verbally because the review of her book never ran. I tried to explain that there wasn’t space—there wasn’t—but this cut no ice at all with her. She hung up on me. I thought she might be having some issues with disappointment. I also had long conversations, and long friendships, with writers I adored and still adore. I talked to independent booksellers, and sales reps, and book editors and publicists, every day. It was an education. You could call it “book reviewing”; you could also call it an education in what it is to be a writer, in how much there is out there to write about, how many kinds of writers there are, and how much the marketplace, public reception, and the weirdness of popular culture, have to do with what we do. I also, needless to say, or maybe not, really loved writing about books and I loved hearing what other people had to say about books.

The first few times that a fiction writer—and it was always, sad to say, a fiction writer—said, when I called to try to assign a book review, that he or she “didn’t review” or “only reviewed books he or she loved,” I laughed. I thought, Well, this is not a serious person. Who would say that? But as I got deeper into my own career as a fiction writer, and began spending less and less time at print publications and more time among other fiction writers, the silence around reviewing and writing about books generally was deafening. They didn’t read reviews or literary essays, they didn’t write them, they hated and felt traumatized by reviewers, and I heard more than once that it might be better if there was no reviewing at all. I understand the pain; I understand the fear. Now, I understand the distance and alienation that people often feel about all those snotty smart people in New York, issuing their pronouncements that can stop a book cold or chill the writer to the bone. I get it.

But, at the risk of sounding like Methusaleh mourning the loss of the stone tablet, I miss the talk. And at risk of biting, or maybe nibbling, on the hand that feeds me now, some of what has drained the energy—besides all the economic factors we know so well, the internet, etc.—from the culture of reviewing is the culture of MFAs. I want to be very clear about the fact that I don’t think that this is an evil development or part of some plot to quell a lively critical culture; it’s structural; it’s the system we have. The mandarin intellectual elite/patronage-driven structure that produced Mary McCarthy and James Baldwin and John Updike (who reviewed constantly and widely his entire life)—and which, God knows, had its own substantial flaws—has been replaced by the more democratic, but also more bureaucratic, and often secretive structure of academia. We have to be, are paid to be, fair. At the workshop table, we are witnesses, listeners, careful helpers; we are there to help produce the best writing we can. That’s what we’re supposed to do, and it’s not easy or simple work. Having a definite, partisan, irreverent point of view is, if not an outright liability, at the very least not required. As a teacher, I must leave my personal taste outside the room. As a critic, without some sort of point of view, I have nothing to say. And as a novelist, without the same kind of obsessive, engaged, partisan energy that I draw on as a critic, I also have nothing to write about, and no reason to be writing. Kathy Acker obviously felt free to bite my head off; I felt free, in return, to write and say what I wanted to write and say. What did I have to lose? Even now, that seems to me a fair trade.

So, I’m raising a problem for which I don’t have a solution, and maybe I’m just making us all feel worse, but I do see this as a pressure, or a force, that has also undermined the efficacy and aliveness of book reviewing: we’re bringing up generations of writers who think of it as something that other people do, far away, or something that might endanger their fellowship, their recommendation, their job application, their grant application, their ability to get blurbs or to receive the coveted invitations to this or that conference, residency, or institute. This makes me uncomfortable, and it also makes me kind of lonely. I still think the writers are the smartest, most interesting, funniest, weirdest people in any given room. I miss hearing their voices.

Editor’s Note:

It is our great pleasure to publish this essay by special guest Stacey D’Erasmo. D’Erasmo is the author of three novels, Tea (a New York Times Notable Book); A Seahorse Year (a Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday, as well as a recipient of both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award); and, most recently, The Sky Below. She created and developed the fiction review section of Bookforum from 1997-1998 and is a regular contributor for the New York Times Book Review. She currently lives in New York City, where she is an Associate Professor at Columbia University.

An earlier version of “An Education in Book Reviews” was delivered as part of the 2011 AWP panel “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com,” moderated by Jeremiah Chamberlin. Joining D’Erasmo were Charles Baxter, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. The goal of the panel was to examine how criticism is changing in a literary landscape increasingly dominated by new media, as well as to discuss how books get reviewed and by whom, why vigorous reviewing is necessary, and ways to write reviews that matter. It was a vigorous discussion, both during the talks and after. And so in the spirit of continuing that conversation, as well as bringing it to those who weren’t able to attend the panel, Fiction Writers Review is publishing talks by several of the other panelists throughout the week. Please join in, and help us spread the word.

Seeing so many contributors, and connecting with writers, teachers, publishers, agents and lit journals who share our enthusiasm for FWR, was amazing. It also reminded us of the vital role you, dear reader, play as a part of the Fiction Writers Review community. Here are photos of some of the many wonderful contributors and writers we saw in D.C. that first week in February. Enjoy!

Click to enlarge!

Eventually he was ostracized, and the next year he moved to another dormitory, where he lived in a single room. He had to, because no one could get along with him. I believe he majored in chemistry, and the last I heard of him, he was working for Monsanto.

I mention Jerry the Reviewer for a couple of reasons. First, he taught me that no one loves a reviewer. No one has ever fallen in love with someone because of a review. That’s an important life-lesson. Second, he taught me that some things probably shouldn’t be reviewed. You don’t review your partner’s behavior during lovemaking, and you don’t review the death of your grandmother. Also, and I’m going out on a limb here, you don’t really need to review Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, although amazon.com encourages you to do so, with the following result, and these are direct quotes: “Paintlady” from Jacksonville, Florida, writes: “Anna Karenina is the most boring book I have ever laid eyes on; I do not know how this book became a classic; it belongs in the circular file, not on the bookshelf.” About Madame Bovary, “photondancer” writes, “Dear lord, this book was awful. One of the very few novels that I have been unable to finish or indeed to get halfway through. It was just TOO BORING.” About Shakespeare’s King Lear, Daisy in Arizona writes, “The story overall was just unsatisfactory. At times it seemed idealistic and illogical.”

Everyone knows that such quotes can be found in vast quantities at amazon.com., often with the word “boring” put into play, but the point is that these reviews serve no purpose at all. Or rather, they do serve a purpose, which is to establish that in an Age of the Imperial Self, any one person’s opinion is equal to everybody else’s, and the mice can review the cat, if they want to. But, if I can go out on another limb, I’d assert that all these reviewers, like Jerry the Reviewer, are reviewing objects, in this case novels, that don’t need reviews, partly because the jury is no longer out; the jury has returned a verdict on these books by now, and it’s just plain obtuse to pretend that it hasn’t.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) via Wikipedia

But the other point I’d make about these reviews is that they are untrustworthy for another reason. They don’t bother to provide the reader with an accurate description of the books’ formal or verbal properties. To say that something is “boring” is not a statement about a book, although the speaker may think that it is; it’s a statement about the reader’s poverty of equipment. One of the reasons that Randall Jarrell’s poetry reviews were so devastating was that Jarrell was a very good describer of a poem’s verbal economies and thematic gestures, and he had a well-stocked mind so that he could provide a cultural context for whatever he was talking about. The marks of a trustworthy review, therefore, have a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it. This description is not the same as a plot summary, although a plot summary may figure into it. What a formal description does is to show what a book is about in relation to the form in which the subject matter has been shaped or located. In order to write such a review, let’s say of a novel, you have to have a basic idea of how novels are constructed; you have to have the technical knowledge that allows you to stand back from the book and to say how a book is put together. By these criteria, quite a few book reviews are worthless. They are made up of what I call Owl Criticism. With Owl Criticism, you have statements like, “This book has an owl in it, and I don’t like owls.”

A case in point would be the reviews during the past year of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom. The positive and negative reviews were often so extreme in both directions that they were paragons of untrustworthiness. Both kinds of reviews assert a claim upon your attention, but only because they’re extreme and not because they supply a sense of how Franzen’s novel was put together. Both kinds of reviews supplied an answer to my first criterion for a review, but neither review (I’m thinking of the positive review in the Sunday New York Times, and the negative one in The Atlantic) had the slightest interest in the formal properties of Franzen’s novel—in the ways, for example, certain dramatic events duplicated themselves, or the instances of crucial scenes that Franzen chose not to present directly. Both reviews were examples of Owl Criticism and therefore take their place in the history of American hype. It’s a long history, going back to P. T. Barnum, and contemplating it is a singularly dispiriting pastime.

It’s quite possible for a reviewer to write a valuable negative review. Dwight MacDonald’s review of James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed is a classic of the type, as is Robert Hass’s essay on James Wright’s poetry. Both reviews give an accurate feeling for the content and form of the books under discussion and present what they’re doing in a wider cultural context.

A reviewer is entitled to any opinion at all, but he or she earns that opinion based on a description and a judicious citation of evidence. Otherwise, the reviewer is the literary equivalent of Michelle Bachmann, making outrageous statements simply in order to become famous.

Is it too much to ask of a reviewer that he should know what he’s talking about? That the writing be accurate and clear? To quote that unreliable critic, Ezra Pound: “You would think that anyone wanting to know about poetry would do one of two things or both. Look at it or listen to it. And if he wanted advice he would go to someone who knew something about it.” That’s in ABC of Reading, in which Pound separates a knowledgeable author from a lay person. I’m not doing that, but I am making the claim that a good review, if it is to serve any purpose at all, has to take the trouble of telling us where a poem or a novel or a book of stories fits into our cultural life, and then has to tell us how its content is located in its form. If it doesn’t do either, it’s not a good review.

What are the reviews that perform a great human service? The ones, of course, that are written with knowledge and passion, and which assert that a great precious object exists that you need to discover for yourself, because it will change your life. A great review suggests why your soul might be altered if you read a particular book. A review should therefore be a gift: something unimaginably valuable is being passed on from the reviewer to the reader. But a good review doesn’t, and can’t, resort to hype, because hype language has the familiar odor given off by falsehood and merchandizing. Hype belongs in the history of publicity but not in the history of literature. Its recognizable adjectives—“important,” “stunning,” “game-changing,” and “significant”—are the touchstones of falsehood and meaninglessness. The great review has to practice the arts of precision; if it doesn’t, you can’t, and shouldn’t, trust it.

Editor’s Note:

It is our great pleasure to publish this essay by special guest Charles Baxter. Baxter is the author of five novels, The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. He has also written two books of criticism and three books of poetry, as well as edited several anthologies. He teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. His most recent book, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, was released by Pantheon at the beginning of last month.

An earlier version of “Owl Criticism” was delivered as part of the 2011 AWP panel “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com,” moderated by Jeremiah Chamberlin. Joining Baxter and Chamberlin were Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. The goal of the panel was to examine how criticism is changing in a literary landscape increasingly dominated by new media, as well as to discuss how books get reviewed and by whom, why vigorous reviewing is necessary, and ways to write reviews that matter. It was a vigorous discussion, both during the talks and after. And so in the spirit of continuing that conversation, as well as bringing it to those who weren’t able to attend the panel, Fiction Writers Review is publishing talks by several of the other panelists throughout the week. Please join in, and help us spread the word.

Earlier this month, I had the wonderful opportunity to moderate a panel on criticism at the 2011 AWP Conference entitled “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com.” Joining me were Charles Baxter, Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. Needless to say, it was an honor to share the stage with such esteemed writers, critics, and editors. And it was equally humbling to have more than two hundred people pack the Delaware Suite at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on a Friday morning at 9 a.m. to attend the event.

But what made me happiest was the vigorous conversation that ensued during the Q&A portion afterward. I’d originally wanted to put together this panel because I have some very real questions about what makes a good review—to whom, for whom, with what audience in mind, under what circumstances, and so on. Further, because the notion of criticism has been evolving over the last several decades, particularly with the rise of (as our title suggests) book blogs and Amazon.com, I thought it would be wonderful to bring together writers whose work in this field approaches the subject in different ways, and from different perspectives. So it was heartening–inspiring, even– to discover that so many other writers and teachers of writing share both a commitment to and an interest in engaging with criticism as an art form.

This re-professionalization of writing about writing, and the attempt to bring readers and writers together for a discussion centered on craft and how literature intersects with culture, is at the core of our mission here at Fiction Writers Review. And in the spirit of continuing that discussion, as well as bringing it to those who weren’t able to attend the panel, we are happy to announce that we will be publishing the talks delivered by Charles Baxter, Stacey D’Erasmo, and Keith Taylor over the next several days.

What follows, then, is the brief talk that I gave as an introduction to the panel. We hope you enjoy, and that you’ll also share your thoughts on each of these pieces as they publish during the coming week.

The Good Review:

In the late 1990s, I ran an independent bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, with my now brother-in-law, Dean Bakopoulos. Back then, straight out of college, wanting nothing more than to be writers, this gig was a dream job. We spent our days surrounded by books and customers who wanted to talk with us about writing, and in the evenings we had the pleasure of hosting readings for everyone from Barry Lopez to Lorrie Moore, Sherman Alexie to David Sedaris, Studs Terkel to Alice McDermott.

Yet the longer we worked at the store, the more I became aware of this other side of literature: Criticism. It took many forms, and it served an equally varied number of purposes—pre-publication reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus helped us know what was coming out and gave us a sense of how many copies we should order, reviews in the New York Times let us know what books people would be coming in to the store to ask about (or not!) over the next several days, and publications like Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Guardian, among others, let us know what sorts of conversations our customers would be eager to engage us in that month. I should also mention that there was a section of books in the store—hidden back by poetry, only a few shelves in size—labeled “Literary Criticism.” Though judging from their titles, most of theses books seemed like you might need a PhD (or four) to take a crack at them. So at twenty-three, with only an undergrad degree under my belt, I steered clear.

Instead, my experience with and conception of “criticism” for those next several years was that of a practical tool—it helped me, as a businessman, know what was coming out, who was publishing it, and what the subject matter of a book might be. “Oh, you like multi-generational family sagas about Hungarian Jews post-World War II?” I might say to a customer. “Well, I have just the thing for you. Step right this way…”

And, of course, depending on whether a particular arbiter of taste had weighed in “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on the product, I might also add, mid-way to the shelves, “And it got a great review in the INSERT: Times/Harper’s/Atlantic.” As if it were entirely about quality control. USDA approved. Think books as slabs of beef.

Now, though I’m poking a bit of fun here, the honest truth was that I didn’t see or understand the artfulness of criticism until after I left the bookstore. Yes, I could appreciate a well-written review, just as I did a well-written poem or essay or novel. But its purpose was still largely a singular one: Assessment.

And I think that this is the sense that many people have of criticism. When someone asks, “Did you see the review of Gryphon in the Times?” our initial response—if we haven’t read it—is to reply, “No. Was it a good review?” By this we mean positive. Whether it got a “thumbs up” or a certain number of stars.

But for whom is an assessment and plot summary helpful? Which, if I’m being honest, makes up the vast amount of what we call reviewing these days. Certainly it’s helpful to the bookseller—invaluable, in fact. You’ve got to know what to put on the shelves. And it’s helpful to the reader who likes to read based on subject matter: about Paris in the twenties, say, or Scandinavian crime literature. And it’s certainly helpful to the author whose book is reviewed favorably (not so much if the verdict is thumbs down), insofar as their work has been validated on some level.

But what does this sort of review teach us about being readers? Or, as fellow writers, about craft or style or execution? What does it tell us about technique? About literary trends? About the voices of contemporary fiction and how they relate, connect to, or riff on the long history of writing that has come before them? After all, books aren’t written in a vacuum.

This new way of thinking about criticism suddenly became very relevant to me when, several years after finishing my MFA and nearly six years after leaving the bookstore, I suddenly found myself editing for Fiction Writers Review. This was an entirely new audience, I realized. One made up of fellow writers and lovers of fiction. And instead of being in the business of selling books, I was operating with the mission to support and promote the work of emerging writers. Not just by featuring their debut novels and story collections, but also by helping them publish their first reviews and interviews and essays. So I found myself urging them to strip all but the most important plot summary out of their work, to resist assessing whether a book was necessarily “good” or not. Honestly, that didn’t seem to matter to a larger discussion about craft, which was what I wanted to understand as a writer-in-training, and where I could engage as both a reader and an editor.

Part of this position had solidified after a friend, Holiday Reinhorn, had her first story collection, Big Cats, published several years earlier. The stories are tough, gritty pieces set in large part in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to its publication, individual stories were published in Ploughshares, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Northwest Review, Columbia, and other literary magazines and journals. Her work has been a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices anthologies. On the cover is a blurb by Marilynne Robinson, who calls the collection “Vivid, witty, and very fresh.”

The cover also happens to feature a bit of leopard skin. The back of one, it seems. And apparently this image “deceived” at least one buyer of the book, who took her ire to Amazon.com to express her opinion. This individual writes the following:

Perhaps we should not be surprised that this reviewer writes under “shopaholic.”

Now, clearly this sort of review is not to be taken seriously. Nor would anyone ever confuse shopaholic as a critic. But what I think it reveals—albeit in an exaggerated fashion, no pun intended—is that to so many individuals, criticism has been boiled down to a relationship of consumerism: I will choose to pay for and then consume this because it is A) good, according to others; or B) has to do with subject matter that I already know I like.

Yet, of course, shopaholic has confused taste with success. She – or he – judges the book not on whether it achieved the goals the author set out to accomplish, but whether she “liked” the book, which in turn is based on how she thinks all “good” books must be.

We see this elsewhere. The consumer mentality has even begun to institutionalize itself in our educational systems. I recently heard an undergraduate declare in a classroom I was observing: “I don’t pay $40,000 a year to learn about stuff I could read on the Internet.” The class was discussing the possibility that the rise of evangelical Christianity might have its origins in the fact that universities no longer tackle subjects like theology in their curriculum.

Likewise, as the Associate Director of the English Department Writing Program at the University of Michigan, our office routinely field calls from angry parents who say things like, “I don’t pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for my kid not to get an ‘A’ in this class.” Their children are investments that they are seeking to protect and, I assume, cash in on later? But I digress…

What I want to say is that as an editor I am excited to work with writers on reviews not only for the purpose of publication, but also as an opportunity to help those writers sort through their own analysis of the books. And, thereby, to become stronger thinkers themselves. Though the Internet, like “the media,” is routinely blamed for all the ills of society, I hope that Fiction Writers Review can be a place where we can engage in a discussion of craft and technique that has less to do with taste and more to do with approach. When we begin discussing an angle for their reviews, I always ask my writers, “What stylistic technique most stood out to you? Why?” And then I push them to explore those avenues. I never ask if they liked the book. That seems irrelevant, in a sense.

Because I’m no longer in the business of selling books, I believe that a good review is—regardless of form, length, or format—one that will leave a reader thinking about writing in a new way, regardless of whether they ever decide to purchase the book or not. One that will generate discussion among a lively and healthy group of fellow writers. One that will teach us—me, the writer, the readers—a bit more about how it is that we interact with literature, and how we pursue our own craft as authors. That will leave us stepping away, saying to ourselves, “I hadn’t thought of that before.”

Further Links and Resources:

And now you can be a part of this program! Applications for the 2011 seminar, which will be held May 26-31, are still being accepted for a few more days. But don’t delay–the deadline is February 15th.

For guidelines and to submit your application, please visit the EKF website. There is no fee to apply. Also, each fellow selected to attend will receive a scholarship that includes tuition, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel.

2011 faculty and guests include the following

For more on the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, here are two photo essays:

Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. In 2009 I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the fellows, along with then soon-to-be FWR contributor Steven Wingate. That journey was chronicled in an essay entitled “Literary Life on the Black Sea,” which FWR published later that summer.

Keeping with what we hope will become a tradition, we asked several of this year’s English speaking fellows if they would be willing to compile a similar essay reflecting on their trip to Bulgaria to participate in the 2010 seminar. Those individuals are Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich. The results of their collaborative work is below. We hope you enjoy!

PART I: The Road to Much Excess

by Kelly Luce

Work schedule cleared, bags packed. Workshop pieces read, re-read, and noted upon. It was the end of May and time to head to Bulgaria for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, organized by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. I was one of five writers working in English who’d been chosen as a fellow for this year’s event. I was ready.

But my plane was not.

The gate area grew crowded, the desk-line long. Backpacking college kids and men in suits parked on the floor near electrical outlets. Eventually, I hit the bar, where a limping Spaniard leaned over me and ordered a margarita—“a triple,” he said, “or if possible…a fourple.” As the delays extended and misinformation piled up, I calmed myself with the promise that, no matter what, I’d still catch the chartered bus from Sofia to Sozopol. It was a seven-hour ride, after all, and my guidebook warned transportation and infrastructure outside the capital was iffy at best. I was about to spend the week sharing stories and talking shop in a fascinatingly foreign, mysterious place with some of Bulgaria’s best-known writers and translators, not to mention a group of intimidatingly talented co-fellows, editors, and publishers from the U.S. and Europe. I couldn’t miss the bonding among participants that would surely occur on the long, scenic ride. (On a comfortable, air-conditioned bus, no less.)

Thirty-five hours after I’d arrived at the airport in San Francisco, I stepped off the plane onto the tarmac in Sofia, sleep-deprived and crabby as hell. I knew I’d missed the bus. But I was in good hands—Founder Elizabeth Kostova and Director Milena Deleva had made sure I wasn’t stranded. The last time I’d been able to check email, at the Munich airport hotel at three in the morning, there’d been a message from Milena: here’s the bus schedule, but we think someone will be there—maybe Simona, the program assistant?

A loud, open-air bus carried me to the terminal. It was early morning and the sun peaked from behind a distant mountain. The air was damp. Dragging my carry-on through the Sofia Airport terminal, I pondered sleepily whether it was the color or the font that made the signage look so outdated, and whether Happy Bar and Grill delivered on its emotional promise.

Near the exit, I recognized Bulgarian writer and seminar fellow Krassimir Damianov. In person, he bore the same unconcerned, slightly pissed-off expression as he did in his photo on the seminar website. Krassie grabbed my suitcase and began to talk. He didn’t stop until we reached Sozopol—over eight hours later. I couldn’t tell if he liked me or not, if this errand of transporting the helpless American was anything but a hassle. So much for making a good first impression, for earning my keep as a fellow and contributor at this prestigious seminar run by such hard-working and generous people.

In his 1972 Citroen pickup, we zoomed past child-driven donkey carts, sunflower fields, crumbling factories and everywhere, that intoxicating mix of red poppies and lavender, their rich hues somehow brightened by the tiny white blossoms sprinkled among them. Perhaps because of the guidebook’s warnings, I hadn’t expected such beauty from the Bulgarian roadside.

Krassie spoke English with a thick accent and an endearing disregard for accuracy. He called pigs “porks” and pointed out the abandoned “mineries” where stone was dug during Communism. He talked on as we headed east across Bulgaria toward the Black Sea, hardly looking at the road, the Citroen shaking as we overtook sports cars in the face of oncoming semis. “I used to be taxi driver in Sofia,” he told me. “It’s no good to drive alone. I can talk all day.” I asked questions, tried to keep up my end of the conversation, but eventually I closed my eyes. I was irritable and afraid I’d take out my frustrations on my ‘taxi driver,’ whose accent had grown incomprehensible to me in my exhaustion.

I dozed, a little. Krassie noticed me nodding off and waved a hand. “Sleep, sleep,” he said. “I will guard your dreams.” Krassie’s gentleness, the nap and the continuing understated beauty of the countryside worked their charms on me. By the time we arrived in Sozopol that night, having missed the welcome ceremony, Krassie felt like a dear relative. I made two notes in my journal upon arriving in Sozopol: There’s a bond that forms over being late to something. And, You don’t have to understand a person’s words to hear them.

The latter proved true throughout the week. During her lecture, held in the cliff-side Art Gallery building that always smelled of the sea, Kristin Dimitrova read her poem “Beliefs” in her native tongue: “…Among sailors, I suppose / there is a belief that when they shave / in an odd direction, an academic dies. / And they try not to shave. / The point is that we think / about each other.” The sound of the poem in Bulgarian had a raw, rhythmic power that transcended literal meaning and gave me goose bumps. Behind her, the huge gallery windows framed the Black Sea, cerulean under a cloudless sky. A few boats dotted the horizon. Perhaps filled with bearded sailors, I thought.

We spent a lot of time in that airy, two-story building, its large rooms empty of anything other than a couple tables, stacking chairs, and the trove of paintings lining the walls. Daily writing workshops were held there, as were readings and lectures like Kristin’s, along with three panels on translation. The theme of translation resonated throughout the seminar, far beyond these daily panels. Over delicious, oft-photographed meals and well-crafted, velvety local red wine, the topic of language surfaced time and again. These playful, often hilarious arguments over which language was most pleasant to the ear, which was best suited for singing, which induced suffering in its speakers, which had the best euphemisms for bodily functions, were some of the most pleasant of the seminar.

Before we arrived in Sozopol, each fellow submitted work to be translated—English into Bulgarian and vice versa. Our last night in Sozopol, a reading was held in which the Bulgarian and English fellows paired up and presented the translations of each other’s work.

Krassie and I were reading partners. He chose to read the last scene of his story, “Downstream.” We met in the Art Gallery to prepare, and I read for him the opening of his piece. He shook his head. “You must read it slow, and flowing, like a river. DA, da-da-da DA, da-da-DA. Think about a current. Flowing, flowing!” He banged on the table to illustrate his point, then began to read, in his thick accent, with the gentlest rise-and-fall cadence. I immediately saw what he meant.

My writing had never been translated before. So the night before our reading when Milen Ruskov, who translated my piece, approached me to recommend I read a certain section, I was surprised. And frankly, touched. Usually, people don’t care what you share at a reading—you’re lucky if they listen. It seemed odd for someone to care about work that wasn’t his. But I realized the Bulgarian version of my story was his. Translation is not simple conversion; it’s an act of creation. During the week’s first translation panel, Svletozar Zhelev, a Bulgarian publisher, had shared his water-in-a-bottle metaphor for translation: in a successful translation, the water, or essence of the writing, remains unchanged; a translator’s job is to create a new vessel to contain the liquid. This metaphor became a seminar favorite, touching on both the physical act—alchemy, really—of changing words, and the spiritual act of engaging with another’s conscious and unconscious mind.

The night of the reading, forty people gathered on the top floor of the art gallery. The sun had set over Sozopol and the charged breeze of a hot summer night swirled through the room. Men replaced (or at least covered up) T-shirts with sport coats. I blow-dried my hair, donned a dress, and swiped on some mascara.

Each pair read to a silent, rapt audience. I introduced Krassie as my taxi driver; he compared me to his daughter, who’s the same age. The rhythm he’d pounded on the table earlier in the day entered my voice as I began to read “Downstream,” swaying as I went. And when Krassie read my story in Bulgarian, he was so expressive I was able to follow along with my English version.

Five days later—during which time the conversation and the late nights had hardly afforded me the opportunity to catch up on sleep—it was time to depart Sozopol. My taxi driver, friend, and fellow reader went to visit his new granddaughter in a nearby town, so he did not join us for the last day of the program back in Sofia. But I wished him and his Citroen well, and part of me wished we were voyaging back together. He told me to visit the hostel he runs in Barcelona. Then he hugged me, grabbed my shoulders and said, “ I wish you much excess.”

It was an appropriate slip of the tongue. If Sozopol and Sofia were marked by anything, it was excess: more ideas, inspiration, laughter, and growth as a writer and human than I could have imagined possible in those six days. And for a friend, can there be a better wish?

Part II: The Terrace of the Hotel Diamanti

By Carin Clevidence

Here’s the terrace of the Hotel Diamanti, with Elizabeth Kostova and Josip Novakovich talking at one of the tables. Warm and gracious, Elizabeth has set the tone for the seminar from our first night in Sofia; this beautiful terrace feels like an extension of her vision. At breakfast, hung-over and increasingly sleep-deprived, we sit on the cushioned chairs under the white-canvas awning to drink coffee and eat sliced cucumber and wedges of salty Bulgarian cheese. The terrace overlooks the Black Sea and red poppies bloom along the edge of the rocky cliff. Blue fishing boats pass. Gulls fly overhead. Offshore lie two islands, a large one with greenery and a lighthouse, and a smaller one, rocky and bare. My roommate Zdravka Evtimova, a Bulgarian who writes in English, tells me she swam to it once on a family vacation many years before, and that the island is infested with snakes. Nikolaj Bojkov, Bulgarian writer and translator from the Hungarian, says through our interpreter Boris Deliradev that the snakes eat fish. How do they catch them, we wonder out loud? Are they aquatic? Someone mimes a snake with a fishing rod and Niki laughs. He is wearing a tee shirt illustrated with one of the Kama Sutra’s less popular positions: “Three-Legged Lemur Juggling,” it might be called, or “Double-Jointed Monkey in the Shrubbery.”

After morning workshop we return to the terrace for grilled eggplant, shopka salata, chilled cucumber soup. The dessert is something called “yogurt ice cream.” Like frozen yogurt, I expect. But no: It comes in a little clay pot, topped with walnuts and honey and it resembles frozen yogurt like a crusty Parisian baguette resembles Wonder Bread. Kelly, Chad Post and I stare at each other, astonished that anything could taste this good. On the terrace the talk is constant, a tumult of English and Bulgarian punctuated with bursts of laughter. Even with our mouths full of honey-laced yogurt ice cream, we can’t shut up. We talk about our morning’s workshop, about the books we’re reading and the ones we’d like to read, and the books we want to write and how we want to write them.

The best food is at the Diamanti, but we eat at other restaurants as well, descending like a large flock of hungry, polyglot birds. At one the fish is garnished with apple, inexplicably fried. At another the mussels arrive already shucked, fleshy and glistening in a white bowl, and as we eat them the poet Kristin Dimitrova recites John Donne for us in Bulgarian. But after dinner we end up back on the Diamanti terrace, drinking more red Bulgarian wine, and talk about the afternoon’s translation panel, and our extraordinary writing session with Alex Miller, and later, more riotously, the Dutch space program and the mechanical bull from our failed karoake excursion of the night before. Ivan Dimitrov and Charlie are smoking. Niki takes out a handful of colored pencils and draws us each a picture; mine is a smiling snail with a house on its back, a curl of smoke rising from the chimney. The conversation surges on, fevered and digressive. “Five years ago,” one of the Bulgarians is saying, “there was an upsurge in nostalgia.” From another table, “But if it sucks on the poetic syntactic level…”

One of the established writers, a seminar connoisseur who instigated the previous night’s skinny dipping, sits back in his chair and looks around the terrace with feigned amazement. “It’s great that people are so excited about ideas here,” he confides. “Usually, they just like to get banged.”

It’s after one in the morning, and I’ve been up since before six, when the gulls woke me from the red-tiled roofs crying “Ow! Ow! Ow!” like someone with a badly stubbed toe. I don’t ever want to leave the Diamanti terrace, but my eyes are beginning to close and eventually I walk across the street to the hotel. From the skylight in my top floor room I look out on the moon, shining over the dark houses of Sozopol, and the distant glittering stars. Zdravka is already asleep. A lively babble of Bulgarian and English rises from the terrace, and that’s the sound I fall asleep to.

Part III: Why We Write

by Paul Vidich

I looked out the bus window and saw Sozopol recede along the coast, its red-tiled roofs spread across the dry seaside. Had it only been four days? It seemed like weeks. My mind was a flip book of images. I settled into the bus ride beside my wife, Linda, and listened to the animated conversations happening around me. Alex Miller, in our final workshop, had presented the combined group of American and Bulgarian writers with a surprise exercise. He asked each of us to say why we wrote. I have several shallow answers that I give, and in my mind I ticked off the ones most appropriate for this group of new friends, all still basically strangers. Alex cautioned that glib answers were just that, transparent cover ups, and honest answers were difficult, but we were writers after all, and we had an obligation to tell the truth, whatever that was. “Hmmm,” I thought.

Alex called on Kelly first. I felt sorry for her. Such an important question and so little time to prepare. I had time to find words that were honest and clever. How honest did I want to get?

I had it all figured out when Alex turned to me. In that instant my comfortable mask fell and I spoke from a vulnerable place. Emotion welled in me, startling me, and I was unrehearsed. I struggled to stay articulate while weeping about my parents’ divorce when I was a child. It didn’t matter that the facts in question were forty years past. When I finished, the mood in the room had changed. I watched with interest as the next up, our Bulgarian colleagues, all men, all accustomed to protective cloaks, opened up one by one. One Bulgarian talked about a son who had recently died. Everyone was quite and attentive. This is what I thought about on the seven-hour bus ride to Sofia. And I thought how odd it was to travel five thousand miles to a remote part of the former Roman Empire to discover something about myself.

The bus arrived in Sofia late afternoon, and as the highway ended we found ourselves in old narrow city streets jammed with rush hour traffic. The next day, May 30, was the final portion of the Conference’s formal proceedings, a day of literary discussions co-sponsored by the American Embassy and Sofia University. On arrival at the Diamanti Hotel, Nikolaj Bojkov, a Bulgarian Fellow, had invited us to Made In Home, a restaurant located at Shandor Petofi 37, owned by Silvia and Rudi, who host a monthly literary gathering. Six of us sat around the restaurant’s single large wood table and dipped warm bread into a thick soap, a savory concoction of zucchini, onion, dill, red pepper powder, sour cream, with salt to taste, all served family style from a large clay pot. I was in a good mood. We talked, took pictures we promised to share when we got back to the States, and we carried on a lively conversation in broken English with several Bulgarian writers.

The conference ended the next evening, June 1, with readings of Fellows’ work at the Red House, 15 Liuben Karavelov Street, a four story red brick building in the city center built by the famous Bulgarian sculptor, Andrey Nikolov. The building’s style is Mediterranean, which is quite unusual for Sofia. Nikolov built the house after he returned from Rome, where he lived from 1914 to 1927. Today, the Red House is a cultural landmark. The last evening of the Conference’s events began at 7:15 pm sharp with a literary flash mob just outside the steps of the Red House. I was reluctant to participate in an event described with the opposing sensibilities of mob and literary and flash, but I was curious too. Who wouldn’t be? I showed up outside the Red House and joined other writers, conference participants, students, and passers-by. At the precise moment this ‘mob’ started reading out loud. Different work. Our own work. The work of dead poets. Anything. This created a noisy cacophony of literary gobbledygook. Words overlapped and intersected and individual words lost meaning. It ended at precisely 7:20 pm, as suddenly as it began, and just as spontaneously. Each reader dropped his manuscript in a trash basket and we dispersed on the sidewalk.

That evening’s main event was a public reading by conference fellows in the Red House’s second floor gallery. Each of the ten fellows read a brief excerpt of his or her work, and the mixed language audience read the English translation of the spoken Bulgarian text on a large projected screen (or the Bulgarian translation in the case of an English text). I introduced each of my American colleagues and Ivan Dimitrov did the same for the Bulgarian fellows. The presentation format was clever, mixing languages, diverse voices, and literary styles. The Bulgarian excerpts often gravitated toward the absurd – the employer who places a classified ad for a worker willing to be fired. We Americans wrote about varieties of emotion: love, courage, tolerance. This reinforced a running joke at the conference: Americans wrote about divorce and suicide; Bulgarians wrote about waking up a cockroach.

My evening ended on the roof of the Red House under a warm night sky among fellow writers whose company made me feel less alone in the world. I had been vulnerable and felt stronger for it. Wine and appetizers were served on a terrace that looked onto the quiet tree-lined street and Soviet-era apartment buildings. The night was cool, the food savory, and conversations took up memories of the remarkable week we’d spent together, exchanging addresses, hugs, and promises–real promises–to stay in touch.

Part IV: Caesura

by Charles Conley

If I were going to try to make you feel the sense of excitement I felt at this year’s Sozopol Fiction Seminar, here’s how I’d do it. I’d write about exhaustion from jet lag and hangovers, what seemed to be unending conversation, the intoxication and surprise of making new friends, the feeling of literary discovery that was permitted mostly by my embarrassing ignorance of contemporary non-English literature. I’d also write about the blue skies, the Black Sea, and the red-tiled roofs of Sozopol; describe how befuddling it is not to know how to even pronounce a word because it’s written with a different alphabet; and, of course, proclaim to the world once again the justly famous Bulgarian sense of hospitality.

That’s not what I’m not going to do, though. What I’m going to do is write about the dolphins.

Friday, May 28, was our first full day in Sozopol. From 9:00 am until 7:30 pm, when dinner started, we shuttled from workshop to lunch to panel to reading. It felt as if every moment I had somewhere to be. Actually, it felt as if every moment there were two places I wanted to be—at that panel but having this conversation; listening to Elizabeth Kostova read but swimming in the Black Sea. (I had been talking about swimming in the Black Sea for weeks before the trip to Bulgaria, and I almost didn’t do it, because swimming in the Black Sea meant possibly missing something else, and that something else might have been too dear to miss.)

After lunch, right before the “Translation in Practice” panel was about to begin, as we gathered behind the art gallery that housed the workshops, panels, and readings, we saw three or four dolphins playing out in the bay. At first, I wasn’t sure—was that a splash or a whitecap? A fin or the sun and water playing tricks? Then, yes! A dolphin leaping in the water. Then another. Then a couple playing together. It was a moment when we all took a deep breath in the middle of the riot of conversation and literature and sun and food. Sometimes a moment of silence lets you hear the music within the noise. For me, this was that silence, and it changed how I heard everything that came around it. Plus, who doesn’t want to look at dolphins?

Then it was time to go inside and get on with it. There was inspiration and information inside the gallery, and after the translation panel was a reading, and after the reading was more good Bulgarian food and better Bulgarian wine, and plenty of evening stretching ahead of us.

Then there was Saturday, with more workshopping in the morning, and more conversation over lunch, and more panels and readings after lunch—but between 1:30 pm, when lunch ended, and 4:00 pm, when the second day’s translation panel started, the schedule was clear.

This was a miracle, and though bed called—jet lag was still plaguing us and we’d all been up late the night before—several of us decided to take a boat ride out of Sozopol Harbor. Alex and Stephanie Miller had recommended the forty-minute tour they’d taken the previous day. They told us to just find the blue and white boat.

The Sozopol portion of the seminar takes place over three densely packed days, and this boat ride came in the center of that line, a forty-minute caesura when we did nothing but look at the Black Sea, calm except for the occasional wake from a passing boat, and watch buildings on the shore slide past—hotels mostly free of guests so early in the season, square and modern vacation homes, restaurants with outdoor terraces, and the art gallery, windows and cream topped by red tile, presenting its proudest side to the sea. We chatted, of course, but not the heavy conversational lifting of dinner—those dinner conversations called for wine or rakia to fuel them. We saw a mussel farm and an island that may or may not have been populated by fishing snakes, and, for a little while, it didn’t matter that we were going back to literary conversation and activity of the most intense sort, because we were out on the sea in a small boat and everything around us was beautiful and new.

Our caesura was ably captained by this man.

We snapped the picture of our captain and rushed back into the maelstrom of the seminar. Except for the late evenings (the heavy-lifting period), we were busy with workshops and panels and readings until we boarded the bus for Sofia on May 31 with a sorrowful goodbye to lovely Sozopol, but perhaps a measure of gratitude that we could finally rest.

The program ended with a reading the evening of Tuesday, June 1. If I left for the U.S. the next morning, I could be back at work Friday. Taking one more day off work meant three more days in Bulgaria, an obvious conclusion I thought everyone would come to.

They did not.

Fellow American Kelly Luce stayed an extra day. We walked around Sofia, a city in which everything is within walking distance, and we talked about the seminar, the town of Sozopol, and the Bulgarians and Americans we’d so recently met and were already missing. We walked past the long stone water feature in front of Vasil Levski National Stadium and followed the paths into a hilly wooded area of Borisova gradina. We also went to the churches—the ancient brickwork of the Church of Sveti Sofia (where the city gets its name) and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which is not only a grand church topped by gold and verdigris domes, but has a bustling marketplace out front. At this bazaar, Kelly helped me buy gifts (filigreed jewelry, a million lev note, and a Russian doll, among other items) and gave me tips on how to haggle with the vendors. On a fence made of plywood around a building that had apparently been under construction for years, we saw breathtaking graffiti in English and Bulgarian.

We went back to our rooms after our walk, but mine was being made up, so I went to a shop I’d noticed earlier to buy a gift for my niece. As I left the store, I saw a businessman in a gray suit standing stock still. Then I noticed the siren in the distance. I turned a corner and saw over a dozen more people standing completely still, as if they were listening for something, waiting for instructions. It felt like the Bulgarian version of a tornado siren. I thought we would be told what to do, but no instructions came.

Back at the hotel, I asked what the siren meant, and they told me the story: On June 2, 1876, shortly after noon, Christo Botev crossed the Danube with 200 Austrians in the hope of inciting and leading a Bulgarian revolution against the Ottomans. He and all his men were killed. Every year on that date at that time, a siren goes off and everyone stays still for one minute to commemorate his sacrifice—no one speaks, no one moves except ignorant tourists.

Thursday, June 3, I wandered Sofia alone. I visited the Sofia Military Museum, a well-presented museum on the edge of the city, outside of which are dozens of tanks, planes, helicopters, and jeeps from World Wars I and II and the Soviet Era. After the long walk (which included getting lost) to the museum, I arrived with only forty-five minutes to see the impressive galleries of military history from ancient times—when the Thracians fought the Greeks and Romans—through the Second World War. That night I also visited Hambara, my vote for coolest bar in the world, one last time. Built in an old barn, as far as I could see there were no electric lights in the place, just dozens if not hundreds of small candles the staff replaced every few hours. The bar has no sign outside, and I almost couldn’t find it despite the fact that I’d been there twice before.

Friday, I went to the Archeological Museum, filled with Thracian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, including a Roman-era “statue of a woman with a head that does not pertain to her” (a phrase that resonated with me). After, I had lunch with Milena Deleva, a woman of apparently limitless energy who directs the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. She was our primary contact with the foundation leading up to the seminar and organized everything from our hotels in Sofia and Sozopol to who would translate our story excerpts into Bulgarian. She scheduled all our meals, which included arranging—with no notice whatsoever—an alternative to the outdoor restaurant where we had reservations on the one night in Sozopol there were thunderstorms. In addition to all that, when I lost my bag during the panel on literary diplomacy in Sofia, she was the one who knew where it was. Friday evening found me at an art opening with my Sozopol roommate, Ivan Dimitrov, who met me after an interview at a local radio station about his new novel. The opening was a Lewis Carroll-inspired take on the artist’s time in Amsterdam, and in addition to the photos and texts lining the walls, it featured live rabbits, a musician playing a didgeridoo, little girls dressed as Alice, and actors playing Amsterdam prostitutes. Saturday morning, June 5, at 6:35 am, my plane left Sofia airport.

At the end of the Beatles song “A Day in the Life,” there’s this long orchestral crescendo, strings, brass, reeds, percussion all improvising up the scale as the volume increases. The crescendo ends when multiple E-Major piano chords are struck simultaneously. On my iPod, those chords take forty-one seconds to quiet. It’s like the song is trying to hold onto itself, not give up what has come before, not fade into silence. My last three days in Sofia were like that. I wandered Sofia taking in the sights and sounds of the city while simultaneously replaying conversations from Sozopol, trying to hold onto the feeling of the sun and the wind in my hair as I ate lunch on the terrace overlooking the Black Sea.

I mentioned at the beginning that the silence in the moments we watched the dolphins allowed me to hear the music within the noise of the seminar. What I want now—what I’ve wanted since I returned to the U.S.—is to hold onto that music within the silence that follows.

Further Links and Resources:

The 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminars will take place next year May 26th to 31st.

Ten scholarships to attend the Sozopol Fiction Seminars will be given to five fiction writers working in English and five working in Bulgarian. The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation will cover tuition fee, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of the international travel expenses. Writers of any nationality are eligible.

Using the online submission system, submit 10-20 pages of fiction, a personal statement, a curriculum vitae, artistic statement, and a letter of reference by February 15, 2011.

Visit the EKF Website for complete guidelines. You may also write Milena Deleva, the Director of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation: mdeleva@ekf.bg

Kelly Luce’s collection of Japan-set stories received the San Francisco Foundation’s 2008 Jackson Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Bakeless Prize. The title story, “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster,” was awarded Tampa Review’s 2008 Danahy Prize. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Jentel Arts, and can be found in The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Nimrod, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals. This spring, she was the Writer in Residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando; in July, she attended the Sewanee Writers Conference as a Scholar.

A graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Michigan MFA program, Carin Clevidence is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her short stories have appeared in Story, the Indiana Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and FiveChapters, among others, and her travel writing in Grand Tour and the Asahi Weekly of Japan. Her first novel, The House on Salt Hay Road has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Paul Vidich is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program. His stories have appeared in online literary journals and have been finalists in Glimmer Train contests, the 2009 Richard Bausch Short Story Contest, and the 2008 Raymond Carver Award for New Writers. He is a board member of Poets and Writers.

Charles Conley, born and raised on Long Island, is a 2009-2010 fellow at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York and was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review and The Harvard Review and are forthcoming in North American Review and Canadian Notes and Queries. He is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant in 2010 and a SASE/Jerome Grant for Emerging Writers in 2007. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota.