I'm happy to present samples of my writing. Additional samples available on request.
Interview: Susanna Kaysen
Published in Seattle Weekly
Novelist Susanna Kaysen garnered much critical and public attention with Girl, Interrupted,
a sparely written chronicle of her stay, from 1967 to 1969, in a
private New England mental institution renowned for its artistic alumni
(including Ray Charles and Sylvia Plath). The haunting, often darkly
comic memoir is notably free of the bitterness one might expect from a
person shut away from the world at 17 after a brief session with a
psychiatrist.
"I
can't imagine myself without the experience; it made
me who I am," said Kaysen during a recent stop in Seattle. "It helped
me to be a writer, in a
way: when you're a mental patient you are sort of a social outcast,
and wanting to be a writer is sort of like wanting to be a social
outcast, particularly because I wasn't able to publish anything until I
was relatively old—I was 37 when my first novel was published. That's a
long time to live with no success at what you care about, doing
fly-by-night, part-time kinds of jobs while your friends who went to
Harvard are corporate executives."
An
outcast no more, Kaysen has seen her memoir top the best-seller lists.
Her previous novels—Asa, As I Knew Him, in which the narrator invents a
past for an unforthcoming lover, and Far Afield, inspired by Kaysen's
stay in the Faroe Islands—have been reissued as Vintage paperbacks. All
the attention has left the author, whose earlier books were critically
praised but far more modestly received, a bit bewildered. In the
future, Kaysen says, "I want to write a dull book."
Excerpt from commemorative program for the
Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellowship 20th-anniversary celebration, Washington, DC
.
. . Dr. Scoville's friends recall him as a warm, humorous, and
congenial man who enjoyed people, parties—and fly fishing. Even after
hip replacement operations stemming from osteoarthritis left him
reliant on canes for walking, he continued to wade out into thigh-deep
water in the rivers of the West to pursue his hobby. The canes didn't
slow him down politically either. "The sight of Pete Scoville in full
stride, leaning forward, black canes clicking along the floor, was
enough to put the fear of God into anyone who dared sneer at arms
control in his presence," recalled Jeff Porro, an editor of Arms Control Today.
He
received many honors during his lifetime, including the Rockefeller
Public Service Award, which was bestowed upon him in 1981 for
"mobilizing his energies, his scientific knowledge, and his political
insight in an effort to create a public awareness of the importance of
arms control to American and international security." His spirit and
legacy continue today via the Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellowship, a
living embodiment of his interest in encouraging young people to pursue
careers in arms control and public service.
Preview: Reading by Carolyn Forché
Published in City Paper, Washington, DC
Many
of us more politically than poetically minded first became aware of
Carolyn Forché with the publication of her second book of poetry,
1981's The Country Between Us. Combining portraits inspired by
her Detroit and Slovak roots with chronicles of her
consciousness-awakening experiences in El Salvador, the slim but
powerful volume garnered awards and became that rarity in America, a
poetry best seller. Over the past decade, Forché has lived in Lebanon
and South Africa and translated the poetry of a French Resistance
fighter killed by the Nazis, experiences reflected in the works from which she reads Monday—The Angel of History, a "polyvocal" meditation on moral conscience in the 20th century, and Against Forgetting: 20th-Century Poetry of Witness,
a Norton anthology of poetry by victims of human rights violations. At
8 p.m. at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol St. SE.
(202) 544-7077.
Mother's Day Revisited
Published in SANE World/FREEZE Focus (national circulation)
Mother's Day as a celebration of women's peace activism?
That
was the vision of Julia Ward Howe of Boston, a noted suffragist who was
one of the founders of Mother's Day. Distressed by the carnage of the
Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, Howe conceived of "a festival, a
day which would be called Mother's Day, and would be devoted to the
advocacy of peace doctrines."
In
her 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation, she wrote, "As men have often
forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now
leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of
counsel . . . as to the means whereby the great human family can live
in peace."
Several
other women began independent campaigns for a Mother's Day around the
turn of the century, and President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first
Mother's Day on May 9, 1914.
Feature: Actress Anna Deavere Smith Listens for Our DifferencesPublished on the front page of Northwest Asian Weekly, Seattle
Playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith has made a career out of listening to people—especially those radically different from her.
That alone might set her apart in today’s America, where sound bites rule the airwaves. But Smith, who gave a riveting presentation on April 16 at the University of Washington’s Meany Theater, listens to everyone—from white LA policemen to Korean shopkeepers to black gang members.
Smith’s best-known plays, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, each focus on a single American cataclysm of race. Fires explores the Jewish-black confrontations that ensued in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 after a black boy was killed by a Hasidic Jewish driver. Twilight investigates the riots in LA following the 1992 acquittal of four white policemen accused of brutally beating a black man, Rodney King.
It’s all part of Smith’s quest to help us hear each other. “America has been based on debate, but now we need symphonies,” she told the largely youthful UW audience, urging them to learn “to hear differently, to hear different tones.” She teaches a course called “The Art of Listening” at New York University, and her groundbreaking theatrical techniques are taught in drama classes at the UW and across America.
Now a San Francisco resident, Smith sent the audience (and herself, at one point) into paroxyms of laughter with an “imagined debate” excerpted from her Washington, D.C.–based play House Arrest.
Fascinated by the revelations of a near-definite genetic link between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ youngest child, Smith juxtaposed passages from separate interviews she conducted with Jefferson scholar Roger Kennedy and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, author of a book on Hemings and Jefferson, interspersing Gordon-Reed’s “Well, that’s crazy!” with Kennedy’s pronouncements that there was “not a shred, not a shred of evidence” of Jefferson’s paternity.
As her “feature presentation,” Smith presented “Shoulder to Shoulder,” an excerpt from a 1960s conversation between black writer James Baldwin and anthropologist Margaret Mead, in which Baldwin doggedly insisted on characterizing himself as an exile from America, despite Mead’s equally dogged protests about the high stakes of disengagement.
“But you see, I would say that the republic did not give that answer, because I’m a part of the republic, and I didn’t give it!” Smith-as-Mead boomed back. “In terms of the colors of our skin, you represent a course of victimization and suffering and exploitation . . . and I represent the conquerors.” Despite their different experiences, she asked, could they not “stand shoulder to shoulder, working for the same future”? It was essential, she argued, because America needed to change, in order to safeguard the very fate of the planet.
One of Smith’s closing vignettes was “Swallowing the Bitterness,” an excerpt from Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 in which she portrayed a Korean shopkeeper whose store was destroyed in the LA riots. Smith termed it one of the more complex portraits in the play. At first composed and controlled, the shopkeeper’s voice soon became a wail of anguish. “We are completely left out of this society!” she roared. Unlike blacks, “who didn’t work,” Koreans didn’t qualify for medical treatment, food stamps, or welfare after the riots, she said, because they had cars and houses.
But then her mood changed. “I was swallowing the bitterness, sitting here alone and watching them. . . . I was happy for them,” she said. “At least they got something back, OK?” Because blacks fought and sacrificed for their rights over the last two centuries, she said, all minorities are better off today.
“It’s still there,” she said. “It can burn up—anytime.”
