"Rocky Halpern is a writer, sex educator, lifelong nomad, and second year MFA creative writing candidate with a concentration in nonfiction. He is the 2019 recipient of the Bette Howland Nonfiction Award, and currently working on a memoir about his experience coming to terms with being a gay, transgender man during a time in his life where in which he feared being a man was synonymous with being a monster. He is a lifelong theatre nerd, lover of trashy celebrity memoirs, and the color pink." 

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

My favorite villain would have to be the talented Mr. Tom Ripley. I guess I'm a sucker for a brooding anti-hero dripping in gay subtext and the blood of his perceived enemies.

My favorite protagonist is Alison Bechdel's unflinching and earnest characterization of her childhood/younger self in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Bechdel was the first memoirist who helped me understand how impactful the truth could be, and that sometimes you've got to be your own hero. 

2. When did you know you were a writer?

I knew I was a writer when I was trying to do anything besides write, but still found myself surrounded by little scraps of ideas I was too insecure to follow through with. I realized I owed it to myself to try, because the itch wasn't going away. 

3. What are you currently working on?

Right now I'm working on my memoir, which is centered around three generations of men in my family and my experience coming to terms with being transgender. I have also been working on a young adult novel about a trans gay boy who loves musical theatre. I spent my entire tween and teen years searching for every single book about LGBT kids, and there just weren't that many. And there were like none about trans kids, which is probably why it took me well into adulthood to discover that about myself. I think if I had even read one book about a boy like me, it would have changed everything. So, I want to write the book that would have saved me as a kid. 

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

When I was 13, I would write these terrible, angsty poems about drowning in blood and eating dead flowers. My mother found them and I was promptly sent to therapy. I kept writing bad poetry about dying, but would immediately tear up the poems afterwards so no one could ever find them. So, I guess my subject matter has improved, and I don't immediately throw my writing into the trash anymore (though I am still tempted to do so at times). 

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

“All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others" -Cher

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY.  She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.

By Liz Sheldon

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2018.

Liz Sheldon, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Christopher Bonanos about his book Flash: The Making of Weegee The Famous. As the city editor of New York magazine, Christopher Bonanos is no stranger to the hustle it takes to make it in the NYC media world. But that inside perspective is just part of what Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, his new NBCC-nominated biography of mid-century crime and pop photographer Weegee, so much fun to read. In exploring how tenement kid Arthur Fellig became self-taught photographer, early branding expert, and true New York character Weegee, Bonanos (whose first book was Instant: The Story of Polaroid) also takes us on a romp through the history of the tabloid industry, the rise and fall of the New York mob, and even the golden age of Hollywood. Bonanos took a few minutes to chat about Weegee’s wild legacy and the process of distilling it into Flash.

LS: First things first: Why Weegee?

CB: “I would say two things: one, I usually write about New York City history, and the history of the press, and two, because my previous book about photography. And they all cross paths with him.”

LS: In fact, so much seems to cross paths with him—the history of New York, the origins of tabloid journalism, the evolution of street photography as an art form...

CB: “It’s so true, he keeps popping up in other people’s stories, which makes him an interesting person to trace through the culture. And you can follow him through his work, as well as through his life, because his pictures are a great history of New York in his time.”

LS: The book includes hour-by-hour replays of some of his nights hitting the streets and hustling to get back and forth to crime scenes and dark room in those early days. How did you put those timelines together??

CB: “The International Center of Photography has his estate, so some of it was from their archive. They have a lot of manuscript pages from magazine articles, and a few drafts of the autobiography he wrote, so I could go through the cut material for details. But mostly I put together the blow-by-blow by going through all the newspapers from those years. His career in the thirties is not very well-documented. Later on he becomes easier to trace because he started to get famous, especially once he started working for P.M., the now-defunct paper that turned him into a character. He authored columns for them, and they also wrote more about him. But before that, he wasn’t wasn’t really in the habit of saving much of his work, so a lot of what he shot went into the anonymous stream of news photographs. But about every other week a paper would run an image from him with a credit, so I tracked his nights via those. What’s challenging about that though is that most of the papers from that time still haven’t been digitized. There were nine dailies in New York at the time, and the only way to find all the photo credits is to turn every damn page on microfilm. So I would sit there in the New York Public Library every Saturday and Sunday—I can tell you from experience they’re also open late two nights a week—and I would just turn pages. I went through five years of the New York Post, and five years of the New York World-Telegram, and five years of The New York Sun. There were patchy databases of the Post and the Sun online, and two of the bigger papers, The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune are digitally searchable. It was a big job—but those three papers, and The New York Evening Journal, were the ones that credited him the most in the early days, so I focused my efforts there.”

LS: A running theme in the book is the question of how much posing and fudging Weegee did to get the shot—and also the extent to which his work is considered capital A art, and you’re pretty egalitarian about it. How did you decide how much of your feelings about those topics to insert?

CB: “The academic art historians have their own strong opinions on this. I like the academics who have written about Weegee a lot, but they look at it as purely artistic practice. I come at it differently because I am also a member of the press, and I see how newspaper and magazines photographers work. It fascinates me how we see these pictures so differently. I’m thinking about the way our New York photographers have shot and what it’s like in a press scrum, and art historians are just thinking about the end result. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that my perspective is better or more accurate, it’s just different.”

“In terms of actual value judgement, I think he was well in line with the values of his time. The business of occasionally setting up a picture—I think a lot of news photographers did that at the time. There are so many stories in memoirs of the time of a photographer giving a kid 10 bucks to go stand in the right place. You can get on your high horse about it as a journalism critic, or you can say, ‘that’s how the job was done then’. That’s just a fact. And the pictures sometimes do tell the truth even when they’ve gotten a little help.”

LS: Can you talk a bit more about how being an editor affected how you tackled this story?

CB: “As a member of the press, there are times that I can recognize what he’s going for in a photograph that an art critic might not—and vice versa! He was also working during the Great Depression, when the tabloid and newspaper business was going great guns, but it was not as rich as it had been a few years earlier. There were mergers going on that diminished the number of outlets at some points, and it was a place where freelancers were scraping by. All of which might feel kind of familiar if you’re paying attention to the industry.”

LS: Part of how Weegee became a household name was by inserting himself into his news photographs. Was he the only photographer to take things that far?

CB: “I’m not sure, and I’ll tell you why. Because you do see people pointing in pictures, but you don’t know who they are. Is that some random passerby that the photographer grabbed, or is it himself? I would guess that what Weegee did was a little more unusual. He was such a lone wolf and he wanted his face in the paper. I bet he felt like he was putting one over the photo editors now and then. And it did work for him. As I said at one point in the book, he created a personal brand before we had that word, and it has lasted a hundred years. He was built for the age of Instagram. He was self-promoting, and what is Instagram if not a tool for self-promotion? I always say if he were alive today he would be pitching a reality T.V. show about his life called I Shoot By Night. I’d watch it!”

LS: Do you have favorite of the anecdotes about his wild adventures?

CB: “What I love especially are the news stories behind the photographs. Like, for example the image of William Hessler, who turned up in a trunk in Brooklyn. I love the detail that he was found with 48 ice pick wounds in his chest and a nickel in his pocket, and the nickel was left there by mobsters in order to give the victim car fare home. I mean, c’mon!”

“In terms of his life story, the joyful hustle of it all is incredibly pleasurable. I also love that story about the photo that really got him into the game in 1936, when he went racing out to photograph the couple of murderer teenages in Bayonne New Jersey at four in the morning. It’s an amazing story of getting there in the two-hour window after the morning papers came out without any pictures, and before the deadline for the afternoon papers.”

LS: He’s such an interesting lens through which to view the NYC media landscape. Was he just in the right place at the right time?

CB: “I think that’s sort of half true. In the beginning he was just a working stiff press photographer. He had some talent, but he was nothing special. Over the first few years of shooting, partly because he worked all the time and partly because he turned out to have an eye, he learned how to do it as well as anyone, and then to elevate it past the level of workaday, take the picture for the paper and up to something more meaningful. But he really embraced the job you could get at the time. He was very practical that way. He also got started very late. He didn’t quit his job to go freelance until he was 36, and he didn’t get famous until he was in his forties. Nobody does that! It’s really wild.”

LS: How did you hit on the irreverent, kind of fast-paced tone of the book? It’s such a great match for the story you’re telling.

CB: “That’s something I thought about a great deal. My own voice as a writer is shaped by magazine work, so I was part way there. I write for a popular audience. But I did make a conscious choice that I wanted to avoid any sort of formality in the language. I wanted it to be a restrained version of a tabloid voice. Now I am not a tabloid writer, they write short sentences and I write long sentences, but I wanted a little of that snap and verve to get in there somehow, and I was never sure if I’d got it. So it’s great to hear if people are seeing that in there.”

“The definitive quality of Weegee’s photos is this sort of playful ghoulishness, and kind of reveling in the picture of the dead guy bleeding on the sidewalk, about which Weegee said ‘I really wanted to make it look like he was taking a little nap.’ So I tried to summon up that voice. Weegee’s particular New York-accented idioms are also very familiar to me. It’s pretty much the way my grandparents and their friends spoke, and his voice, which I have come to know on recordings pretty well, is one that I recognize from real life. And maybe that got in my head a little bit too. There’s a video called Weegee Tells How, it’s a recording he made in 1958 explaining how he made some of his more favorite photographs. You can hear his accent, and it’s pretty unbelievable.”

LS: Weegee was so prolific—how did you pick which photos to include in the book?

CB: “I had a long list! I had a budget, so that determined the number. There’s about 60, and it was definitely painful chucking out a few at the last minute. Sometimes I wanted to illustrate a particular anecdote or make a point about his photographic technique. Other times it was too good a photo to leave out. For example The Critic has to appear, it’s so famous. Then in three or four few cases, they were pictures I just loved too much not to include. There’s one photograph of Robert Joyce, the guy who drank 18 beers and shot two guys in an argument about the Brooklyn Dodgers. It’s an amazing face, and I just knew I had to have it.”

LS: I couldn’t decide at the end if this is a triumphant story, or a sad one. What do you think?

CB: “I don’t know either. It ended badly for him in that he was broke. But he wasn’t alone, he had Wilma, his on-again, off-again partner. She was the silent hero who safeguarded his archive. He ended sort of forgotten and not really happy with the way things had turned out for him—but at the same time, there is a sort of triumph, in that he wanted to be famous, he wanted to not be forgotten. It’s 2019, he’s in a 400-page book and here we are talking about his story.”

Christopher Bonanos is city editor at New York magazine, where he covers arts and culture and urban affairs. He is the author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid. He lives in New York City with his wife and their son.

Liz Sheldon is the Editorial Director at Of a Kind and a current MFA candidate in fiction at The New School.

Aditya Goenka came to New York City to pursue a MFA in fiction from The New School, on a sabbatical from his job as a police officer in Meghalaya, in northeast India, where he has worked since 2008. Goenka’s family accompanied him, and he and his wife enrolled their children in PS 165 on 110th street inHarlem. One day his daughter, who is in first grade, came home from school traumatized. She had been stuck in the restroom during a lockdown drill. When Goenka asked her what the exercise was for, she told him it was how students were meant to respond if there was a shooter in the school.

Goenka’s daughter’s story took him back to his experiences as the commanding officer of a counterinsurgency special unit. He has been in shootings up close. There have been casualties in his unit during operations, and as district chief of police he has supervised investigations into violent crimes involving the death of civilians. That his six-year-old daughter should have to deal with such things, however, was shocking to him.

Guns find a pride of place in the global patriarchal culture. They've become symbols divorced from their effects, normalizing extreme violence in our everyday lives. The proliferation of arms across the globe gives any individual anywhere extraordinary potential to harm both themselves and others.

AFTER EFFECTS is the artist's attempt to take the onlooker into an immersive space where they can witness the effects and stand testimony to this violence. Furniture from children’s schools has been shot using a variety of weapons, from pistols to shotguns to automatic weapons.

AFTER EFFECTS engages the senses by using the smells typical of an art class in school. There is a shelf with rolled scrolls of poems and statistics. At the end of the installation, there is a recreation of an active lock-down. The onlooker is invited to fold his arms over his head and look at the display with earphones.  

AFTER EFFECTS is a part of Goenka’s creative thesis, under his advisor Dale Peck and John Reed, it was supported by Latief Dickerson of NJ Firearms Academy.

AFTER EFFECTS is located on the third floor of the sky bridge in Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, at 66 W. 12th Street. It is open for viewing from the March 28th till April 5th. Goenka is available at adityagoenka61rr@gmail.com.

In April of 2018, Alia Malek spoke with Zia Jaffrey at a nonfiction forum event at the New School. Malek read from her memoir The Home That Was Our Country, a book about Syria, published in 2017.

The Home That Was Our Countrybegins with a portrayal of Malek’s great grandfather Abdeljawwad, a prominent statesman in the city of Hama, who came of age during the French colonialization. Alia uses her great grandfather’s life to shed light on the politics of that time. The book then moves onto the life of his daughter, Malek’s strong-willed grandmother, who, despite having limited opportunities as a woman, tenaciously carved-out her independence in Damascus. She became the first person in Syria to sell Avon products, in bulk, to large department stores. Like her father, who ignored her, she loved to hold court at her modern apartment building, the Tehaan—a multi-story, multi-family home, built in the forties. She welcomed poets, politicians, seamstresses and neighbors, and anyone who knocked on her door in need of assistance. As her reputation grew, she utilized her influence in the military and government to aid families in life or death situations. Malek uses the Tehaan to show Syrians’ capacity for peaceful coexistence; Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and a diverse multi-ethnic population, dwell within its walls. In the second half of the book, Malek takes us to 2011, to a Syria on the verge of civil war. Under the guise of returning to her ancestral home to renovate her late grandmother’s apartment, Malek researches and reports on the Assad regime and Syria’s disintegration.  

P.M.: How would the story have changed if you’d written it after Trump took office? And in writing nonfiction, is it more critical for you to incorporate political-historical rhetoric or more of a ground view based on interviews?

A.M.: So the first one, I have to think about the second one, but the first one, I don’t think it would have changed it, because I think the longevity of the work would be affected in a less positive way if you were trying to be responsive. Time moves, things happen and change and if you’re trying to responsive to every single thing, you’re going to lose the coherence of the overall narrative part. 

And the second question:  there are different kinds of narrative nonfiction; mine is definitely based in interviews. I don’t know if you saw it, but Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple’s book, Brothers of The Gun, there’s no context, no explanation, it’s just the narrative as it is. I asked them if that was a conscious choice and Molly said there was a tension because she felt that an American reader needed more context, but he didn’t want to deviate. He felt like people could google the history. But because in Syria the history is so contested, we have fake news and deliver obfuscation by agents from Russia and Iran, and I didn’t feel like I could leave that to chance because Syria is such a vacuum of knowledge. I did feel obligated to fill in. Some people would say I didn’t maintain balance. Some people loved the narrative parts and wanted less history, but I kind of wanted people to get through the book and come away with a deep understanding of what is going on. The story is there to drive you forward, but people did need to understand the history of economics, and colonialism to understand the moment, and that was a choice I made. But if I were writing a book about America for America I could just tell you the story. So many Syrians don’t know their history because it is purposefully deprived of knowledge, authorial dictatorship requires that. It was also important for me to lay things out, also using the work of scholars. I’m very scholarship heavy in my work. People have done wonderful historical work and studied the political economy or the regime. It’s a long-winded answer, but that’s sort of my approach. 

P.M.: What were the most useful strategies for condensing the history and narratives? 

A.M.: I think readers will extend you a certain leniency, but ultimately you need to be propelling the story forward, and what’s what editors are for. I am someone who loves history, the minutia of it. That’s not the majority of readers and sometime my editor would be like this is too much detail. Sometimes, you have to read five books to write five paragraphs. Your job is not to report everything; it’s to take what you learn, so your reader gets what they get what they need to know. The end of the Ottoman Empire in Syrian History is only being excavated in recent years. I basically stopped doing anything for a month and went into the minutia and interviewed the scholars whose books I was reading to be able to give the readers the five paragraphs they needed. When all else fails, your editor is there to clean it up for you. 

P.M.: Sounds like a team effort. 

A.M.: Yes, or you should have a trusted reader. In my earlier work, my sister was my trusted reader. In my current work, my partner is also great at that. 

P.M.: You touch on the psychological effects of the Assad Regime; do you see parallels between the propaganda tools the administration uses here and over there?

A.M.: Yeah, I mean regrettably. We at least have our free press. That’s why there are all these dispersions of the free press and fake news. In a dictatorship, you have state T.V. Take North Korea, it’s very effective. The other thing about Syria is that because everyone was afraid that someone would inform on them nobody spoke openly, nobody knew what other people thought. The state was kind of like this chaperone that was omnipresent. The state isn't omnipresent in the US, but now, because you can choose your truth – you choose your Fox News, or you choose your MSNBC—we’re not interacting with everybody else, and in that you can ferment a kind of suspicion or a fear of the other, and that’s what’s crazy. We are self-selecting; we’re opting into this. Although people over there are too, I think I talked about it a little bit, either you’re watching Al Jazeera or State T.V. Honest, open interaction between different parts of society were not existent in Syria, and now, here in the US where they should be plenty existent, because we choose our partisan line, feed, news, you’re seeing something similar; it is dismaying. 

P.M.: It happens on Facebook too.

A.M.: Right, you can curate your feed, and now the algorithms are speaking to that. I watched the Republican reaction of people who attended Trump rallies last week; I mean, they’re not seeing the news the way we’re seeing it. They’re not mortified about what’s happening at the border. There’s clearly a lack of knowing each other.

P.M.: Were there any pressing questions you had while writing and were you consciously addressing them in the book?

A.M.: A part of me wonders: how did we get here? That was the big overarching question. What chances are there for reconciliation? What could the future look like? Yeah, those are the things I’m still trying to figure out and ask. Who were these people I come from? And why do I feel disconnected from them in many ways.

P.M.: I can relate to that.

A.M.: Who were they? It’s so frustrating; they’re not alive to ask them.

P.M.: Is there anything you didn’t get a chance to ask grandmother?

A.M.: So much I would want to know from her, like was she happy. Mostly I’d want to know about happiness and fulfillment and how did she feel about the way her father treated her mother. I can try to understand, but it’s not the same as asking her, I wish there was so much I would have asked her. Is there any hope for Syria? Did it have to go this way? I would have asked her a lot. You know, what was she wrong about? Did she prevent her own happiness? These are the things I’m curious about now.

P.M.: What shocked you most about the Assad regimes approach to its citizenry?

A.M.: I thought: there are new ways to manipulate populations, like brute force, I didn’t think they would go that route, you can break a people many other ways, and they chose the most traditional, although they’re being rewarded, at least in the short term, so maybe we’re all the idiots.

P.M.: Like they’re getting the last laugh.

A.M.: Yeah, I think they’ve engineered their continuity, but to what cause? A lot of skilled and entrepreneurial smart people have left the country. In the long run, those are the type of people you want to build the country—activists, people with consciousness, people who never thought of themselves as activists, but people who stood up in the moment and said that this isn’t right. I thought they were more modern and would have co-opted the movement, but no one will ever rise up again, people’s lives have been so broken. It’s horrible. Stealing their property. Everything is done in legal ways, like confiscating properties, absentee properties that are considered abandoned so you can’t return. The reconstruction is going to make the people who are already in power even richer. The money that’s about to be made is sick. Sorry, this isn’t really optimistic. 

P.M.: Do you have any advice for people who are detached from what’s happening or feel powerless to do anything?

A.M.: Those are two different people – the first one, what goes around comes around. The international system in many ways has sort of showed that evil can triumph, so why would anyone stand up. I think Americans have a problem imagining that anything can happen in the US, and to those people I recommend they read, a very dystopian novel, American War, he [ Omar El Akkad] imagines a new civil war here in the US and shows how things can come apart and people from the outside can also manipulate that. But we have a playbook where the world will not take action; you know obfuscating the truth, now that the truth is so malleable in the end, to destabilize the Middle East is not a good thing. A lot of things we’ve taken for granted have been put into question by what’s happened in Syria.  For those people you’re wrong to think that you shouldn’t be alert. 

For those who feel powerless about it that’s good – good news to them, they’re still kind of human, but we can demand that you differ the kind of discourse, because a lot of the language – like illegal refugee – is meant to dehumanize other people. The Muslim Ban the Syrian Ban we’re all here, this is a representative government, speak up. Go, volunteer, there are ways to extend yourself to show that we are not the same as our leaders.

P.M.: Can talk you a bit about your work with Europa?

A.M.: Yeah, that was valuable information to relay to refugees, and people trying to make this journey. I don't know how much it of an impact it will have on Syria, but when I see people aboard the rescue ships readingEuropanot only does it show the world the different side of refugees, but there's some value in it, and that makes me feel very good about that work.  I'm glad we created something that spoke to them a different way, because implicit in making work like that is saying, I recognize that you are human and educated, and people of understanding.

Plamena Malinova is a Bulgarian-American writer, educator, and lover of cats. She is an MFA candidate at the New School focusing on dual concentrations in Nonfiction and Writing for Children and Young Adults.

The Creative Writing Program will be represented at this years AWP conference. Come by booth 9041 to say hello Thursday March 28-30.

Below is a list of events including our faculty and students:

R263. What's Craft Got to Do With It?: On Craft, Race, and the Black Imagination. Thursday, March 28, 2019 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm. C124, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1. Featuring Dianca London Potts,Dennis Norris II, Jessica Lanay, Cole Lavalais.

In an age when Black authors are on the rise, why is craft still dismissed as "bougie" or adjacent to whiteness? Why are Black narratives analyzed primarily through a sociological or anthropological lens rather than one of literary craft? Why do so many readers and writers still resist the merit of craft when it comes to Black literature? This dialogue examines, confronts, and unpacks the creative and cultural implications and potential of craft within the contemporary Black literary canon.

*Offsite* BitchReads Live! Thursday, March 28, 2019 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM. Lagunitas Community Room 37 Northeast Broadway Street #300 We're bringing our BitchReads partnership with Powell's Books from the page to the stage on Thursday, March 28. Join Bitch Media at the Lagunitas Community Room on Thursday, March 28 to eat, drink, and mingle with the Bitch staff (even our remote folks are flying in!) and hear from past Bitch contributors and writing fellows!Andi Zeisler, Naseem Jamnia, Dianca London Potts, Aya de Leon, Ilana Masad, Randa Jarrar, and more!

F269. WriteOn: How to Begin and Grow a Community-Oriented Writing Fellowship: Friday, March 29, 2019, 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm, D135, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1. Featuring Catherine Bloomer, Helen Schulman, Austen Osworth, and Kiri Milburn.

WriteOn is a fellowship offered by The New School that places MFA candidates in under-resourced middle and high school classrooms as creative writing instructors. Join New School administrators, faculty, and fellows to discuss creating a new organization within a university, creatively partnering with community organizations to meet needs symbiotically, and preparing MFA candidates to enter the world as teachers, professors, and literary citizens.

F286. Beyond Voice: Teaching the Craft of Consciousness in Poetry. Friday, March 29, 2019, 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm. Portland Ballroom 255, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2. Featuring Erin Belieu, Adrian Matejka, Dana Levin, Monica Youn, Mark Bibbins.

In workshops, much is made of a writer’s “voice.” But it may be more apt to think beyond this privileging of utterance and conversational tone to consider a more three-dimensional idea of how we shape a distinct consciousness on the page. In this panel, we discuss strategies for encouraging students to think beyond voice, offering ideas on how intellectual engagement, conceptual structures, poetic form, and the tensions of argument and rhetoric help build a fuller sense of a poem’s speaker.

F165.  Extreme Exposure: Going Public with Deeply Personal Stories.  Friday, March 29, 2019, 10:30 am to 11:45 am Oregon Convention Center, Level 1. Featuring Nancy Hightower, Alison Kinney, Doreen Oliver, Julie Metz, Alice Eve Cohen

After realizing that a story must be told, the writer faces difficult questions. What are the rewards for the writer in going public with their most personal experiences? What are the risks? How might these stories benefit individual readers? What is the value for the larger community? The #MeToo movement has demonstrated the power of sharing stories once shrouded in secrecy. In this panel, essayists and memoirists discuss artistic and personal complexities of sharing their most personal stories.

R191.  Let's Talk About Race, Baby; Let's Talk About You & Me.   C123, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 Thursday, March 28, 2019 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm. Featuring Jean Kwok, Mira Jacob, Mitchell S. Jackson, Irina Reyn, Devi Laskar.

This panel is for anyone, regardless of color, who wishes to improve the way they write about, teach or publish racially- or ethnically-charged issues in this complex time. How do we handle race and ethnicity with sensitivity, in real life and on the page? How can we overcome discrimination in workshops and the publishing world? May we write negatively about a character of a particular race? This panel of successful writers provides honesty and humor and suggests strategies for connection.

S206.  What a Heroine Can Do: Female Protagonists Take Back the Narrative Oregon Ballroom 203, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2  
Saturday, March 30, 2019, 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm. Featuring Alexander Lumans, Kirstin Chen, Marie-Helene Bertino, Mira Jacob, Katherine Hill.

To ignore the female protagonist is to slight a necessary and integral character in literature, denying not only her past achievements but also her future potential to be an agent of her own change. In this panel, five established and emerging fiction writers give voice to the dynamically resonant women at the centers of their novels. Through individual readings of their potent protagonists, these writers challenge the patriarchal view that a woman cannot be a hero.

R258.  The Cuba Writers Program Faculty and Alumni Reading.B115, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 Thursday, March 28, 2019,3:00 pm to 4:15 pm. Featuring Alden Jones, Tim Weed, Ann Hood, Dariel Suarez, Suchita Chadha

The Cuba Writers Program launched during the Obama administration to bring writers to Cuba for workshops and engagements with Cuban artists. Its mission is to encourage meaningful interactions between the US and Cuba and to generate writing that opens transnational dialogue. Join faculty and alumni with various perspectives—Cuban, American, Canadian, citizen, expatriate, traveler—as they share their work exploring issues specific to the Cuba/US dynamic and beyond these boundaries.

F322.  What Now? When Good Writers Act Awful. Portland Ballroom 255, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2 Friday, March 29, 201, 4:30 pm to 5:45 pm. Featuring Michael Croley, John Freeman, Erika L. Sánchez, Tomás Q. Morín, Bonnie Nadzam

In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, it’s hard to know how to regard the work we love when we’ve lost respect for its author. How do we reconcile the two and how should we respond to them and their work in real life and on social media? Should an educator erase these authors from the syllabus? Is redemption for them and their work even possible? Five writers wrestle with this crisis and with what justice in our literary community should look like. 

S164.  Editor-Author Relationships: How Should They Be?. E145, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 Saturday, March 30, 2019, 10:30 am to 11:45 am. Featuring Jennifer Acker, John Freeman, Tracy O'Neill, Yuka Igarashi, Patrick Ryan.

 Literary journals and small presses provide a platform for launching the careers of writers, and strong editorial support is key to this role. Collaboration between editor and author happens in real time, on the page. In turn, editors are often writers, with their own distinct experiences sending work into the world and being edited. What can and should editors provide authors, and how can their own experiences as writers and literary citizens inform and expand these collaborative relationships?

F220.  The Art of the Book Review.  B110-112, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1, Friday, March 29, 2019, 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm. Featuring, Carolyn Kellogg, Gabino Iglesias, Veronica Scott Esposito, Joseph Salvatore, Siddhartha Deb.

Thousands of books are published each year. We're led to many of them by intelligent, engaging, well-made book reviews, which not only investigate and articulate the mysteries and pleasures a literary text offers, but also please the reader with their style. Five widely published writers/critics/editors discuss the review as a genre in its own right, a unique form that offers—and invites—critical reflection, raises the level of public discourse, and establishes professional reputation.

By Aubrey Moraif

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2018.

Aubrey Moraif, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Anna Burns about her book Milkman (Graywolf Press), which is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Milkman is a book unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It is surprising. I was surprised by its pink cover. I was even more surprised, when I opened it, to discover its narrative voice. The first line: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” The language is innovative and unexpected. It requires concentration but still moves. I was so immersed in the narrator’s mind, an unnamed 18-year-old girl trying to navigate through the complications of sexual and political predators in a world based on Belfast at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s.

It is the narrator’s unique perspective on the effects of tribalism, fear, paranoia, and sexism on her violent and unstable world that are at the core of my questions for Anna Burns. Milkman is told in a unique narrative style that allows for the strange and beautiful combination of humor and pain. With none of the names of objects provided in the narration, the story becomes one that is about Belfast during the violent period of the Troubles in the 1970s but also takes on a dreamlike universal quality which allows the reader to look inwards and explore our modern-day world while also reading about horrors that were not so long ago.

AM: What inspired you to write Milkman?

AB: Initially I had the idea to take a few hundred words of notes from another book I was writing at the time to start me off into a short story to send to a magazine. These notes were about reading-while-walking which I used to do a lot. People would say to me, including strangers in clubs and shops and bars and cafés, ‘You’re that girl who reads and walks!’ I would continually be startled at having this pointed out, mainly because it seemed an activity not particularly worthy of note. And also, I was surprised to be noticed doing it by so many people. I wanted to try to write something around the possible reasons why this was being pointed out to me, rather than about the activity of reading while walking itself.

When I started to write these notes up to make a fiction, a character appeared, a teenage girl. She was reading Ivanhoe while walking down an interface road in Belfast (or what I took to be Belfast). I went with her and she told me thoughts. She wasn’t concentrating on her book but instead was preoccupied with thoughts of her elder sister, who had told her off recently for something. After that, another tiny bit of prose came, again of this same character, now in a bar with her best friend. This friend was berating her also over something. After that, the scene changed to one that eventually became the start of the last chapter of the book. This was where her elder sister suddenly slapped her face.

And those three scenes became the beginning of the writing of Milkman. Not a short story after all.

AM: What was your artistic process?

AB: I wait for my characters to turn up and tell me their story. I discover the book from them as I write it. Frequently I am surprised and astonished by what they come and say. They are their own people. There are no guarantees. That’s the bargain. There is no bargain. They call the shots. They also tend to give me information backwards. So it’s a messy process. Eventually though, the book cleans itself.

AM: The narrative voice provides an intimate exploration of trauma and a veracious perspective of womanhood in this backwards, broken society. What inspired you to write in this stream-of-consciousness style?

AB: The language of the novel appeared at the same time as the teenage narrator, with its mix of high literary, archaic, cartoon, conversational and vernacular. This is the language of this entire fictional world. I don’t consider it stream of consciousness myself.

AM: Humor is not something I would expect to find in a novel with a society in which car bombs are commonplace, civilians caught in the crossfire of political violence are expected casualties, and sexual harassment is brushed aside and turned into neighborhood gossip. Yet, this novel associated with the Troubles incorporates comedy into the tragedy. What is the role of humor in Milkman?

AB: Humor has an important place in that society, perhaps in any society under prolonged stress. It’s another way of coping and responding to trauma and tragedy - with laughter and a different understanding. Also, one never knows for sure, for absolutely sure, what might make one laugh or cry - and when.

AM: In Milkman, none of the characters and places are given names. Instead, their name is determined by their relationship to others – middle sister, maybe-boyfriend, the country ‘over-the-water’— which allows for the setting to resemble Belfast during the Troubles without being explicit. How did that impact your writing and the story as a whole?

AB: The book didn’t work with names. It lost power and atmosphere. In the early days I tried out a few names, really out of curiosity rather than conviction. The book wouldn’t stand for it and it was right.

I think the lack of proper names adds to the atmosphere and tension in the book, to the sense of paranoia, the under-the-surface panic and unease, even if it also seems to offer an apparent protection to the characters of their real selves against the surveillance world they are living in. Also, throughout the book there is a sense of an imposed collective mindset, with obedience to it being of more importance in terms of survival than individual autonomy and identity. The individual, for the sake of survival, is required to be subsumed into the collective and hence the narrator’s harmless behaviors - looking at the sky, reading-while-walking, going to a night class down the town, having a maybe-boyfriend instead of getting married at sixteen etc - are seen as huge rebellions which pose a threat to the status quo.

This is also the case with the behaviors of some of the other characters: the issue women having their meetings; the pious women after they become the ex-pious women, the French teacher; the relationship of chef and maybe-boyfriend; the international couple; wee sisters studying their forbidden publications from ‘across the water’; third brother and tablets girl’s sister daring to be together as right spouses; the beyond the pales; those district inhabitants who dare to go to hospital; second sister marrying-out.

AM: One of the most memorable quotes in Milkman is middle sister’s reaction to longest friend’s scrutiny over her habit of reading while walking. She says, “Are you saying it’s okay to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?” “Semtex isn’t unusual. It’s to be expected,” longest friend replies. How do norms and expectations play into the cautious society found in your novel?

AB: My book is a fiction about an entire society affected by long-term violence and existing under intense pressure. It is about how societies and individuals react and fragment through living their everyday lives in fear and paranoia and who are suffering both the conscious and unconscious damage that sneaks into every fiber of their being. It is a place where hypervigilance, distrustfulness and surveillance has become the norm. They are the coping mechanisms everyone uses to try to survive in their claustrophobic, totalitarian world.

AM: How does the setting resemble the setting upon which it was based? How is it different?

AB: It is recognizably a skewed form of a segregated, violent Belfast in the 1970s. I hope though, I have written it in such a way that it could also represent any closed society existing under similar restrictive circumstances.

Rather than trying to depict an actual environment with its historical events and specific locations, what’s important to me as a novelist is to get the world of the fiction true to itself, with its own inner logic and connections and emotional reality. I do this by writing what comes. The reality of the fictional world may end up being askew from the actual place it seems to be based on. To what extent that turns out to be the case is dictated by the story and the characters.

AM: Although set in the 1970s, this book is able to explore many current issues: abuse of power, sexual abuse, violence, oppression, borders, and the feared “other”. What compels you to explore these concepts in your work?

AB: My own history and experience of growing up in Ardoyne in Belfast at this time of huge pressure undeniably informs my interest in these issues. This is based on my need to understand and explore how these pressures built up and worked out in that specific time and place, as well as of what this might mean for similar places throughout the world in all different timeframes.

Anna Burns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of Milkman and two previous novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, as well as the novella, Mostly Hero. No Bones won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in East Sussex, England.

Aubrey Moraif is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bella Grace Magazine, The Hidden Scribes, and Equinox: Poetry & Prose. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and received a Master of Science in Education from Johns Hopkins University. She is currently writing a novel inspired by her experiences living and teaching special education in Hawaii for several years. You can find her on twitter @aubreymoraif.