WRR@LARGE

by Angie Brenner

If you educate a boy
You get an individual
If you educate a girl
You get a community
- African Proverb
Sometime between the reception and podium, Greg Mortenson, author of the New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, slips off his shoes and stands on the stage of the Point Loma Nazarene University’s Brown Chapel in stocking feet. This big midwestern football player and mountain climber looks oddly comfortable with the audience of more than 1800 people. The event venue had changed three times due to increased interest in Mortenson’s highly publicized book.

Kathie Diamant, the MC for the evening from San Diego’s National Public Radio Station, KPBS, tells how Mortenson’s book was chosen as this year’s One Book One San Diego − a sort of a book club for the entire city.

“Some men climb mountains,” says Diamant, after mentioning that San Diego State University has made Three Cups of Tea mandatory reading in next year’s curriculum. “Other men move mountains.”

Actually, Greg Mortenson does both.

In 1993 bad weather thwarted Mortenson’s climb to the 28,267-foot summit of K-2 in Pakistan’s Karakoram mountain range. He became disoriented and ill before being led by his guide into the tiny village of Korphe. The failed attempt to reach the peak hit Mortenson hard. This climb was to honor his younger sister Christa who had died, and the opportunity of a lifetime was missed. Or so he thought.

While recouping in Korphe, Mortenson became friends with the village chief, Haji Ali. “As the guest in the village, I was told that the first cup of tea offered is to the stranger, the second is to a friend, and the third is for family,” Mortenson tells the audience. “And, for family, they will do anything. When I left, I asked them what was most needed in the village. Haji Ali, himself illiterate, said that the children needed to be educated; they needed a school. They were scratching out math problems with sticks in the dirt.”

Mortenson returned home, sold his few belongings, and while living in his car, began to raise money to build a school for the children of Korphe. “I typed out letters on a manual typewriter at night,” he says. “The only response was $100 from Tom Brokaw. But it gave me hope. I went to Westside Elementary School in Wisconsin where my mother is the principle and spoke to the students. Six weeks later they presented me with 62,342 pennies. That began the Pennies for Peace program, now promoted by my eleven-year-old daughter.”

The first substantial benefactor, Jean Hoerni, gave Mortenson $12,000 to return to the Pakistani village to build the school. “When I walked into the village, Haji Ali just shook his head. He never expected to see me again. “‘You can not get materials to the village unless a bridge is built,’ Ali told me. So I returned home once again to find more money to build the bridge.”

Journalist David Oliver Relin found Mortenson’s story of school building so compelling that he worked two years with him to write the story.

“My publisher wanted the subtitle, One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations,” says Mortenson. “‘Greg, only 12% of non-fiction books make money, and terror sells,’ they told me. So, I agreed with their title for the hard cover release if they agreed to use my sub-title for the paperback publication should hard cover sales not do well,” As it turned out, the hard cover sold a dismal (by New York publishing house standards) 20,000 copies. “The paperback version of Three Cups of Tea has been on the NYT’s Bestseller List for nine months now.”

We can see Mortenson’s wide grin twenty rows away.

The story is remarkable on so many levels. It’s a story about compassion and trust, and believing in a goal and not letting it go no matter how the odds are stacked against you, and how to fight terror and hate through peace and education.
Mortenson talks about the two Fatwas against him that ordered him to stop teaching girls and ordering him leave the country. The Council of Mullahs would determine his fate. Inside the Imam Bara Mosque, Mortenson joined eight stern-faced, black-turbaned men and expected the worst. Syed Mohammad Abbas Risvi greeted him and placed a red velvet box that contained the decree on the carpet in front of him and opened the lid.

“We direct all clerics in Pakistan to not interfere with your noble intentions,” read the Mullah.

Mortenson believes that his refusal of all U.S. government contributions (and millions of dollars have been offered) helps his credibility in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. “They might think I was a spy if they learned that I took money from my government,” he says.

“I just returned from a speaking engagement at the Pentagon,” he says. “They purchased 5,000 copies of my book.” Again, Mortenson’s signature broad smile illuminates his face.

The building of schools near terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, with the resurgence of the opium trade and Taliban, proves to be even more of a challenge. Recently, one of his schools was threatened by the local Taliban despot who said that they would kill students if the school wouldn’t stop educating girls. The local authorities intervened, made arrests, and stopped the Taliban before anyone was hurt.

Building schools in two of the most politically charged and dangerous countries in the world, and encouraging that more girls attend, always puts Mortenson at risk.
When he’s not overseeing the building of a new school, Mortenson travels the world fundraising for his organization, CAI (Central Asia Institute). Already he has had 140 speaking engagements this year and just returned from an event in Florida where President H.W. Bush, Barbara, and their son Jeb, listened to him speak and offered a contribution.

He tells of the e-mails he’s received from an army captain stationed in Afghanistan who candidly says that this war can not be won by bombs, only education can create peace.

“I’ve come to realize that the Pentagon has no idea about this part of the world,” says Mortenson. “The captain stationed in Afghanistan says that he has no problem ordering thousands of dollars worth of bombs to be dropped on cities, but can’t get $4,000 to help rebuild a school.

The speaking engagements are working. Mortenson now has sixty-four schools under his belt, and 25,000 students being educated, many of them are girls. And, he’s adding to the success stories.

Mortenson receiving award from Muslim girl scout

“One of the first girls I saw in Korphe was writing in the dirt with a stick. Even with much taunting and ridicule from boys, she has since graduated from high school. We paid the $800 for her medical training. Now she has returned to her village in Chunda, Pakistan, and with her medical skills has reduced the morality rate of women during pregnancy from about twenty a year to zero.”

Mortenson admits that he creates his good luck by building relationships based on trust and patience, and he takes the time for the third cup of tea.

Mortenson will carry his message again during his many San Diego speaking engagements, including the Camp Pendleton Marine base.

“You can not get peace through politics,” he says in closing. “You can only get peace through people.”

Web Links:
www.threecupsoftea.com
www.ikat.org

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by Joy E. Stocke

Michelle Obama in Tampa, Florida - December, 2007

In early December, 2007, I traveled with a group of Latin American trade and policy experts through Ecuador as part of a delegation accompanying Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus (See WRR, January 2008, "Opening the Gates of Capitalism."). At a luncheon honoring Dr. Yunus, I sat next to Frank Sanchez, a public policy expert and former Assistant Secretary of Transportation for the Clinton Administration.

We were guests of Ivonne Baki, President of the Andean Parliament, an old friend of Sanchez's from their years together at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In the mid-90s Sanchez had worrked with Baki as part of a team that brokered a peace deal solving a 53-year-old border dispute between Peru and Ecuador; and later as advisor on trade policy to the Ecuadorian government.

He was as gracious as his credentials were impressive, so when he told me he was now an advisor for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, I set down my glass of wine and began asking questions. The most obvious, "Why Obama?"

Sanchez didin't hesitiate with an answer. "Because Obama has the intelligence and guts to go into uncharted territory.He doesn't doubt that his mission is to be of public service. People don't realize that he has twelve years experience in public office in the Illinois and U.S. senates. That's longer than Senator Clinton."

I was intrigued. During conversations with friends across the political spectrum, when the name Obama came up, the discussion often turned to Obama's youth and a lack of experience compared to Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

Sanchez went on to say that Obama's wife Michelle was a political force as well, intelligent, as well-educated as her husband, and supremely articulate.

"I'm hosting a fundraiser for her next week," he said. "Would you like to come?"

*

A week later, I stood on a runway with Sanchez and fundraising organizers waiting for Michelle Obama's plane to land. It was just two weeks before Christmas and she was coming from Iowa where her husband and Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were in a tough race.

Campaign dollars mattered, and Sanchez and his team had managed to organize a sold-out event. When her plane landed, Obama gave no hint that she was anything but prepared to go the distance with her husband. The weekend before she had appeared with her husband and Oprah Winfrey at a rally in South Carolina, a crucial state in the early primaries. Tonight, she would have the opportunity to court a crowd that included black, white, and Hispanic voters.

She did it with ease and an engaging oratory style tailored to a crowd, many of whom, including myself, wanted to know as much about her children as her husband. She carried a notecard, but barely used it, opening her speech with these words:

"No matter where I go, what people want to know most is, how are the girls doing. And I want to let you know that they’re doing just fine. They are fourth graders and first graders, and they don’t care about anything but Santa right now.

But it’s interesting because I think this is becoming more of a reality for them as well. I had this interesting conversation with my nine-year-old that ranged from what college did I go to? What college did she want to go to? And, what was terrorism and where was Iraq? Interesting, there’s a level of paying attention and not paying attention.

When I asked her, "How would you feel if your father won the presidency?" - she said she was excited and scared at the same time. And the fear was that she’d have to move and go to another school.

I said, "That wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world."

So we’re holding it together pretty well.

We had a great weekend with the lady, Oprah Winfrey. That was amazing, even for all that we‘ve done. She was terrific and has been from the time we first met her when she had Barack on her show after the Democratic Convention. He had just published his first book, Dreams for my Father.

She was already an Obama supporter and said it right there on the show. She has an insight, an ability to see through the noise and identify what she sees as good leadership. She has been a good, solid friend, stepping out in a way she doesn’t have to. You know, when you are a billionaire, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to support anybody, let alone travel to the four early states and speak on their behalf.

So it was a wonderful experience and the enthusiasm and the energy was indescribable. They couldn't get everyone under the strucure and when Barack walked out, there were crowds lining the streets for a block, and they were cheering and waving.

It reminded me of a trip Barack and I took to Africa two years ago, the level of excitement that we saw in that country, the hope that people had just in the sheer presence of Barack Obama, a Kenyan, a black man, a man of great statesmanship who they thought could change the world..."

*

In Ecuador, at the end of our conversation, I asked Sanchez about the rigors of fundraising.

"First we've got to get through the early stages,: he said. "I'll continue to raise money and take a larger role in Hispanic outreach. If things go really well for us - and we'll know by mid-February - we're only at the beginning because this race could be contested right up through June."

To be continued...

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by Dale H. Cotton

The mummers will once again descend on Broad Street in Philadelphia for their annual parade and competition on New Year’s Day. Local clubs gather in secret throughout the year to prepare elaborate costumes and practice the teetering mummer walk, affectionately called the “Mummer’s strut.�? Its roots go way back, some say to mid-17th century, but its “blue-collar�? forerunner could even be the Roman festival of Saturnalia, circa 400 B.C.E., when Latin laborers marched in masks through a day of satire, gift exchange, and a mock reversal of the social order—where the powerful (masters) exchanged places with the powerless (slaves).

I stumbled upon this parade back in 2004, when I was photographing using analog film for my series on spectacles. I plan to head back this year with digital in hand, and aim to add to my collection of photos of outlandish costumes and peculiar personas. How can you resist strutters in diapers, devils with umbrellas, or Iraqi dictators, as well as fancy costumes, choreographed dances, and crowds of adoring people?

www.hingephoto.com

Devil performs the Mummer's Strut.

Elvis the Pelvis rides a float with a stone-age crew.

Saddam lives in the minds of many.

Micro-not-so-Soft complete with bugs.

"Men" in diapers bring in the New Year.

Butterfly float floats down Broad Street.

May the bluebirds of happiness take off.

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PART ONE

by Joy E. Stocke and Angie Brenner

Waiting for the Shaman
by Joy E. Stocke

"Did you know shamans live in Otavalo?" says Mohammed Baki, son of Ivonne Baki, President of the Andean Parliament, when we tell him we're staying in Ecuador a few extra days to visit the Northern Andes.

We are having dinner after one of Muhammad Yunus's talks about his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He had discussed how he had negotiated with the Imams of the local mosques.

"As leaders of the village," Yunus had said, "The Imams had control over how women lived their lives. And so I needed to gain their trust. This took time and patience."

We continued the discussion in relation to how micro-lending might work with the indigenous tribes of Ecuador, and how it might work in a Catholic society.

Ecuador is 95 percent Catholic. Indigenous people make up 25 percent of the population. Sixty-five percent of the population is mestizo, people of European and indigenous descent. And four percent, are Afro-Ecuadorian. Only six percent of the population is European.

On the drive to Otavalo, two hours north of Quito, we ask Victor, our taxi driver, if he knows any shamans.

He doesn't hesitate to say, "Yes, there is a shaman in nearby Cotacachi where my family lives. Would you like to go?"

Our search for the mystical has led us to Shiva Temples, dervish ceremonies, sweat lodges, churches, and mosques. But neither of us has visited a shaman.

And so we make arrangements to meet Victor's father (also a taxi driver) at his taxi stand in Cotacachi, then drive to see the shaman.

Victor brings us into the courtyard of a whitewashed, adobe house. Several people sit on a ledge against the wall, including a beautiful Afro-Ecuadorian girl about twelve years old, and a man who looks to be her father. The previous night, Barry Featherman, President and CEO of the Inter-American Economic Council, told Joy about the Esmeraldas, a region in Ecuador's northwest coast where many Afro-Ecuadorians live, and where their ancestors arrived in the 1600s on Spanish slave ships.

While we wait our turn with the shaman, Victor brings us into a small room in the back of the courtyard dedicated to the Virgins <em>del el Quinche and Rosario. There are several pictures of the saints and a large glass case housing an image of the Virgin del el Quinche. Several candles placed in sand burn on a metal table in front of her.

Shrine at Cotacachi
by Joy E. Stocke

The door to the shaman's room opens and another Afro-Ecuadorian man exits. Behind him, a short man appears with sparse, tangled, jet-black hair, wearing brown trousers, sweater, and a short necklace.

"That's Joaquin, the shaman," says Victor.

We had expected to see a medicine man smelling of sage and tobacco.

"Angie," says Joy. "I think this shaman practices Santeria."

Joaquin the shaman
by Joy E. Stocke

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Part II
By Angie Brenner and Joy E. Stocke

Shaman's Tools
by Joy E. Stocke

Victor motions for us to enter the room he calls the shaman's laboratory, while he steps outside to negotiate the price of our ritual cleansing with the shaman.

In the cool white-washed room, a small, wooden block dripped with candle wax, a wooden box decorated with saints, and an ebony-black spear surround a red plastic lawn chair. Unable to resist peering into the shaman's box, we take a peek at his tool-box containing sticks, leaves, and several smooth earth-colored and black stones. Joy quickly snaps a photo and we sit down on a bench against the opposite wall.

Shaman's Stones
by Joy E. Stocke

The shaman, enters carrying a spray bottle of clear a liquid that we assume is holy water, and sits in his chair, followed by Victor who gives us white candles, keeping one for himself.

He motions Joy to stand in front of the shaman, and then he and the shaman begin a discussion. We don't speak Spanish and Victor speaks little English, so he gesture the shaman's request that Joy remove her blouse.

Uncomfortable with the suggestion, she shakes her head, and says, "No."

More discussion ensues until an agreement is reached where Joy can remain clothed.

"Las mujeres creen," says Victor, "The women believe."

And that seems to satisfy the shaman who smiles at us.

And we do believe. Since we've both been baptized in the Catholic faith, the idea of invoking the spirits of ancestors and saints is familiar to us. The trip has been a whirlwind of people, inspirational thoughts, and new beginnings. Our individual yoga practices have taught us to keep our focus and let go of anything which does not serve the better good. If the shaman can conjure forth spirits, then we're perfectly willing to let those spirits, through his intercession, remove any negative energy from our minds, hearts, and bodies.

The shaman takes the candle from Joy, lights it, and asks her profession.

"Journalist," she says.

"Periodista," Victor translates.

Joy closes her eyes and concentrates on removing any negative energy that would get in the way of reporting all that she has seen and experienced during the past week.

The shaman nods as if he understands, and the ritual begins. She hands him the unlit candle which he rubs over her body, front and back, and then over face, forehead and hair. Then he hands her the black spear, having her grasp it with both hands, repeating the procedure he initiated with the candle - front, back of body, over face and hair.

She hands back the pole, which he sets against the wall. He picks up the spray bottle and makes a grimace to indicate that she should squeeze her eyes tight. Before she can close her eyes completely, he sprays the holy water directly into her face.

Angie glances toward Victor. With a look of shock and disbelief, he covers his mouth to suppress a laugh.

Joy, however, is not laughing. The solution that the shaman is now spraying and rubbing under her shirt, arms and hands stings her eyes like hell and smells like an herbal, alcoholic beverage. Tears fall from her eyes as the shaman sprays her hands with the mixture and asks her to rub it over her hair.

The process continues now in rapid motion. Chanting an incantation, the shaman plucks first one smooth stone from his box and rubs this over Joy's body and under her shirt. Then another and another, before rubbing her face and arms with a shorter black stick. Finally, the candle is blown out and the ritual is over. The shaman and the saints have completed their work.

Joy sits down on the bench rubbing her eyes, whispering, "So this is Santeria."

Over four-hundred years ago, African slaves brought the practice of Santeria "La Regla Lucumm" to the new world via the Spanish slave trade routes, first to Cuba and then the Caribbean. By integrating their religious beliefs with Catholicism, they were able to create a thriving faith, keeping it alive and secret at the same time.

The Yoruba people of West Africa overlaid characteristics of their Orisha - a spiritual being or presence that is interpreted as one of the manifestations of God represented in stone deities - onto Catholic saints, the very saints who are manifested in the shaman's black stones.

Now, it's Angie's turn for the cleansing and knowing what awaits her, she concentrates on being present in the moment. Yet, when it comes time for the spray to the face, she's unprepared for the burn and sting to the eyes. Tears flow out like pouring water. Maybe, like life, pain is part of the process of Santeria.

Finally, the shaman nods at Victor who gamely removes his shirt and stoically goes through the motions. He winces only once while being doused with the alcohol mixture. Later, we learn that this is his first visit to the shaman, too.

Out in the sunlight, the world seems to glow, making us believe that all things are possible. We retreat to the small sanctuary to deliver our candles to the saints, and then return to Victor's taxi for the drive out of Cotacachi, the little town that UNESCO has declared a World Heritage Sight.

by Victor Penafiel

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by Joy E. Stocke and Angie Brenenr

by Joy E. Stocke

Midnight in Quito and we’re in the midst of a week-long celebration leading up to December 6 honoring the day Quito was founded by the Spaniards in 1534. The first week in December is also known as bullfight week celebrating a tradition imported from Spain more then three hundred years ago.

This morning Muhammad Yunus left Ecuador for Paraguay, and we left Guayaquil for Quito, planning to travel north into the Andes to Otovalo known for its crafts and shamans, one of whom we were planning to visit. But that would have to wait a day.

Before our tightly knit group began to disperse, we were invited to meet for a late lunch at Bolivar, a restaurant that celebrates the bullfight. Every afternoon during this celebration week, women dress up and men often wear the traditional Ecuadorian fedoras (commonly know as the Panama hat, but actually originating in Ecuador). They come to meet friends and watch their favorite torero. Like a football game the socializing begins early. Because many in our party planned to attend today's bullfight, we chose to stay and meet them at the restaurant before saying goodbye.

Bullfighting is big in Quito. So big that you can't miss the advertisements showing handsome young men in a pas de deux with a bull. All week long we’ve had conversations about the moral implications of bullfighting. Is it a blood sport whose time has past? Clearly, many Ecuadorians share this thought. But as we got ready to meet the rest of our group for a post-bullfight dinner, we never thought we’d find ourselves sitting next to Ecuador’s best torero Guillermo Alban.

Alban, compactly built, with blue eyes the color of sea-glass, fielded questions from us as we tried to understand the psychology of bullfighting and why it still exists as a sport.

With a degree in business management and applied economics from Cornell, he is thoughtful and clear. Bullfighting for him is a metaphysical experience.

Guillermo Alban, Torero
by Angie Brenner

Correia means killing the bull. I think that bullfighting is a very strong activity. I understand that people say, 'I don’t like to see the blood. Or humans don't have the right to kill another species.'

But, once you’re in the ring, the only friend is your bull. He’s your companion. He’s your partner in a death dance. You can get very badly gored. Nowadays, few toreros die not because it’s less risky, but because medicine is so good. We have doctors ready to clamp your arteries if you get gored. In the days before antibiotics many toreros died or lost a leg.There’s a statue in the Las Ventas bullring in Madrid, Spain in honor of Dr. Fleming who invented penicillin.

I’ve been gored twice, but not very badly. It’s more out of luck. Once a bull knocks you to the ground, or once he throws you to the air, you are no longer in control of the situation.

Sometimes the bull just touches you. And you are bruised and battered and you think, oh, he didn’t gore me. I think it’s luck that I haven’t been gored. There must be some protection, something looking out for me. As time goes by, I get so much more convinced of that. I am 36, and 15 years I've been trying to find an explanation for this, but I don’t.

What bothers me the most about these comments is that bullfighting gets attacked by people for being cruel. But, in modern society, we exploit animals every day. Just because we don't see the cow going to the slaughterhouse doesn't mean it didn't suffer.

I would like to ask people who are against bullfighting why a person in whatever city of the developed world has a right to eat a lobster or crab, putting a live creature in boiling water with no thought how it feels? But we are omnivores and when you eat a piece of meat, are you eating it because it's right or because you need it?

Killing a bull is probably the part of bullfighting that satisfies the least. I try to kill a bull with dignity. Quickly, efficiently, with the least pain. You face the bull and do not stand behind its back. For a moment, the bull sees you and you see the bull. It is a spiritual connection. I think it's much sadder to send a bull to a slaughterhouse and send him down a dark, narrow corridor to be killed.

When I stand in the ring, I begin a dance that has a long history. In Crete during the Minoan period, bull dancers came to Knossos and performed many feats on top of the bulls. We, in modern society, want to deny death. A bullfighter shows how real death can be. You could say the blood of the bull is a symbol of the sacrifice thousands of animals make every day so that we can live.

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by Joy Stocke and Angie Brenner

Muhammad Yunus and Hassan Becdach traveling from Quito to Guayaquil
by Joy E. Stocke

Traveling with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus has its advantages. Our group of assistants, business people, interpreters, journalists, and photographers (among others) are part of the entourage surrounding Professor Yunus and the people responsible for organizing his itinerary: Ivonne Baki, President of the Andean Parliament; and Hassan Becdach, Executive President of HJ Becdach Marketing Inc.

Today, we are rushed by motorcade to the Quito Airport, given tickets, and led into the executive lounge for refreshments before the short flight to Guayaquil in southern Ecuador. Dr. Yunus is scheduled to speak on the city's Malecon, followed by a grand lunch at Ecuador's oldest private men's club - Club de la Union - two more speaking events, and then to the hotel for another banquet. At each event, local businessmen and women will have the opportunity to hear Yunus's message and have their photos taken with him.

by Angie Brenner

The reality of constant attention, paparazzi, tight schedules, long days and nights can exhaust anyone, let alone a Nobel Prizewinner. But watching Yunus deliver his seventh talk in three and a half days at the Guayaquil Catholic University shows how determined he is in his quest to rid the world of poverty.

We have a brief opportunity to interview him as the motorcade speeds from the luncheon to the university, but the luncheon had been long and Yunus is tired. He prefers to talk about his daughter, Monica, an accomplished soprano who performs with he Metropolitan Opera in New York City, and is the founder of Sing For Hope, singforhope.org, "which maintains a roster of compassionate, world-class artists who donate time and talent to the humanitarian causes that inspire them."

Laptops closed, tape recorders off, we ride in friendly silence so Yunus can prepare for his speech. This will be the fifth time we've heard him speak and one of numerous times we've followed him through a gauntlet of photographers. But once he reaches the podium, he immediately connects with the students making us believe that we are hearing his story for the first time:

"I come from a country that started as probably the poorest in the world. Poverty everywhere. You didn't see a symbol of prosperity any place. That’s where Bangladesh began as an independent nation. During the Nixon era, Henry Kissinger called Bangladesh a "basket case." Meaning it could not survive. It would disappear.

We've been making loans for the last 31 years and we've never had a second thought."

by Angie Brenner

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Joy E. Stocke and Angie Brenner

"There's a spirited presence beyond charisma. An inner peace that emanates to others. That's the extraordinary part about Professor Muhammud Yunus. His message reaches out and lifts people up."
Barry Featherman, President and CEO of the Inter-American Economic Council

by Angie Brenner

We feel like royalty as we stand on the balcony of Quito's Presidential Palace and watch a crowd gather below in the Plaza Grande.

Nobel Prizewinner Muhammad Yunus, Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa; Vice President, Lenin Moreno; newly elected President of the Andean Parliament, Ivonne Baki, delegates and cabinet members crowd the balcony to watch a marching band parade through the square. The band stops and the crowd grows quiet. When the band begins the national anthem, "Salve mi patria, mil veces!" the dignitaries above and people below join voices, then cheer when the flag is raised above the palace.

We've just left a dedication ceremony in the palace's opulent salon where President Correa has presented Yunus with Ecuador's highest honor, the Ecuadorian Peace Prize. We ask ourselves, what does all this pomp have to do with micro-lending and helping the poorest of the poor?

The answer comes in the evening at the 10,000 capacity Ruminahui Colliseum where Yunus is about to speak. In Vice President Moreno's introduction, he speaks directly to Yunus's challenge to eradicate poverty worldwide. "We want security, basic services and, above all, happiness," says Moreno. "We have to find special leaders like Mahammud Yunus working on behalf of the poorest of the poor."

But when Baki steps forward, she takes the microphone from the podium, moves toward the crowd, and sets the tone for the evening. "Better not to have any barriers between people," she says.

*

This is the second time we've heard Yunus speak and what impresses us is that he remains true to his fundamental goal of eradicating poverty worldwide.

"Looking back at what we did 31 years ago in Bangladesh, it looks like something unusual, something big," says Yunus. "We never felt this. We had no idea what it would lead to. I had no action plan."

He describes how he successfully created Grameen (Village) Bank, which currently has seven and a half million borrowers, 97% of whom are women, with an almost flawless return rate.

In 1972, after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan, Economics Professor Yunus returned to from the U.S. to be a part of his country's future. "Soon our dreams turned into nightmares. A famine left hundreds of thousands of people destitute and suffering," he says. "I decided to forget about books and go into the village. "My university education never taught me what to do to help people. I found that if I could help by doing a little, that I felt good."

The turning point for Yunus came when he realized that it would only take $27 to help 42 poor people get out from under the hands of the local loan sharks.

"I was shocked," he says. "An economics professor talks in millions. All these people needed were a few pennies. I thought that if $27 can make so many people so happy, shouldn't I be doing more of it?"

by Joy E. Stocke

...to be continued

Posted by Joy Stocke at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joy E. Stocke

“One has to be very stubborn to build a company and start from zero.�?
Dr. Muhammad Yunus, speaking to Ecuadorian microlending organizers in Quito.

by Joy E. Stocke

What is clear on the first day of Professor and Economist Muhammad Yunus's visit to Ecuador is that his message is simple: Shifting consciousness to create a sustainable world where poverty no longer exists is not only a priorty, but a moral duty.

Dr. Yunus's solution is microfinance: Helping the world's poorest people escape poverty by giving them collateral-free loans and other financial services to support income-generating businesses. As each loan is repaid, the money is redistributed as loans to others, thereby mulitiplying its impact.

Galvanized by what he saw as a deep chasm between those who have access to credit and those who do not, Yunus made his first loan in the village of Jobra in his native Bangladesh with 27 dollars from his own pocket.

Yunus and Grameen Bank, which he founded in 1983, operate on a revolutionary philosophy: Grameen Bank does not require any collateral against micro-loans and does not require borrowers to sign any legal document.

More than 95 percent of loans are to women with no collateral and who have never had access to credit. The banking industry is set up to lend money to people who already have money, but contrary to naysayers, nearly all of the women who have received loans have paid them back week after week in small, steady increments. (More on Grameen's philosophy about accountability in a future blog.)

The question that Wild River Review poses regarding microfinance also explains the reason we're here: How can wealthy, developed nations understand true poverty? Why does it matter? And what can we do about it?

We begin in a conference room at the Swisshotel, where according to representatives of Red Grameen, Ecuador - a cooperative of microlenders modeled on Yunus's Grameen Bank - thirty-eight percent of Ecuauadorian people are at the poverty level. Twelve percent are at the extreme poverty level. Red Grameen is working against serious odds to change that. (More on that when Wild River accompanies Dr. Yunus to visit the President of Ecuador.)

Quito lies about 15 miles (24 kilometres) south of the Equator in the spectacuar Andes Mountains where the play of shadow and light and sun and cloud can mesmerize first-time visitors. It's easy to get lost in the highlands where shades of green become so gorgeous you grow hungry just looking at them. This luxurious landscape is also home to the world's largest rose-growing industry.

One example of Red Grameen's progress can be seen in the rose industry. Most roses that we, in the north, buy during the holiday season and into the new year, come from tracts of land with greenhouses situated in the valleys surrounding Quito. Pesticide use is heavy and workers who handle pesticides face serious health risks.

Yet, the markets for roses, such as the U.S market, depend on a steady supply of perfect long-stemmed roses and very low prices. Neighborhood supermarkets and florists seek the lowest prices at the highest volume. So what's a small country to do? Pay substandard wages. Allow pesticide runoff that flows into the numerous streams that course through the gorges of mountain passes. Look the other way when workers develop rashes or get cancer.

One of Red Grameen's programs uses micro-loans to allow those below the poverty level to get financing to grow pesticide-free roses. Dr. Yunus is here to help the organizers expand their program (which encompasses other industries as well) and develop long term goals.

What remains daunting is the fact that banks run on a for-profit, bottom-line model. And governments often get in the way of what, in effect, works like a Mom and Pop operation, where, loans of less than 100 dollars, sometimes much less are given to people who have no assets. In other words unsecured credit. Except that nearly all the people who receive loans from Grameen repay their debts and reinvest in their communities.

Where Yunus more than earned his Nobel Prize is in his unwavering belief that if you help the rural poor, especially women who do most of the day-to-day work in addition to bearing and raising children, you empower them to create a stronger community.

Yunus, who calmly and generously navigates between the people "on the street" and those who live "in their ivory towers," touches both deeply. In his ability to show empathy at all levels, and his willingness to share his expertise in economics, those around him are motivated to do work they might not have believed they could do, to act on a single goal of eradicating world poverty.

by Joy E. Stocke

Posted by Joy Stocke at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

by Angie Brenner

Less than twenty hours back in Quito and already I miss the self-contained, eco-world of The Black Sheep Inn in Ecuador´s Central Andian Highlands. While there, my lungs struggled against hiking in high altitude air (some 10 to 12,000ft), in Quito they must also work to filter out clouds of black exhaust expelled by an endless stream of buses.

When I booked the Black Sheep, there was no way of knowing that it would turn out to be a geo-political, eco-tourism mecca. Due to the Black Sheep's remoteness - midway on the Quilotoa Loop in the tiny hamlet of Chugchilan - I'd expected to be by myself most of the time. I was wrong. Hikers, vegans, adventurers, volunteers, an NGO worker, and Canadian Vice-Consul poured through the inn during my four night stay.

Chugchilan sits on the Ecuadorian paramo, the high, harsh, grass and scrublands that soak up mist and rain and brings an abundance of water to the many small, traditional farmlands in the lush green region. Outside my cozy, well-appointed room (one of several individual buildings stratigically placed for the best views) clouds part to reveal the almost vertical hillsides planted with potatoes, beans, and corn - staple crops of the thin erodied soil. The snowy peaks of the Ilinizas peaks, green plateaus, and deep canyons stand out like a diaorama against the clear blue sky. The seven hour bus ride to this shangrila, over a bumpy dirt road, seems worth the struggle and a good excuse to linger a bit longer than only a couple nights.

One can understand why the owner-operators, Michelle Kirby and Andres Hammerman, an American couple, who chose to stay on and buy the land to develop the eco-friendly inn. Their dreams and persistence, not to mention 24 hours a day of work, have paid off. The Black Sheep has won many Eco-awards and Outside Magazine voted listed them as one of the world´s top ten ecolodges.

Everything here is about sustainability, mindfulness of the land and culture. From the easy to use compost toilets that efficiently transforms human waste into rich garden compost, to saving the tea wrappers to use as scratch paper, nothing gets tossed into a landfill.

"Firewood," says Andres, "is from non-native pine and eucalyptus trees and should be used sparingly, if at all."

The Black Sheep treads lightly so as to be a part of the solution to Ecuador´s serious environmental problems of poluted water, soil erosion, illiteracy, over population, and cultural degradation.

Michelle who seems to prefer being behind the scenes, teaches a weekly English and computer class at the local school. Andres hires locals to staff the inn and as hiking and tour guides and drivers. Since setting up the inn about twelve years ago they have seen gradual changes in attitudes.

"There are now two other backpacker hostles in town run by locals that help with the overflow of guests," says Andres, the gregarious, 41 year old host who hails from Chicago. "At first I was angry that they were copying us. Then I realized it was a good thing. I raised our prices and now guests have options and the local people are benefiting. That was part of our goal, to create a sustainable community to help build and reforest the land." He says that now the community has trash bins throughout town for Organic and Non-Organic trash.

"Sustainability is the new word for Ecuador," says another fellow guests, Marc-Andre Hawkes, one of the three Vice-consuls to Canada in Ecuador (versus over 200 people with the U.S. Embassy in the country). "There´s talk about gold mining in Southern Ecuador near the Peruvian boarder, and how this will impact the land and people,' he says.

Another guest, an English woman, Claudina Nagiah, who works with the organization, CRACYP, a reforestation NGO, is here for a rest from her agricultural work in Southern Ecuador. "It´s a stuggle to teach and sustain methods to move poeple from subsistance living to a sustainable environment," she says. "CRACYP has also started a micro-credit lending bank similar to Muhammad Yunus´s Graneen Bank in Banglhdesh."

Three other young women (two from London, and one from Montana) show up at the Black Sheep doorstep one night after finishing several months of work in Ecuador´s jungle regions helping other eco-tourism facilities find their way. They paid for the opportunity to clean out cages for wild animals in need of rehabilitation and helped host tourists. "It's party week in Quito," says the woman from Montana, clearly ready for a break from the good-will jungle tour.

In Eucador aulturism has taken new heights. Never have I seen a country so ripe with people ready help a culture sustain itself. I wonder, however, whether anyone is asking the people what they ultimately want their country to look like. Do they want flourishing eco-tourism or to be left alone to farm and live as their ancesters, or is sustainable tourism an opportunity of the western mentality?

From the Swiss Hotel with Wild River Review Editor-in-chief, Joy Stocke and photographer Gabriel Cooney, members of the Andean Parliament, and numerous delegates, we await Muhammad Yunus who will arrive at four. It will be interesting to meet with him and hear him speak as he discusses whether his sustainable solutions against poverty can be integrated into the Ecuadorian culture.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner

Ah, the tiny La Casa Sol Hotel, colorful yet a bit sad in that it's on the fringe of a 'bad' neighborhood in the Marascal District. The cheery breakfast room looks across the street at green metal warehouse doors filled with graffiti....FUCK OFF, SKINS, SKINS!, PUTAS, and other such obscene comments I can't decipher. Just the sort of place Paul Theroux would love to hate. Me, too, as a matter of fact. However, the staff is congenial and accommodating.

After many warnings about theft in Quito, this morning I carelessly walked through the Old Town with my small camera slung on my wrist for easy access. The first photo op was a man on the corner of Avenue Guayaquil peeling coconuts. No sooner had I clicked the shutter and dropped my hand to continue walking (rather than opening the backpack and sticking the camera inside), than I felt a slight tug at my wrist. I turned just as a man snapped the camera from its thin strap, and ran.

Stunned, I watched him speed away, a squat male in jeans and navy windbreaker. When he turned up Avenue Galapagos, I felt the anger rise and took up the chase, no easy feat considering Quito's 9,000 ft elevation. I began to run up the hill and stairs leading into a Mercado and spotted him ducking into the market place. I wanted to catch and pummel him. THAT would be the story I'd tell my friends later. He wasn't that fast and had I not had the "deer in the headlights" moment, I might have caught up with him. But, he was long gone.

A few women who had watched the event sympathized with my plight, "Bandito,"one of them said, and pretended to beat him up with a pole. As I continued on my way to see the obligatory churches of the old city, I spotted a couple of policeman. THEY should at least know what happened two blocks away. How are tourists going to visit with this threat hovering?

Soon, I was whisked away in a police car with two male officers and one female officer back to the scene of the crime. They didn't seem to understand that it was faster to walk the two blocks back, so they insisted on driving. They drove around through traffic until finally the woman suggested that we walk the marketplace. She lead us down dreay alleys lined with oily car and machine parts and tools. "This is where they come to sell cameras," she said.

Wow, wouldn´t that be a great story, I thought, to catch the guy selling my Olympus. Finally, like me, she too decided to give up the hunt. With her Asian features, she looked like a model in the dirt brown, uniform of slacks and bombardier jacket and military style hat, the kind that looks equally dapper perched square on the head or carried under an arm in Top Gun fashion. She seemed relieved when I declined to "go to the station" to make an official report.

It occurred to me later, under the shadows of spires, bell towers, and church domes, while passing shop after shop selling religious paraphernalia of crosses, Jesus pictures, and every possible version of Mary, that Catholicism can be very cloying. And, if everyone is so religious, why is crime an epidemic? Is it the devastating poverty? Or, like the US, perhaps drugs play a factor?

But on my first day, still disoriented from a long journey, I wonder, How many Hail Marys for my camera?

Posted by Joy Stocke at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Angie Brenner
November 8, 2007

Marguerite Eliasson stretches her long legs out on the wicker table over looking a yard of cool green grass. Beyond the veranda of the small one bedroom house are two large corrals. “That’s Turkoman,�? she says and looks out at the black horse in the corral on the left. “He’s a sweetheart, over twenty years old and still one of the best breeding stallions we have.�? Beemer, Marguerite’s square-jawed rotwieller tries to heft his hundred and ten pound body into my lap and lick my face. “He does that when he’s stressed,�? says Marguerite. I push him down gently and keep a calm demeanor; the last thing I need is a nervous, unpredictable rottie in my face. “The stallion that belongs in this corral lost fifty pounds while he was confined to a barn stall.�? She points to another expansive, empty arena with part of the fencing blown over from the winds. “Once we put him out in an open space he calmed down immediately.�?

The EA Ranch, a 927 acre estate that breeds, boards, and trains thoroughbreds reminds me of a movie set (something between Falcon Crest and Seabiscuit), a mountain top with four or five houses, seven barns, countless corrals, and a racetrack. The long road leading into the ranch is lined with pepper trees and winds past an elegant arched barn with chandeliers and an upstairs office decked out in oversized Spanish furniture. There’s a small pool with ducks and turtles, and another that’s left dry due to drought. The ranch owner’s Spanish style house sits above the corrals and racetrack. The smaller house, where we sit, is used by one of the owner’s daughters and her husband when they visit the ranch and will be where Marguerite lives temporarily.

We watch a silhouette of horses graze on a western hill backlit from the setting sun, and I try to imagine how this picture might have been different. If not for Marguerite’s loyalty, commitment, and determination to stay and fight off the raging fires that two weeks earlier surrounded and encroached the ranch and ultimately razed her two story home, this entire estate and the horses might have all been destroyed.

Marguerite's house

“It was a nightmare,�? says Marguerite. “Because the fire started on a Sunday, only four of the twenty-three workers were on the ranch. When we saw smoke, we had to get the horses (a hundred and eighty high-spirited thoroughbreds) into the barns.�? Marguerite and I hop into her white jeep for a drive around the ranch, and it becomes obvious that even the gathering up of the horses must have taken several hours. The barns and fenced pastures reach every edge of the ranch. “I left that white mare in the middle of open dirt fields with a few yearlings. She’s a calm horse and I knew they would be safe. We’re treating one yearling for a corneal ulcer from an ember, otherwise there were no injuries.�? The tranquility of the mare and a half dozen yearlings munching hay is a long stretch from the chaos they must have endured during the fire and wind storm.

"For a day and a half we fought with hoses and shovels.�? She tells how the 100,000 gallon water tank had drained due to a melted PVC pipe. This required her and one of the men to drive down to a smaller water storage tank to fill five gallon buckets by hand, then drive to each barn to water the horses. “They would drink the water as fast as we filled up their buckets,�? she says. “We must have made a hundred trips until my jeep finally ran out of gas.�? The logistics seem overwhelming. She shows me the palms of her hands buffed smooth as glass from hours of flattening haystacks inside barns to keep embers from landing on them, and tells me how she jumped on stacks of packaged stall shavings piled around barns for the same reason. At one point during the fire, she drove to an area of small corrals near the racetrack that are shaded by several oak trees. “I beat out a fire that started from an ember landing on a small haystack with a board. I didn’t want to lose the trees,�? she says.

Hay Barn

“I had one man working the barns non-stop to put out flying embers that might ignite hay or the shavings in the horse stalls using a shovel and sand, and left two men to fight off flames down by the water tank. When I went back to the water tank and found the men sleeping, I told them, if you sleep, you will die.�? Later, she shows me one of the barns where the winds tore off part of the metal roof and ripped off the sliding door. Fire ravaged two huge hay barns. “It took two days to burn $70,000 worth of hay,�? she says. I tell her that I’d heard that winds had been clocked at 110 mph during the blaze. “I believe it. There was so much sand and smoke that we could barely see the roads. I kept pouring saline solution that I use for the horses into our eyes.�? Time has become somewhat of a blur. She doesn’t quite remember when it was that two fire engines drove in to escort some cars out and advised everyone to evacuate, or when and who dropped off their horses at the ranch. “There are about five horses still here that we’re caring for, but I don’t know who they belong to.�?

Marguerite Eliasson

I hadn’t realized until our conversation that the 2003 fire had also threatened the ranch, but it was a different fire to fight, and while flames overtook hundred foot trees there weren’t the high winds shearing the landscape like a giant blow torch. “During that fire they (the CDF) dropped hot shots (fire fighters who parachute into terrain unreachable by vehicles and begin to cut brush and make fire breaks), and one fire engine came in to help,�? says Marguerite.

A fire captain who drove into the EA Ranch last week to secure smoldering areas around the estate had said that he had taken one look at the fire the day it started and told his guys to go get some sleep and come back the next day. “There’s nothing you can do when the winds are blowing off roofs,�? he said. “You can’t fly planes or send in hot shots and trucks. You just have to wait until it blows through.�?

Eventually, our conversation shifts to Marguerite’s personal life. While she fought to save the ranch and horses, her house burned down. Yet when we walk to the ashen property with an almost three hundred and sixty degree view where she has lived for the more than twenty years that she has managed the ranch, it is not to show me what has been lost, but to fill numerous bird feeders and water containers for wildlife now left without their habitat. We move around hoses to drip water on charred oak trees that had already been stressed by years of drought. She picks through brittlebush and rosemary bushes to determine what might come back in the spring, and ignores the 10X10 patch of burnt nails, all that’s left of a gazebo. I asked about her mate of the past sixteen years, knowing that it had been a relationship with many ups and downs, and I learn that though he had lived with her, he worked as caretaker for a Rancho Santa Fe property. Where was he during the ordeal?

“Oh, he was here at the ranch during the fire,�? says Marguerite. “But he couldn’t handle the stress of it all and stayed in the office and slept.�? I’m more than a little shocked. He was here but didn’t do anything to fight the fire? Marguerite shakes her head. “He isn’t like me, and he did what he could, he made sandwiches for us. He tried his best, but just couldn’t handle the situation or understand why I wouldn’t leave when told to evacuate. After he left the ranch, his employer found him a home close to his work and gave him money. Our house where we lived and all our belongings burned. I told him there was nothing left to come back to.�? Marguerite’s competent façade begins to crumble, just a bit. “I know that I’ve let the ranch consume my whole life, and I can’t expect my partner to feel the same. I’ve made mistakes in the relationship too and trying to learn from the past and move forward, even if it means that after the end of the day I’m here alone.�?

Posted by Joy Stocke at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner
November 4, 2007

Lani, owner of Julian's Soups & Such restaurant, sat behind the counter eating wheat pancakes under a mound of fresh fruit. She called out our orders to her husband and chef, Ibrahin, without leaving her perch."Aren’t you tired?" she says. "I'm exhausted." - a sentiment I have felt throughout the post-fire week as I move through my daily routine in slow motion. The fact that internet DSL connections were down throughout most of this community and the San Diego County administrative offices, helped to slow us all down.

Even tough-skinned rancher Ray Meyers looked beaten down yesterday while he ruminated over the events of the week from his fruit and vegetable stand. Ray always stays to protect his property and was a hero in the 2003 fire when faced with flames which overtook old oak trees in his back yard. He managed to keep the flames from jumping the highway and burning down houses along the road. The fact that he wasn't challenged to repeat this event hadn't lessened the anxiety.

My Saturday morning yoga class was grateful for the abbreviated, beginner class that helped ease the stress from our bodies. Lying in savasana (corpse pose), we felt tensions evaporate. Choosing ways to deal with PTSD (post traumatic stress Disorder) whether minor or major has become a way of life here. Free acupuncture sessions were made available at one of the local fire stations, and while I can’t picture Ray Meyers with needles poking out of his temples, there’s no doubt that we've come a long way in accepting new techniques in stress management.

Many of us ran into friends at the library since librarian Colleen Baker rallied to keep the community connected to the web by obtaining a Microsoft van equipped with computers. On Saturday, Julie and Rob Weaver were there scouring the net to price out lost antiques and household items for their insurance company. Teenagers zoned-out by playing online video games. Our schools, without the internet for the week, returned to old fashioned teaching methods.

Low-tech seemed to prevail during this fire when cell phones were blocked in order to keep emergency lines open; rotary dial phones (most kids today don't even know what these look like) or plug-in landline phones worked best. Without phones, television, and internet, we have learned that disseminating information and sharing our stories between neighbors by word-of-mouth has given us quality information (difficult to get in emergencies), and a closer connection on a human level.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner
November 2, 2007

The Weaver family (see previous blogs) are evaluating there losses and trying to bring normalcy to their lives. A friend offered them (and they accepted) a temporary vacant home, a ranch house a quarter mile from where Julie works as superintendent for the small Spencer Valley School and where Julian, her seventh grader, can walk to school. “I can walk to my friend’s house too,�? he told me. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen Julian happier then when he got to walk home from school yesterday.

A Ramona High School senior, daughter Emily has stayed with her girl friend away from her family since the fire. “She’s acting as if she’s already on her own,�? says her dad, and maybe that’s what she feels. And while mom Julie is looking at possible options for rebuilding and taking time to adjust, her husband Rob only wants to get a FEMA trailer so the family can return to their property as soon as possible, to go home. “Let’s wait and build a yurt,�? she suggests, “it’s something we can use later.�?

The family horse, Buddy, still wary from his ordeal in the fire, is recovering from burned eyes and singed coat at the EA Horse Ranch.

Rob has started to list everything that was lost for the insurance company claim: all his tools and fishing gear, and an antiquated book collection given to him by his grandmother. How do you list your entire life?

There are hundreds of people who lost homes in the 2003 fire available to give them advice on contractors and builders. “I was burned twice,�? says one local, “Once when the fire destroyed my home, and twice by the insurance company!�? It seems unanimous; the insurance companies have made rebuilding a nightmare. That is if you have insurance. Many home owners in the area can’t afford or get insurance, and almost no one has enough to cover all possessions. Regardless of how one can finance their new life, how does one begin to do it?

I’ve watched my friends during the past four years who have had to do this. They all go about it differently. One single woman who had just finished building her house months before the 2003 fire was the first to reconstruct the same house. The plans were so current that the county waived all building fees. Another friend not only rebuilt their exact two story log home, she went on E-Bay to replace each item lost, down to the china cups and saucers she’d inherited from her mother. My friend Fe, a local artist, lost her unique metal and stained glass home overlooking a valley. Without insurance coverage, she had to settle for a standard-issue, wood-frame two bedroom house. I’m sure she’ll give it her own style, eventually. Others simply sold their scorched and burned property and left for the Pacific Northwest. “I need green,�? said my friend Susan when she and her husband decided to relocate to Eugene, Oregon.

The Weavers will find their new footing, of that I’m certain. But, how many others in the community will leave, I wonder. This fire has brought back old wounds and angst, and caused new anxieties to form. A slight gust of wind sends a shiver down my spine causing me to look up for smoke. This catalyst of nature that changes the way we look at our lives and possessions may be necessary, but it doesn’t make the process any less painful. Growth never is.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner

November 1, 2007

Thirty or so Julian residents ambled into the Town Hall on Main Street Tuesday night to hear and be heard. There were almost as many CDF (California Department of Forestry) and local firefighter volunteers in attendance. I waited for applause, for the love-fest to begin. None of our homes were burned (mostly due to the diminishing forces of wind); and if the town had been threatened, the presence of seventy or more fire trucks in the area were ready. But the mood was somber.

Julian/Cuyamaca Volunteer Fire District Chief, Kevin Dubler, introduced the CDF officers present and took on the topic that apparently was brewing in the community: Mandatory Evacuation. "We'd expected that this fire would be similar to the Cedar Fire fours years ago, that onshore winds from the coast would turn east," he said, coughing out the smoke still trapped deep into his lungs.

"But everything about this fire was different. It burned downhill against the wind and blew through areas already burned."

I heard some of the fire terms such as blow over and laying down (when fire runs like a locomotive a foot or more on the ground slicing fence posts and melting brass tools in its wake); and leaf-freeze, when heat sucks out moisture so fast that tree leaves are frozen black in motion.

A hand waves in the air. "Those of us with defendable property and equipment should be able to stay," said the man sitting in front of me. "It’s a free country."

"In this fire and wind there was no such thing as a defendable property," says Chief Dubler. "When people tell me they are staying, I ask them for their name and address so that when we get their 911 call, we can ignore it." Dubler coughed again.

No one was fooled by his tough exterior. When he gets a call, we know that these volunteers, our neighbors who give up weekends and risk their lives to help our community, will come to our rescue.

For additional emphasis, one CDF captain adds his thoughts. "Two people on Highland Valley Road in Ramona are dead because they thought they could defend their house." The group is silent.

A few days ago, I wrote about how we all need to rethink how we live in the back country (or the city for that matter). How we must learn to use generators and fire hoses and do a better job at clearing property and having supplies and water on hand to live independently for a week or more. While all this is true, my resolve to 'stay and defend' has weakened after listening to the fire fighters' stories.

With over a half million people evacuated across San Diego County, there are many things that can go wrong, and communication is at the top of the list. Staying behind and risking my life and possibly that of the firemen who attempt to save me, or milling around the roads when trucks and equipment need to get through, should not be in the equation.

"We can’t pick and choose who is allowed to stay and who should leave," says Dubler. "Evacuation means everyone."

This is his party line of course, but we all know and admire those who stayed in their homes and have equipment and skills to defend them. Fortunately, this time they weren’t put to the test.

Yesterday, I'd heard the talk and criticism toward those who left, 'the wimps' as someone suggested. Then, I remembered Steve Rucker, the fireman who lost his life in 2003 on Orchard Lane at the house next door to artist James Hubbell. Certainly no wimp. He was experienced and had the latest fire fighting equipment on his truck. In a fiery instant he was gone. On Monday October 29th, thirty of his brothers gathered at the rebuilt house where each year Marabeth and Larry Lis create a memorial shrine to Steve, a place to go to grieve and to honor the man (like many others) who gave his life to save a home.

Nothing that I own would be worth losing a life, mine or someone else's.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner

Julie, Rob, Emily and Julian Weaver's Home

"I found something, Julie," said Emily's friend, Lauren Everts, as she gently stroked the fine ash through her fingers. She blew the dust off two slightly charred, long white earrings: a ghost and a skeleton. With Halloween fast approaching, it seemed to be a bit of cosmic humor.

Emily's mother, Julie, walked toward what was once her bathroom past the cast-iron claw foot bathtub now melted in two, and draped the earring over the neck of her T-shirt.

"This day of sifting through the ashes," Julie later says "is as much for friends and family to grieve. I don’t even know what or how I feel."

Each family member processes their losses. Husband Rob plans to replace all four of the new bicycles the family purchased this summer before their annual family holiday in Wisconsin.

For son Julian, soon to be twelve, there's only a small partially-melted action figure. Seventeen-year-old Emily has collected her burnt dollhouse furniture and several ceramic figurines. She starts to cry when handed a Christmas ornament (an especially important holiday for the Weavers); it’s a tiny ceramic baby shoe with the date of her birth. Both children retrieve a single ornament, each given to them by their parents years earlier.

Nothing else is left of the hundreds of special ornaments Julie collected during her and Rob's twenty-five year marriage. "A friend of mine had missed giving me my present last year," says Julie. "She just gave it to me. It’s an ornament replicating Salvador Dali's melting clock. I never knew the title of the original art work before; it's The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory."

Another cosmic joke? Perhaps. She tells me that yesterday she picked up a fragment of burned paper. "I have no idea what book it cam from. It was a mathematical equation which showed Happiness equaling Satisfaction over Desire. I thought it would be perfect for a collage but it disintegrated in my hand."

A light rain settles some of the smoke over Ramona when we pack up to leave for the day. Healing often comes in the doing and for the Weaver family their will be much work ahead.

I'm off to take Julian Weaver to the mall for a little R&R and shopping.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Have you thought about moving to Oregon this time?" My sister from Corvallis asked as she does each time a fire breaks out in Julian's San Diego backcountry. It's a reasonable question since here we're beginning to count the homes and property not yet burned, and we continue to get that familiar ache in our gut when dry winds shift east.

I can't answer her. Work, friends, familiarity, wildness, inertia, or all of these things, I think, keep me rooted to this small tinderbox community. But the spirit of rural Julian continues to intrigue and often inspires me to stay on.

Yesterday, after tall, blond Officer Connell let me through the Santa Ysabel road block so that I could use my dial-up internet service at my home and post my daily blog, I decided to take a quick drive into town and see what might be happening. The streets were clear; the town empty of tourists and locals. Several fire engines lined the east side of Main Street, ready to move out should the McCoy fire near Eagle Peak burn get out of control during the night. I knew through word-of-mouth who had decided to stay in their homes, yet the town was left wide-open for the CDF and utility crews to do their work.

There’s been much babble on 'shock talk' radio this week about people ignoring mandatory evacuations and putting the firefighters in harm's way. Some of the AM Deejays still think of Julian as the place to go for apple pie in autumn, an idyllic world of nature lovers.They may not understand that this community attracts self-sufficient people who know and weigh the risks of living, in some form, 'Off the Grid.' They have generators, their own wells, and many use solar energy. And, we all know who stayed behind during the 2003 Cedar Fire and saved homes. I'm not talking about the weak, infirm, or meek retiree to the country. I’m speaking of men and women who own and operate chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and can cut brush with the best.

Let me just say, right off, I’m not one of them. I live off a dirt road alone with a dog and three (outside) cats in a cedar and pine house, nestled under large oak trees, in the middle of some very dry brush. I know my escape routes and which way to look for on-coming smoke. But I get out before getting trapped.

In front of the Julian Café a half dozen people, most in aprons and wielding spatulas, flip hot dogs on the generator-operated grill and sort through stacks of paper and food goods on the café steps. They were waiting to feed the next influx of firefighters and residents. "No one is turned away," says café co-owner Christy Connell. "Not people or animals," she adds.

While Quentin Porter turned the plump hotdogs, Christy explained that she organized the makeshift, all-volunteer, 24-hour restaurant service through her church, the Christ Community Church of Shelter Valley. "Most of the businesses in Julian continue to donate food and supplies through the church. On Thursday we served eight hundred people," she tells me. "I want to thank all those who helped in this community outreach."

Christy gives out a huge whoop and applause when the line of fire trucks rumble past toward Volcan Mountain. "We love you!" she shouts. She stated the sentiment we all have toward the men and women who risk two-hundred foot flames, muck around hot-spots in smoldering ash, and sit for hours in their yellow fire gear in eighty plus degree, Santa Ana wind weather.

"They’ve been wonderful," says Christy. “Forty firefighters from the Julian/Cuyamaca, Shelter Valley, and Warner Springs stations stayed in town the first couple days of the fire working the Eagle Peak, Pine Hills, and Mt. Laguna areas without any outside assistance."

Quentin nods in agreement. "The police have been really great too," he adds.

I agree. During my comings and goings this week in and around the many road blocks, the fire fighters, policeman (who stand out all day at the road blocks), CalTrans road crews, and utility workers have been courteous, pleasant, and professional throughout.

After this week, several of us in the area are committed to honing our own survival skills, perhaps buying generators and staying behind. Maybe we all have gone too soft, too dependent. But the folks, like Christy Connell, who chose to stay in Julian and help, are heroes in their own right.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Fire Storm - Day 6
Friday, 3:00 p.m.

by Angie Brenner

My hope of sleeping in my own bed last night (even with bottled water and no power) vanished when I drove around to a neighbor who had a generator that could charge up the computer. The CDF guys (California Department of Forestry) blocked the road asking those of us still poking around the area to leave because the road in would soon close. They were worried about wind change, and indeed smoke was rapidly filling the sky from the west to east. Not good. The fire plumes smoldered near Eagle Peak, exactly where the 2003 Cedar fire started. That fire, like most all during the past four years, ended up on, or close to, Volcan Mountain just behind my house. The fire WANTS Volcan. Why doesn’t the community change the damn name of the mountain already? I like Cold Springs Mountain (but it’s been years since cold water ran through the creek beds), or maybe Snow Peak, but ditto with the heavy snow falls.

For the second time in three days, I packed up the car, this time leaving behind my favorite footstool, and dog carrier (my dog Sam wouldn’t be sleeping in this, ever), and extra sheets and towels (my friends have these and I can always buy more). I drove back to Warner Hot Springs (yes, they do still have hot water there) in time for a home-cooked meal with other friends evacuated from Julian, and gathered up the latest news now disseminating by word of mouth since local KOGO Clear Channel has switched to mostly talk about recovery and politics, and has pretty much ignored those of us being re-evacuated.

The big news last night was why the authorities would not let the Ramona residents back into their homes. The fires were out, power on, only water is an issue as the fire destroyed the municipal water district that’s having problems replacing the 1950’s era equipment. Many people have their own wells and are not affected, everyone else would need water trucked into tanks or buy bottled water.

Rumor had it that a couple hundred people drove to the closed highway to demand that they re-enter their homes. Armed guards kept them out, at least until 7:00 pm. County Supervisor Diane Jacob (who would like to get re-elected I’m certain) made it happen. Controversy looms. The ‘talk radio’ guys suggest that the populace respect authority… “How dare they do this, and what a wimp Jacob’s is to honor the request.�?

After all, the patriarchy has spoken. If we give the people this, they might think they are in charge. (Forgive my personal editorial).

On another sad note, four burned bodies were found by the border.

Also, friend Julie’s cat (who wasn’t able to be rescued) is missing. The family went out to check today. More tomorrow.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner

Those here and across the world most likely know more than I do about the big stories and the numbers of houses and acres burned. They've been watching Katie at Qualcom Stadium show the world how much nicer the folks in San Diego are than those in during Katrina.

Hello...these people have money and their homes and ranches have been threatened. We’ve heard about the clowns and free hats and good food a the stadium (with Katrina the only clowns sent to the stadium were from FEMA). This morning an ‘illegal’ alien (as the newscasters so insensitively refer to the Mexican population who clean their houses) was caught trying to enter the stadium to eat and maybe get a free T-shirt or hat, and a place to sleep. He was tossed out. I just heard that they caught a man trying to enter who had been wanted by the police for domestic violence.

The big story is that Rancho Santa Fe and Del Mar were miraculouly saved, while next door the hippy community of Lake Hodges burned (so I've heard) quite badly...except for the landmark Hernandez Hideaway Mexican restaurant. Yesterday and this morning at Santa Ysabel there were several more delegation caravans traveling to and fro, mostly locals from the looks of the cars and trucks, and the fact that these folks drive a slower. The really important guys travel military style, in equal distance from each other and move fast. Bush is due (or already is) in town to declare Mission Accomplished and many expect him to do a fly-by since the winds are now calm.

Am still without electric but the phone line is open and I found someone with a generator to charge up the computer. I have a couple close sources for water so plan to stay the night in my own bed and watch for any east moving winds. So I’m okay. I spoke with my friend Julie this morning and learned that, yes, she lost everything. She and her daughter were away from home so her husband and son grabbed what the could, turned out their horse Buddy, and left.

Husband Rob took bags of old clothes and wet clothes from the washer, not much more, all treasures lost. Son Julian scouted the house for his November birthday present and came up with an Xbox game (I just love kids), and he took his sister’s highschool letter-woman jacket (he really DOES love her). There are so many metaphors and the remarkable stories keep coming. Julie’s neighbor Marguerite runs the EA Ranch (horse spa and breeding ranch) and stayed on to keep the dozens of horses alive (including Buddy who turned up with singed eyelashes). She lost her house and burned her face. She’s still out there.

I’m quickly losing power so will send more later.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner

Courtesy of the San Diego Union Tribune

Early Sunday morning, in the wake of strong Santa Ana winds, a fire broke out in the town of Portreo 45 miles east of San Diego near the Mexican border (where the private military contractor Blackwater USA wants to open a mercenary training camp).

I learned about the fire as I was driving to San Diego University to hear a talk by Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi economist and banker; winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize along with Grameen bank for their efforts to create economic and social development through micro-loans to poor women. (More to come.)

I walked out of Mandeville Hall about 4 p.m. to a sky filled with smoke all along the coast. I remembered, all too well, the Cedar fire of 2003, which had threatened my home. I made a phone call to friends to learn that at about 1 p.m., a fire had broken out west of where I live in Julian in California's backcountry 30 miles east of the city.

A familiar sense of the surreal settled over me as I began driving home. Since my normal route through the city of Ramona was blocked, I drove home via the back route through Cuyamaca State park which was hit hard by the Oct. 2003 Cedar Fire. The Santa Ana winds were now clocking in at 70 miles per hour and were blowing the fires westward toward San Diego.

Fortunately, the neighborhood where I live, in the shadow of Volcan Mountain, was safe for the moment. But the entire city of Ramona (population of over 35,000) where my sister lives, was evacuated creating miles of traffic worming along Hwy 67 toward who knows where.

Since then, the fire has ravaged sleepy Rancho Bernardo, and Del Dios at Lake Hodges. Parts of Rancho Santa Fe, one of the wealthiest communities in the country, has burned. We don't know yet how many homes have been lost, but in 2003, 2,500 homes were razed and these (now multiple) fires are so much worse and being driven into dense areas.

Amazing that there aren't more deaths. The new reverse 911 system has saved lives! And people are getting out. However, no one is prepared for days and weeks without electricity, food, and phone service.

Most people don't understand that it still pays to have a landline phone that plugs directly into a wall jack. So many cell phones aren't receiving signals that it's difficult to keep in communication. Or the need to keep for extra water and food....even I am poorly equiped, but have filled up water jugs, am dusting off a Coleman stove and looking for my propane canisters. I've stuffed sleeping bags into an already-filled car and am wondering what item I might have left behind.

I've seen a lack of real common sense amongst folks too. (Gee, maybe a match can light a gas stove when the electric starter doesn't work).

Also, we've had a huge response from FEMA, much different than the response the poor folks in New Orleans received.

In the midst of all this, I see a need for all of us to think about being more self-sufficient. The plan to run wind power across San Diego from the desert via mega power lines will ultimately not work. We must put up solar panels on homes, etc., but these are bigger issues for later.

Now, we must get out of harm's way and help our neighbors when the smoke settles.

***

3:00 am Wednesday morning.
Fires continue to ravage San Diego County. Seven or eight at last count. Santa Ana winds whip trees and power lines creating a frenzy of madness and fear. 560,000 people, at last count, evacuated from their homes. It’s getting more difficult for many to decide where to go. Friends offered me their coastal homes in Oceanside and San Juan Capistrano, but during the night back fires that were lit on the Marine base of Camp Pendleton at the Pacific Ocean got quickly out of control. The I-5, a major north-south freeway from Mexico to Oregon, has been closed between the military base. Pendleton residents, like those of us in the eastern back country area of Julian, are without power and are getting news through local am radio station, KOGO.

At least I still have some options, and have camped out at the Santa Ysabel Art Gallery about five minutes from my residence. It’s a crossroads between two arteries out of the county, if necessary. From this vantage point it’s easy to access where the fire trucks are headed. Long after dark last night I watched a caravan of about twenty vehicles with lights flashing roll past the road block and head west toward Witch Creek, the area where this local fire started Sunday afternoon. Sandwiched between the cars was a long, black limo. We surmised that this must have been homeland security director, Michael Chertoff or Arnold Schwarzeneger coming to access the situation, albeit at high speed and behind tinted windows. I’ll take my homeland security in the form of a row of fire trucks staged at the ready outside my window.

Tonight the hillside is dotted with several back-fire burns smoldering into the grassland below. These are intentionally lit fires created to burn out the fuel should the winds shift east. Back fires often save lives and structures. Sometimes they do the opposite. My neighbors, artist James Hubbell and his wife Anne lost their home, as did others, and firefighter, Steve Rucker, lost his life in 2003 due to a back fire. I sighed a breathe of relief when learning, just before darkness fell, that the half dozen fire trucks and firefighters in full gear staged along the highway ridge above me and my home five minutes away were sent off to other areas, the planned back fire was called off.

Second guessing nature can be disastrous. There’s a constant gauging of when to evacuate and I hear people complaining that they had to leave a couple days ago yet fire has not yet threatened their homes. The 2003 Cedar Fire taught all of us that wind and fire are not predictable and that we are all vulnerable at anytime under such conditions. I wonder that our comfortable lifestyles with an absolute dependency on outside entities for food, water, transportation, and safety have caused a dumbing-down of our survival skills, something to ponder during these long hours at night by oil lamp and candles listening to the relentless wind howling under a waxing moonlight. I fear that this disaster may be a glimpse into our ever-warming future.

Oct. 24, 2007 – 4:00 am Wednesday

More of the same. A couple more drive-by caravans with officials in my area. Firefighters are poised tonight in the event of a wind shift to the east. This would be very bad for me. I’m now charging my computer battery in Warner Spring as the electricity came back on last night (but not their phone service), and will drive up to my Julian residence to send off e-mails as my landline seems to be the only open communication nearby. So I’ll sign off so I can beat any pending road closure.
PS On a sad note. I just learned that my friend’s (Julie and Rob Weaver and their two children Emily and Julian) home has been lost. They live in the center of Witch Creek near two huge horse ranches and a rancher with fifteen camels. No word yet the fate of these ranches. Wish us all well.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Kyi May Kaung

Government security forces in Myanmar cracked down for a second day today on nationwide protests, firing shots and tear gas, and raiding at least two Buddhist monasteries, where they beat and arrested dozens of monks, according to reports from the city of Yangon. New York Times, Thursday, 27 September, 2007

(Editor's Note: Wild River Review contributor, Kyi Mae Kung is a Burmese human-rights activist, artist and writer who has lived in exile since 1982. She holds a doctorate in political economy from the University of Pennsylvania. Most recently she worked for the Burma Fund, affiliated to the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the democratic government in exile.)

On Monday, for the fifth straight day, monks demonstratied in Rangoon and other cities of Burma, the numbers growing larger with each passing day. At first only a few monks demonstrated in towns such as Pakokku, where the authorities used hired thugs, now called Swan Arr Shin (Possessors of Strength) to lasso and catch the fleeing monks with lariats and imprison them, forcing them to disrobe and then rough-housing and torturing them in prison.

In Pakokku, for a few hours, the monks kept some army officers captive, but since then, they have walked through cities and towns silently, observing the Theravada monks' traditional discipline of silence and downcast eyes. They have also been chanting the Metta Thoke or Loving Kindness Sutra, which sends and shares merit to all living beings.

Monks able to see Aung San Suu Kyi.
According to eye witness reports the monks did not even speak to Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Nobel Peace Laureate democracy leader, who has been under house arrest since May 2003. When a group of about 500 monks was inexplicably allowed to walk past her house on Saturday, she came out of a side gate dressed in yellow (gold- the color of the religious Order or Thathana) to pay her respects on Saturday.

With this implicit or implied blessing from a woman increasingly considered the matriarch of Burma - as her father Aung San before her was considered the founding father of independent Burma in 1947, the year he was assassinated with his entire cabinet - the number of monks marching in the streets has increased together with the numbers of lay people forming "human chains" accompanying and applauding them.

The monks are of a generation younger than the 1988 generation of dissidents and activists, who are now in their late 30s or 40s. I am amazed that there are so many of them. A foreign journalist estimates their countrywide numbers as 500,000, the exact number as the number of conscripted and other soldiers in the junta's standing army, and says that "they are the only organization that can now challenge the military government," now that Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party has been severely repressed and decimated by death and arrest.

In a smuggled video obtained by the radio and TV station, The Democratic Voice of Burma, based in Oslo, Norway, the sound of clapping hands accompanies the marching monks, and is at first startling, making one wonder if those are gunshots.

Now the demonstrations seem to have reached their peak, numbers reported at 20,000 yesterday and 100,000 today, and the junta, called The State Peace and Development Council, has put out an order that it will "take action"if this continues. In smuggled out video and photographs taken by citizen journalists inside Burma, we see masses of rust red, maroon red robed monks, and many many shaved heads, hands held in the gesture of shikoe or paying respect. Some of the monks appear to be hiding their faces from the camera, but the majority do not hide. It makes me sad to think of their mothers and grandmothers, the other women in their families, who have "given them to the Sangha (The Buddhist clergy)." A monk who was clubbed and then transported back to his monastery while still unconscious, later gave an interview to a foreign based radio station. I fear many of those in the images I see today, may not survive in the coming weeks.

On previous days the monks marched either behind a banner with the colors of the Buddhist thathana, or led by a monk holding his black lacquered begging bowl upside down. In Burmese, the word for "strike" or "to strike" - thabeik hmauk - literally means "to turn the thabeik or begging bowl upside down."

In our Theravada Buddhist belief, a monk, as the Buddha Gautama himself did, does a lay person a favor, by allowing him or her to obtain merit, by accepting alms from them. It is not the other way around. So when a monk or monks refuse alms from the junta, it is an act of severe moral censure.

When I was growing up in Burma in the fifties, it was the custom for monks to go on their begging rounds every morning into the neighborhoods. The monks will stand silently outside each house for a few moments. Usually the lady of the house will donate a few scoops of cooked rice, or whatever curry she can afford. The monk is not supposed to be choosy, cannot refuse whatever is offered and once back at the monastery, may not eat at leisure, savoring each flavor, but must mix all the offerings up in his bowl, balabaing, as we say in Burmese, and then eat this mush.

The Vinaya, or rules of the order, have come down to us from the time of the historic Buddha, the Gautama Buddha (Prince Siddartha before he obtained Enlightenment) and number a total of 227 rules, beginning obviously with the ten commandments and extending to rules regarding the robes, personal possessions, modes of dress, rules regarding meals (the monks may not eat any solid food after 12 noon until dawn of the next morning) and may not travel during the Buddhist Lent, which coincides with the monsoon season.

Due to lack of space to explain here, the best book for you to read is What the Buddha Taught, by the late Dr. Walpola Rahula, the famous Sri Lankan thera or wise person.

Theravada means the wada or vada, that is, the creed of the theras. It is the oldest form of Buddhism, that Burma shares with other South and Southeast Asian countries such as Sri Lanka (in fact Burma got its Buddhism from Sri Lanka in the 10th century), Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. To call it Hinayana Buddhism (The Little Vehicle) as opposed to Mahayana Buddhism (The Greater Vehicle) is considered to be derogatory.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's nothing quite as seductive as fakes, forgeries, and intrigue in the art world, and the traveling "Touch of Mandela" exhibition, currently featured at the J.Alexander Galleries in La Jolla, California, has proven to be no exception (see WRR@Large below from September 6th, Nelson Mandela, Holding Africa in the Palm of His Hand).

Considering the amount of money involved - up to $40,000 for a single limited edition print - it might have been inevitable that someone would cry fake. And indeed this happened with a WRR reader posting by Gary Arseneau, a self-proclaimed lithographer and artist from a small beach community near Jacksonville, Florida.

Mr. Arseneau's blog-sight and articles would indicate that he's a one-man vigilante in exposing alleged art fakery from Rodin to Degas, and now he has taken on the "Touch of Mandela" Collection.

The issue at hand is whether or not the signed, limited edition lithographs being sold are authentic. Representatives from Touch Galleries http://touchgalleries.com.au, the Australian organization that "own the artworks outright," and whose sole purpose has been to sell the illustrated and personally signed limited edition images by Nelson Mandela, stand by their claim that the lithographs are certified as authentic and have been independently forensically tested to support this claim. Touch Galleries' Director, Richard Lubner, also assisted in creating a non-profit South African based charity, MaAfrika Tikkun http://www.maafrikatikkun.org.za/Intro.htm.

Touch Galleries, in its own capacity, also supports the efforts of MaAfrika Tikkun. "We encourage you to participate with us in supporting the well-being and education of underprivileged children in South Africa," Lubner said. The organization lists Mr. Mandela as its Chief Patron. To see what Mr. Mandela has to say about the work that Tikkun is doing in South Africa go to: http://www.touchgalleries.com.au/charity/.

"There is no question that this has been a commercial venture from the very beginning, but to allege that the lithographs are fake and that Mandela’s signatures are not original is simply false and inflammatory as this issue has been forensically proven otherwise," says Touch Galleries Australia General Manager, Benjamin Cook.

"There were allegations of wrong-doing in the past with regard to 'misappropriation of funds' in general among the Mandela camp, as well a collaborative program/collection of artworks completed by a list of international artists know as the 'Unity Series'," says Cook. "Those works are not a part of the current Touch Galleries' collection and exhibit because they (the 'Unity Series') never received Mr. Mandela's consent - hence it never came to fruition. I think Mr. Arseneau has confused the facts," Cook went on to say.

The controversy might be better served by a discussion on the value of art and how double-digit price tags, driven by art enthusiasts and speculators, best serves an artist's work and/or cause. The art world is subjective and when art is created for the purpose of fundraising and profit it moves into a different category. Ultimately, it's up to the buyers of art to review a gallery's credentials and their own motives for purchasing.

After looking at both sides of this issue, I still come away in awe of what Mandela, an icon of peace in our day, has endured and accomplished; and without the exhibit I may never have seen his work. Regardless of the details of how these lithographs were created and sold, Mandela's art work will prove to be a legacy of an indomitable spirit.

Posted by Joy Stocke at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

by Joy E. Stocke

Photo: Nanette Kardaszeski

What happens when an art museum located between New York and Philadelphia - showcasing, among its holdings, an extensive collection of paintings from the Pennsylvania Impressionist School - announces an expansion?

It hires a world class architectural firm (RMJM Hillier) and prepares for a groundbreaking ceremony.

To break ground, one needs a shovel, so the Michener Museum by-passed Home Depot and went to the studio of one of the world's greatest woodworkers, George Katsutoshi Nakashima (1905-1990), who, during his lifetime, was called the "Elder Statesman of the American Craft Movement." (The Michener Museum features the George Nakashima Reading Room designed by his daughter, Mira Nakashima-Yarnall, and includes several important furniture pieces in the Nakashima tradition.)

A shovel made by the Nakashima studio promises to be unlike any other and on a very humid morning, at the invitation of the Michener Museum, I find myself standing barefoot in an exquisite show room in the hills above New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Dressed in a tie-dyed blue and dark purple shirt that contrasts vividly with the serene pieces of wood furniture that compose the showroom, Mira Nakashima holds the shovel, made of English walnut, beautifully carved from a single piece of wood, and says with extreme good nature, "This is one of our goofiest projects."

The fact that the piece is exquisite is not lost on her guests. She introduces her assistant, Miriam Carpenter, a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, explaining that, "Miriam is the first person I have conferred with since my dad passed away."

What attracted Mira Nakashima to Miriam was the fact that Miriam grew up working with and loving wood. "My grandfather was a woodworker," says Miriam, "and I was always interested in the grain and texture of each piece."

And so the apprenticeship began, an apprenticeship that includes the opportunity to trace the hand of George Nakishima, transfering drawings he made directly on wood to paper; drawing choplines, sculpting the handle, and scooping out wood to create the bowl of a shovel. A piece of art almost too beautiful to spade into earth.

Mira Nakashima and Miriam Carpenter
Photo: Nanette Kardaszewski

Editor's Note: The first phase of the James A. Michener Art Museum's expansion and renovation program will build a new wing to include a 5,000 square-foot upper level gallery that is large and flexible enough to accommodate major nationally touring exhibitions and the permanent collection. Groundbreaking is set for the end of September.

http://www.michenermusem.org/contact: ksmotrich@michenerartmuseum.org
http://www.nakashimawoodworker.com/

Posted by Joy Stocke at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Angie Brenner

"My long walk has not yet ended."
Nelson Mendela

We had expected to be moved, maybe even outraged, when invited to attend a private viewing of Nelson Mandela's lithographic drawings at the J. Alexandra Galleries in La Jolla, California. What couldn't have been anticipated was the collective sense of hope and empowerment our group of twenty or so San Diego patrons of African art experienced.

While gallery owner Diane Haman poured mimosas, we stood in front of Mandela's drawings and wondered how this gentle man had endured years of torture at the hands of his fellow countrymen and come out on the other side with dignity and the will to move peace to the highest level of humankind?

As South Africa's first Black president, he was able to bring about the changes he sought. "One man, one vote," has always been his mantra.

But who knew Mandela could draw?

Even he didn't, says the exhibit's spokesman Ben Cook, a bright, young Australian who tells us that it was Mandela's publisher, inspired by the line drawings of John Lennon, who first came up with the idea. It was a commercial endeavor from the beginning to bring awareness of the power of peace to a new generation, and income for Mandela's large, extended family and his many humanitarian projects throughout South Africa. Projects like MaAfrika Tikkun., the organization that means Mother Africa; and the Jewish word, tikkun, transformation. MaAfrika Tikkun provides
academic, nutritional, agricultural, and health education to local African communities.

Cook, who was hired to take Mandela's work to galleries around the world, tells us that Mandela spent several months with an art tutor learning to sketch. The result is seventeen prints, most of which depict scenes of Robbin Island Prison in South Africa where Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven imprisoned years in a seven by seven foot cell.

In his drawings called the Struggle Series, we see a panel of five charcoal sketches: a raised, defiant fist, 'Struggle'; chained wrists, 'Imprisonment'; chains broken, 'Freedom'; hands clasped in peace, 'Unity' (Mandela's chalk-mark on all his drawings); an adult and child's hands clasped together 'Future.'

"These sketches not so much about my life as they are about my own country," says Mandela. "I drew hands because they are powerful instruments, hands can hurt or heal, punish or uplift. They can also be bound but a quest for righteousness can never be repressed. In time, we broke loose the shackles of injustice, we joined hands across social divides and national boundaries, between continents and over oceans and now we look to the future, knowing that even if age makes us wiser guides, it is the youth that remind us of love, of trust and the value of life."

It took Mandela three months to create all the drawings, Cook says, and another three months to sign the fifteen thousand lithographs.

The drawings of Robbin Island Prison almost appear to be lifted from a traveler's journal. There's a watch tower colored in bright ochre surrounded by barbed-wire against a sunny sky, a room of a row of beds covered with emerald-green blankets, and an outside view of the stone prison walls against a blue ocean. Even the primitive toilet inside a tiny barred cell is painted in a bright yellows and reds.

Mandela thought his drawings were too stark, too harsh without color. "We can choose to live life in black and white or in color," he has been known to say. He added color as a celebration of hope and the positive light in which he believes has sprung from tyranny of oppression.

Much of Mandela's life seems cloaked in irony. We are told the story of the young woman, Varenka Paschke, whom he chose to be his art tutor. The woman, the granddaughter of P.W Botha, the former Prime Minister of South Africa and the one responsible for Mandela's ongoing imprisonment, asked him if he understood who she was. Mandela had said, yes, he did, but could think of no better way for reconciliation then to have them work together. It is this belief in the power of love that comes through in his art work.

The least expensive and most expensive paintings in the exhibit are void of color and equally the most moving. In the first, Mandela dipped four fingers in black paint and simply drew bars on white paper. Under this, an exact replica of the key to Mendela's Robbin Island's cell number five has been mounted.

The lithograph in this exhibit with the highest price tag ($32,000. and three had already been sold) was made by accident when Mandela placed his hand in wet ink. The idea of hand prints however intrigued him and he began to make several images. Only later did an assistant point out the iconic image inside the right hand print of the painting now in front of us. In the center of Mandela's right palm shows a clear silhouette of the African continent.

The six and a half foot Mandela will turn 90 next year. He walks slower, his hands now arthritic. He will never paint again. The original plates of his drawings were destroyed, and fourteen of the fifteen thousand drawings have already been sold for a total of one-hundred million dollars, making Mandela the most commercially successful artist of the twentieth century.

He laughs, Cook says, with such titles of political activist and prisoner, Nobel peace laureate and president, at the idea of being thought an artist.

When I leave, Haman hands me her gallery business card with its logo of an abstract pyramid and swirl. An ancient Hawaiian symbol she says. "It means a wave of light that makes you gasp."

Yes of course, I think, like hope.

The Nelson Mandela exhibit will be featured through September 2007
www.jalexandergalleries.com
J. Alexander Galleries
1298 Prospect
La Jolla, CA
858-454-7110

Posted by Joy Stocke at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Grace Paley
(1922-2007)

"Oh, Auden said everything," was Grace Paley's response to a student's question at the Juniper Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst this past summer. After hearing a stream of Paley's short poems I got the impression that if my Nana would have regularly sat down for tea with William Carlos Williams this is the person she would have become. During Paley's Q&A session, moderator Chris Bachelder prompted her to talk about "Two Ears, Three Lucks," the introduction to her collected stories. She said one must have "the ear of listening to the world and the ear of listening to literature." Paley then moved into moments of her past: her babooshka reading stories aloud in Russian, sneaking down to the foot of the stairs at night to listen to her parents talking, hiding under the kitchen table to just listen. This careful listening translates to work that pulses with a living language springing from conversation; it's fluid, it's moving, it doesn't always need quotation marks. When asked about characters, she spoke of "giving life to people—your character must live and do what they want to, not what you want them to do—you must look at them with great surprise, understanding, interest, and curiosity." Another fitting quote, a reminder of the ever present wit in Paley’s stories, was said sometime during the session, "The only thing that makes a plot is the word 'then.' I can say 'then' as good as anybody." She certainly did. Posted by Christopher Tiefel at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) August 27, 2007 Scenes from a Symposium - 3 - Joan Halifax Roshi by Joy E. Stocke Joan Halifax Roshi is one of Buddhism's leading contemporary teachers, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author of numerous works including The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom. Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher at Upaya Zen Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Roshi Joan has worked in the area of death and dying for over thirty years and is Director of the Project on Being with the Dying. "My field is dying. You could say I've been on a death trip for the past twenty-five years. How do we die? How we die and how we live can't be separated because the factors and policies surrounding death affect the well-being of the planet. Although, I'm a specialist in death, I'm also an incredible generalist. How did I come to be a generalist on a death trip? Ralph Abraham and Amy Varela (psychoanalyst and wife of the late neuro-scientest Francisco Varela) remind me that to be in a changing system, catastrophes - or unexpected changes both personal and political - can produce new emergences. My own catastrophe was blindness and paralysis at age four. I was blind until age six and was not well-socialized, so I became an introvert with a personality; a one-on-one, or a one-in-a-thousand being. Since I could not see and spent much time alone, I had to learn to see beyound seeing. And because I was so young, my blindness was a non-tragic, but interesting time in my life. The person who took care of me was an African American woman whose mother was a slave. She was very poor, but to me she seemed freeer than anybody. Because of my relationship with her, by the time I reached my late teens, I was deeply committed to the Civil Rights Movement. My generation also became aware of the damage we were doing to the ecological system. We had the opportunity to develop a path of social action. It was not then - and is not now - frivolous. I had the opportunity to work with folklorist and musicologist, Alan Lomax, who, with his father founded the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. What I learned in my relationship with Alan was the importance of cultural and environmental diversity. The Civil Rights Movement spoke to that. We spoke up against the way our society was pressing us into a kind of monoculture, one where everything becomes objectified. I've discovered that this issue of objectification has pervaded our global culture, this notion that we posses the earth. With Alan I started my fieldwork in Pentecostal churches, my caregiver's church, and became fascinated with alternate states of consciousness I witnessed during service. In 1969, I went to Mali to the Dogon people. Every 53 years they have a seven-year period of initiation. I sat there and thought, how do we transform in our own culture? Our initation rites offer no alternative but to send kids to war. Or we get them drunk. There is no opportunity for true maturation. The question came to me. How do I deepen my life? I had begun sitting in meditaion in 1965, just sitting. And I thought, this is a refuge that gives a wonderful gift every day, after a while, and sometimes. The Buddha himself had a really hard time in meditation. Mara, the ruler of desire and death, always came to him, even into his death because the Buddha died at a time of war; a time and place not so different from now. What he came to understand is that nothing is fixed in time and space. It was liberating to realize how groundless our moment-to-moment experiences really are. We have to ask the question, what is a self? Is that a me and everything else is not me? In meditation we know there is no other. Even Einstein knew that the idea of the "other" is foolish. There is one thing we all have is breath - an engine - a piston that goes up and down. The in-breath. The out-breath. The piston that one day stops. So Buddhism is medium for dying people, caregivers, famiy institutions. Upaya Zen Center is a place that expresses diffrerences that nourish and engender one another. And so we must always live with questions about the institution we created in order to do our work. Do we downsize? Or answer a bigger calling? How do we have a sense of profound intimacy and socialize ourselves into healthy growth knowing that growth engenders breakdown? Knowing that we're not going to grow without catastrophe? This is a great and interesting problem. It takes surrender, but incredible determination to punch through our points without attachment to outcome. Thich Nat Han said, 'Our own lives are the instrument where we experiment with the truth.' We should remember that only ten percent of people die quickly and painlessly. For the rest of us, whether we are on a conscious death trip or not, we will share this process with the people we love, and they will do this with us. www.upaya.org Posted by Joy Stocke at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) August 9, 2007 Scenes from a Symposium - 2 - Ralph Abraham by Joy E. Stocke Ralph Abraham - Mathematician - A pioneer of chaos theory and its applications. Abraham is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, and creator of the Visual Math Institute. He has taught at Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton before moving to the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1968. He has performed works of visual and aural mathematics and music (with Ami Radunskaya and Peter Broadwell) since 1992. Ralph Abraham "A year and a half ago, I had a Fulbright to Kokata, India. I stayed at the Ramakrishna Mission and Institute - http://www.sriramakrishna.org/ Nowadays Kolkata is like Boston with fabulous schools where I had the opportunity to lecture on chaos theory. In my early history I spent a lot of time in India "out of time." Ever since, I've been thinking of how to make use of my experience, and was finally given the opportunity when I was asked to participate in a conference on science and consciousness. I was with a group of yoga practicioners. They included yogis who live in caves; Christian mystics from Egypt, Sufi practitioners. These people were models of consciousness according to personal experience. What you have in India is a culture of scientists who meditate. I don't find this much in the U.S. It's not taken seriously here, but in Kolkota that is okay. I ended up in partnership with a quantum physicist who was studying Yoga Nidra or yogic sleep." (Ed. Note: In Yoga Nidra, one leaves the waking state, goes through the dreaming state, and into the deep Sleep state, yet remains fully awake.) "He had been author of an advanced model for quantum vacuum, which is a weird thing beyond reality. The quantum vacuum is the realm of energy behind matter. In this realm, there is neither space nor time and yet everything in it is interconnected." (Ed. Note: The properties of the Universe come from `nothing', where nothing is the quantum vacuum - a piece of `empty' space that is not truly empty. It is filled with spacetime, which has curvature and structure, and obeys the laws of quantum physics. Thus, it is filled with potential particles, pairs of virtual matter and anti-matter units, and potential properties at the quantum level.) "He said, 'Let's use the quantum vacuum as a model for the soul. Something which all mystics know exist, but which has never been scientifically proved or quantified. My day job involves a lot computer programming for bioiolgists, social scientists. For example: With voters, why do the Democratic and Republican platforms drift together? So we thought, maybe a computer program can help answer the question of the soul. We came to this conundrum: Condensation creates the illusion of space-time - zilions and zillions of nodes that are conneceted by links. Condensation has micro times - changing lights. Out of this comes an illusion of ordinary time. So time is created step by step from an object which is eternal. There can be evolution following laws of physics, biology. This condensation process, if we envision it the right way, makes us understand without conflict parnormal behavior." (Ed. Note: Paranormal - any phenomenon that in one or more respects exceeds the limits of what is deemed physically possible according to current scientific assumptions.) "In the neo-Platonic emanation view of reality in some sense creation is from the top down. You have Plato's cave where human beings only see shadows on the wall, not the reality. In Plato's world, human beings are simply passive agents in the story of creation. In the condensation model, the agency becomes important because the understanding of condensation would include the mind of the observer. How do we base ths out of relativity? We have among paranormal phenomena, free will, something which doesn't appear in Einstein's view. But the physical world has evolved the quantum vacumm. I want to make a phantom double: the soul. So we create a model for mind and a model for the body. We can double them up by putting links between them. We create dynamic cell networks in our model for mind, which we only know through our experience. It's hard to write the rules for a model. But the point is, what we think matters, and thoughts exist." http://www.ralph-abraham.org/ . Posted by Joy Stocke at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) August 6, 2007 Scenes from a Symposium 1 - Mary Catherine Bateson by Joy E. Stocke Mary Catherine Bateson - Cultural Anthropologist - Author of many books including, Composing a Life; co-author with her father, Gregory Bateson, of Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Mary Catherine Bateson; Santa Fe, New Mexico "A few years ago, in Composing a Life, I focused on women - because women's lives have changed so radically - and how women deal with various demands. I wrote of women's lives as improvisatory art. Shifts in women's lives are like shifts in a piece of music. We ask the question, 'How do I put this together in composition with that? How do those strands complement one another, rather than conflict?' I mean, heck, I was in my forties when I wrote Composing a LIfe. Some librariarians from the Americans for Libraries Council came to me, and said, 'Soon we're going to be a society of retired people. What should they do besides read large print books?' Since I turned 65, I've been thinking about what is there besides large print books? We are undergoing huge demographic changes. For most of human history average life expectancy was 30-40 years. An awful lot of infants died. Elders were rare and precious. Today in the U.S., life expectancy has reached the later 70s. Everybody's panicked. What are we going to do with greedy geezers who are not contributing to the economy? First, a couple of odd characteristics that developed during the evolution of our species. We have long, dependent childhoods, which makes learning possible; and we have an uncoupling of sexuality from the estrus cycle. Since most species mate to breed, this uncoupling for human beings is important. Why should natural selection - which depends on breeding to produce offspring - select for longevity? Because, if you have a social species with a capacity for learning, survival of the group is enhanced by the memory of our elders. A lot of insects breed once and die. For social critters like us, long memories are important. I like to tease the librarians because now that we have writing, we don't need longevity. It's all there in our books. Almost. What strikes me about the situation we're in now - dropping birthrates, longer survival - is that we're moving from a social structure that included children, adults, and the precious resource of grandparents to a structure where we've got a wealth of grandparents in relation to structure of society. Now a child could have eight grandparents through divorce and remarriage. And It's very important to think through about what this will mean. I have conversations with people all the time. They say, 'I'm 65, I don't feel 65.' They're simply saying, 'I have arrived at this age with sterotypes about aging, which are no longer applicable.' http://www.marycatherinebateson.com/ Posted by Joy Stocke at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) August 4, 2007 Scenes from a Symposium: A Rare and Wondrous Gathering by Joy E. Stocke The Upaya Zen Center nestles into the mountains a sufficient distance from Santa Fe that I'm sure I've made a mistake walking into the hills without a map. When I ask two police officers in separate cruisers where the center is, they look at me with raised eyebrows as if to suggest I turn around and fly back to New Jersey. I stop a third car, and a young man says, "You're standing in front of the entrance. The monastery is hiding in plain sight." And then he drives away... His words could be a mantra for what is about to transpire within the walls and gardens of Upaya, where Abbot Joan Haifax, Roshi, presides over a gathering of artists, scientists, architects, writers, poets, philosophers, mathematicians and spiritual leaders, which include Mary Catherine Bateson - daughter of antrhopologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson; her sister Nora, who is making a film of her father's life; mathemetician Ralph Abraham, an expert in chaos dynamics; poet and farmer, Wendell Barry; the Reverend James Parks Morton, former Dean of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and founder of the Interfaith Center of New York; and Saul Mendlovitz, Director of the World Order Models Project. We are guests of cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, one of my mentors. In 1972, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Fellowship, an association of creative individuals in the arts, sciences, and contemplative practices devoted to the study and realization of what he calls, "a new planetary culture." What Bill means by that is not so easy to quantify. In her opening remarks, Roshi Joan sums up the early years of Lindisfarne: "We felt a sense of urgency in those years. We thought the world was uraveling. And so we created a consort - summed up best in the work of Paul Winter - a consort that was wild and safe and where our relationships were vital." Joan Halifax, Roshi Joan spoke of the philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller who had "extraordinary faith in Bill," and "who made it possible for us to take risks." She also reminded us that this is the first meeting of Lindisfarne Fellows in ten years and that as the orginal members age, "there will be a point of discontinuation of people who have transformed the landsape." "It's important to bring us together now," she says. "Not to look at what we're doing, but to see what lies ahead. Elders cary the possiblility of prophecy. So let's sit with our mortality and remember that Lindisfarne is a process, not an institution." We are sitting in semi-circle, our shoes off, some with notebooks poised. She seems to look at each one of us, particuarly at the younger faces in the room, "This could be our swansong," she says, "or maybe we swans will lft up our voices and sing." Posted by Joy Stocke at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) July 24, 2007 Finding Harry Potter by Christopher Tiefel I knew I was there when I saw Hagrid. The unkempt bearded half-giant was browsing for cell phones in the shop next to the bookseller, buyers forming a bubble around him and his cadre of characters; Ms. Figg was there, so was Viktor Krum, and two other Hogwarts students, waiting to enter the Deathly Hollow Ball next door. Friday night and on the agenda for these characters was the release of book seven in the Harry Potter series. Not since Christmas had I seen a store so crowded, and not since Halloween so many costumed wizards wandering around open in the Muggle world. The place filled with the palpable energy of all-aged fans washed in childhood energy, an anticipation for the climax of getting a bedtime story. Over the loudspeaker the store manager gave a disclaimer speech before the book was released: "Because you will be waiting in the checkout line with your books if anyone decides to yell out the ending I cannot guarantee their safety." There was laughter but then a sincere serious quiet, because somebody certainly should get slugged for spoiling the ending of the series. Bookshelves were moved to form a long corridor; patrons were able to enter the runway only when their reserved bracelet colour was called. It was an arena of yelling fans and when my colour matched I ran down the gauntlet entering a small stadium of stacked books, the orange creamsicle covers melting away as the heavy hardbacks were frantically passed out. It's Christmas morning, it's my birthday, I am six again getting my first two-wheeled bike--the one that could make me fly. In the U.S. 8.3 million Harry Potter books will be sold in the first 24 hours, or roughly 96 books per second. Confirming to me the bookstore as the place of magic I always have known it to be. Posted by Christopher Tiefel at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) July 16, 2007 EARTH WIND FIRE WATER by Angie Brenner The scent of warm cedar and pine lingers over the ampitheater of the Idyllwild Arts Academy as the earth holds us in the arms of the spirit world. Tonight, Dancing Earth, an Indigenous, contemporary dance ensemble, originated by choreographer and spiritual visionary, Rulan Tangen, enchants a Southern California audience. Shawl Dancer Mixing modern dance with ancient and native rituals, Rulan Tangen seeks to bring a new world vision, one which embraces the elements and traditions of indgenous tribes from around the world. "Through arts," she says in her vision statment, "We promote awareness and communication as cultural exchange with both Indigenous communities and global audiences. With passionate and committed artistic exploration, we revitalize issues of environmental, social, cultural, spiritual, historical, educational, and philosophical relevance. We believe in dance as an expression that can illuminate issues of cultural, historical, philosophical, mythic, and spiritual relevance." Rooted on the grassy terraced knoll, we sit, enraptured, when a Maori percussionist enters stage left, lifts a small, bone horn and begins to call the dancers on stage. A Native American girl swirls her elaborately decorated, fringed shawl and dances, purposefully, to the repetitive beat. Soon, a half dozen loin-clothed and tattooed dancers step on to the stage twisting their necks and heads in perfect bird form. We have entered the world of the Maori bird dance. An honor to the extinct god Moa, perhaps? For the next two hours, dancers take us on a symbolic life journey through sight and sound. Several are visiting the U.S. for the first time from "The Land of the Long White Cloud," New Zealand, and speak their native language, Maoritanga. Others are from tribes in Canada, Arizona, California, New York, and Mexico. All say they are here to give something back to the earth and humanity by sharing their performances and life choices. Rulan Tangen Dancer, Kalani Queyop Dancer, Jessica Marisol Allen Regina Aguilera, my yoga teacher in Julian, California lead me to the festival. She was introduced to Rulan and her core dancers through her holistic work with the Native Wellness Institute, and was invited to perform with the ensemble. The dance troop, along with practicing their routines and making costumes, enjoyed the week-long Native American celebration at the Academy which included several cultural lectures and workshops. "And to sleep and dream," said Tangen, "It is the place where creativity comes." As if it were a Hollywood backdrop, the last rays of a setting sun stream golden light through tall cedar trees as Thunder & Fire dances are performed. No one moves; no one speaks. We watch in wonder as primal dances take us from ancient passages of renewal and sexuality to the yellow-shirted rap-dancers who combine modern music and movement with old traditions. As our planet warms and warps its way toward destruction, and we find loss everywhere we look, Dancing Earth left me with a profound sense of hope for an earth spinning in harmony. http://www.dancingearth.org http://www.nativewellness.com Posted by Joy Stocke at 2:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) June 21, 2007 Meeting Markus Zusak, the Boy Next Door by Wendy Fulton Steginsky Markus Zusak and I met in a New York City hotel last month, courtesy of PEN American Center's World Voices Festival. When he walked into the hotel's hospitality suite, Zusak — with a slight build, chestnut-brown hair and a boyish smile - certainly looked like the boy-next-door. He is anything but... An award-winning, Australian author with six books under his belt, and another in the works, Zusak has accomplished all of this at the tender age of thirty-one. His most recent and famous novel, The Book Thief, just hit the #1 spot on the bestsellers' list in Brazil. I was in New York City to interview Zusak, by special request...my own. I read The Book Thief last year, and when I saw the line-up of authors at PEN World Voices, I put in my request (read demand) to my colleagues at Wild River Review, saying, "I have to get this one, pleeease..." Markus Zusak I was bowled over by The Book Thief: by the inventiveness of the characters, the poetry, the imagery, and by the originality of Zusak's voice. The story takes place in Nazi Germany and the narrator is Death - sounds kind of grim so far, doesn't it? Well, in Zusak's powerful, well-crafted, and uplifting story, the elements that stay with the reader are the human ones: the real characters in the family he depicts, their interactions, their ambitions, their warm love for each other, their playfulness, and grand passions - all set in World War II Munich. To make everyday life shine with warmth and humanity the way Zusak does, in the larger picture of one of the darkest periods in human history, is an enormous feat. Zusak puts soul into each of the family members in The Book Thief, characters drawn, as he says, from stories of his parents, who grew up in Munich and Vienna at that time. In the context of the World Voices theme: Home and Away, I asked Zusak what "home" meant to him. In response he talked about Sydney where he grew up, his family of origin, of his brothers, and now his wife, and almost year-old baby. He said, however, he hasn't had much time to surf lately, one of his major outdoor loves. As we sat together in the hotel suite, I was struck by Zusak's genuineness and his seriousness of purpose. He writes every day for most of the morning and again later in the afternoon. He said about his writing that he strives to have a "gem" on every page - whether it's an image or an idea - so that if he writes a hundred-page book, there are a hundred good reasons to read it. I think, however, Zusak's most endearing quality was his modesty. He described how he is riddled with self-doubt until the book really takes off and he knows it is working. He is afraid at the moment of the new project he's engaged in, called Bridge of Clay. He describes this feeling as a good thing because it serves to make him stay on task and work harder. "I'm most happy," he says, "When I'm writing a book that means the world to me." When we finished the interview, Zusak and I went down in the elevator together. At the eighth floor, the elevator stopped and Markus hesitated, saying, "I have a date with my editor in fifteen minutes, but I should see you down to the lobby." I assured him I could find my way and insisted he get off to go to his room. He did with great reluctance. It was then I realized I had spent an hour of my time with a famous author, youthful boy-next-door, and a true gentleman. Posted by Joy Stocke at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) June 5, 2007 The Hottest Ticket at BookExpo America 2007 by Angie Brenner Any one of the authors scheduled to speak at Saturday's 8 am breakfast event at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York would be worth the early morning rally: Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love), Ken Burns (The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945), Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns). But it was the moderator, I - and 1300 other souls attending the annual book industry breakfast event - wanted to hear: Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, and first-time author of: I Am America (and so can you!). This was the one ticket I'd hoped to snag. Don't tell Stephen, but he's almost as funny as Sherman Alexie. (Okay, go ahead, tell Stephen. Maybe he’ll challenge Alexie to a 'funny' contest.) The problem was, I'd not signed up in advance. "it's been sold out for two weeks," said the first BEA registration clerk. So, I changed lines to ask another and got the same response. I begged my friend Melony (Latitude 33 Book Shop) to sell me her ticket (She had the patience and foresight to search out BEA event schedules in advance.). She wouldn't budge. When I followed her to the Javits Center Saturday morning in a feeble attempt to 'crash' the Colbert party, Melony saw the desperation in my eyes. She handed me a consolation prize, her invitation to a 3 pm panel discussion titled, Social Entrepreneurs: Changing the World. The audience in room 1C02-04 was staid and focused. Brian Lamb, the founder of C-Span had just taken the podium when I arrived and slid into a front row seat. He introduced a short film clip of Bangladeshi author, Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his successful work with lending money to people in poverty. I opened the invitation card to read who else was on the roster. There, seated on the dais from left to right was Teresa Heinz Kerry, philanthropist and co-author with her husband, John, of This Moment on Earth; Wendy Kopp, author and founder of Teach for America; George Soros, philanthropist, author, and chairman of the Open Society Institute; James Wolfensohn, author and former President of the World Bank. This was quite an impressive line-up, people with money, power, and compassion. Teresa Heinz Kerry Mr. Yunus, who was unable to attend in person, began by saying that the issue of business profit was, "too narrow; the human being is larger than this." Lamb then introduced author, journalist and the founder of Public Affairs publishing house, Peter Osnos, who would lead this heady panel in discussion of matters of consequence which affect all economic classes of people in the world. Osnos set the tone of the conversation by stating the opinion of the panel members that when you put people before money, great things can happen. George Soros talked about how to scale up micro-credit businesses and pointed out that Yunus's micro-credit projects have now reached macro proportions. And when asked whether protecting the environment is a social or business issue, Teresa Heinz Kerry spoke forcefully, saying "I think it is a health issue and moral imperative. We create the legacy we leave." She went on to say that today there’s a "new door of opportunity" to turn around the problems of global climate change. "We have a ten year window," she said, "in which to avoid calamity." Osnos added some levity to the discussion by saying that the BEA organizers had done their part for the environment by not using air conditioning at the Javits Center the previous day, when thousands of us melted in the crowded, humid air. Later, over dinner at Midtown restaurant Molyvos, Melony told me about the breakfast event, how Ken Burns's new series about World War II brought her to tears, and of Mr. Hosseini's humorous rebuttal to the fun Colbert has made on his show about The Kite Runner; and how the unshaven Colbert tried to stay in his right-winged character, and sometimes failed. I was sorry to have missed hearing these remarkable authors in person, but after sharing my comments from the panel discussion I'd just attended, I realized that I'd not missed the hottest event at BEA after all. Besides, I did get to have my photo taken that afternoon with Stephen at the Grand Central Publishing booth – well, at least a facsimile of Stephen. Posted by Joy Stocke at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) June 4, 2007 Heard and Seen at BookExpo America... by Joy E. Stocke For all you Jack Kerouac fans, this fall Viking/Penguin will publish the 50th anniversary edition of On the Road. No - scrolls of printed tracing paper won't be piled like so many rolls of paper towels on bookstore tables. Instead, says Paul Slovak, Vice President-Associate Publisher at Viking, fans of Kerouac will be able to read the unexpurgated On the Road exactly as Kerouac (who took stream of consciousness writing to new heights) wrote it. On the Road Slovak also updated us on Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. This fall, Viking will release a paperback collection of her short stories. According to Slovak, Gilbert, who by all accounts is known as a gregarious and generous soul, is planning to get back to her newly purchased New Jersey home - a former Presbyterian church - and sequester herself among the saints in order to write her next book. The folks at Graywolf press were displaying the hard copy edition of Norwegian author Per Pettersen's beautiful novel, Out Stealing Horses, published for the first time in the U.S. in April. (My interview with Pettersen appears in PEN World Voices section of this magazine - http://www.wildriverreview.com/worldvoices-perpetterson.php) At the Henry Holt and Company booth, Tara Kennedy, Assistant Director of Publicity; and Richard Rohrer, Director of Marketing, teasingly introduced us to Danielle Trussoni, author of Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir, (One of the New York Times's 10 notable books for 2006), saying she was Susan Faludi. Trussoni's book, which chronicles her relationship with a father suffering from post tramatic stress disorder after fighting in Vietnam, could be read as a precursor to Faludi, whose lastest book The Terror Dreaam: Fear and Fantasy in post 9/11 America poses the question: Why did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity? Tara Kennedy, Richard Rohrer, Danielle Trussoni Meanwhile, Angie is off to find Sherman Alexie and it's time to take off my heels. Posted by Joy Stocke at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) June 1, 2007 Where Joy Stocke and Angie Brenner Brave BookExpo America If anyone thinks that books are becoming obsolete, they haven't been to the Javits Center in New York City on a sulty June afternoon for BookExpo America, the biggest industry trade show in the United States. Angie and I have joined an expected 30,000 attendees on three levels in crowded lanes where booksellers have the opportunity to mingle with publishers, authors, press, agents, and magazines like Wild River Review. At times, the booths are so crowded, we feel as if all 30,000 of us had descended on the show at exactly the same time. As much as a sales event, BookExpo is also a celebration of the chain of events that must occur to bring an author's work to the public. BookExpo grew out of the ABA - American Bookseller's Association - a consortium of independent booksellers. According to attendee Melony Vance, General Manager of Latitude 33 Bookshop in Laguna Beach, California, "There are 2000 members of ABA, with a hundred new members joining this year. One of the highlights of BookExpo is the celebration of book selling, which is driven on many levels by the independent bookseller who has the knowledge, expertise and opportunity to spread the word about good books through their peers and customers." Melony Vance, Lattitude 33 Bookshop, Laguna Beach, CA On Thursday night, ABA announced its annual Booksense Awards, chosen by the independent booksellers - the Golden Globes of the book industry. Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants, a story of a man who joins the rough and tumble world of a traveling circus in 1930's America, won the Adult Fiction Award. "My book would never have taken off," she said. "If not for word of mouth through independent booksellers. To emphasize the popularity of the book, she told the audience that she had just finished a marathon book tour of 35 cities, which she called, "The holy Mother of God tour." Nora Ephron, riding on the zeitgeist of her latest book, I Hate My Neck (see Age of Reasonable Doubt - Fran Metzman's recent blog - for a rebuttle of Ephon's book), took the award for Adult Nonfiction. Ephon, who unabashedly loves New York City, told a story about her family moving to Los Angeles, California when she was 4 years old. She remembered walking into a beautiful blue sky world, thinking, "What the hell am I doing here?" She went on to explain how her family had befriended a local inependent bookseller, and how it transformed her life. "The store manager always had the right book for each of my family members," she said. When Nora was fourteen, the bookseller suggested that she read a book called Sic, Sic, Sic. "I was astounded," said Ephron. "This woman understood who I was and where I needed to be. I eventually moved back to New York and never forgot her, or the power of books." Graciously, Ephron thanked booksellers for making I Hate My Neck a bestseller. "It will keep me in turtlenecks for the rest of my life," she said. Stay tuned: Does Joy finally succumb to blisters and switch from heels to flats? Does Angie finally meet Sherman Alexie? More to come... Posted by Joy Stocke at 8:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) May 23, 2007 Sherman Who? Alexie,Of Course! by Angie Brenner It was by chance that I attended a talk by poet, author, filmmaker, Sherman Alexie at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last month. As I planned the day’s itinerary, my bookseller friend, Melony, suggested we meet at the Barnes & Noble stage at two to hear Alexie, one of her favorite authors. I was already on my way to attend a panel discussion featuring one of my favorite authors, global optimist, Pico Iyer, so I glossed over Alexie’s name, remembering where I was to meet Melony, but not who was speaking. At three minutes past two, I found the B & N stage packed beyond the twenty-five or so rows of filled chairs, and was relegated to standing with other latecomers outside the huge canopy. Sherman Alexie by Angie Brenner The tall, good looking author with thick black hair had captured the audience’s attention with a story of, “One of the two worst flights I’ve ever experienced.” He’d been sitting across the aisle from an attractive, well-groomed woman, who, after a perilous drop in altitude, reached out her hand. He took it. And, for the remainder of the flight, they sat there, holding hands, in silence. Once safe on the ground, they let go and turned away in embarrassment. He admitted that he’d felt more vulnerable than if he and the woman had just had sex in the airplane restroom. “It’s one thing to share body fluids, but nothing’s more intimate than to show fear.” He punctuated the point. “There’s no condom for fear.” This guy is poignant and hilarious, I thought. In the way Robin Williams is funny. “Who is he?” I asked the lady in front of me who had managed to irritate most of the people around her by letting her gray and white whippet silently beg for affection by gently placing a paw on a leg or arm. “It’s Sherman Alexie,” she said. Ah ha, now I remembered. Alexie is the author whose short stories, collected in the book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, were the basis for his movie, Smoke Signals. I’d loved the movie, but hadn’t read Alexie’s books. Suddenly, I felt like I’d come upon a treasure chest, or an old box in my grandmother’s attic, and had found gold or a stack of old AT&T bonds. “He’s fabulous,” I said, and the woman nodded her head in agreement. The whippet turned to stare at me as if to say, “You fool, of course he’s fabulous! Where have you been?” Alexie talked about being in Nantucket, Connecticut for the screening of his movie, Smoke Signals, and was surprised that so many white residents would want to see a movie about Native Americans. After all, Nantucket’s “the whitest, white place in the history of whiteness,” he said. For forty minutes Alexie created a roller coaster filled with laughter, and then told us about a recent book signing in Virginia. He’d returned to his hotel room to find several messages from his family and friends asking if he was “okay.” Perplexed, he returned the calls only to learn about the student at Virginia Tech who’d just gone on a shooting rampage. Alexie picked up a copy of his new book, Flight, about a young man with guns, ready to do the same. He held up the book. “Thankfully,” he said. “I chose a positive ending for this story.” We were stunned. No one was laughing. This storyteller had taken us to the edge of the cliff and I could feel the collective emotion of the audience sink to my gut. “Forgiveness,” said Alexie, “I guess it’s a form of optimism.” Next week Angie Brenner returns to New York City to cover Book Expo America. Posted by Joy Stocke at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) May 16, 2007 All Things Political and Personal: On the Mixing of Art and Politics by Angela Ajayi I have to admit: I wasn’t entirely prepared for the discussion on art and politics at the PEN Voices Festival in New York. I had left my little blue notebook at my friend’s apartment, and my pen’s ink was running little dry. And because I thought I would be a bit late for the discussion, I didn’t stop to pick up a new pen. So I took notes, selectively, on a brochure that announced upcoming events at the Instituto Cervantes where the discussion took place. In a small, low-set auditorium, the moderator, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, introduced the distinguished writers at the table. A very interesting mix of international writers that included Danish writer Janne Teller, German novelist Dorothea Dieckmann, Spanish novelist Almudena Grandes, African American activist-poet/performer, Saul Williams. Janne Teller by Beowulf Sheehan for PEN.org Quoting a Russian artist whose name I didn’t catch, Tanenhaus set a sobering (yet potentially uplifting) tone to the discussion, and to the importance of politics for the artist. He said that politics, according to the now deceased Russian artist, “guarantees the freedom of the artist.” This statement agreed with me — and I imagined that this Russian artist had probably lived in communist Russia where politics had guaranteed little for artists with dissenting views, even their own lives. Today, in America, a freer society, the artist is luckier — and can probably express any political view through his or her work without life-threatening consequences. Yet, regardless of the times, Saul Williams, was essentially right that afternoon when he said, “You come from a place of privilege if you write from an apolitical [position].” For him, at least, “a sense of activism is always related to [his] art.” With some pleasure, I observed the emphatic, confident presence Williams had at the table. He is a stylish man with a strong message about the less privileged, those who are young, poor, and black in this country, and those who need an intelligent and creative advocate in their diminished corner. He seemed to know exactly where he was coming from and what he is doing with his own life and art. Another bold writer on the panel was the Spanish writer Grandes. She spoke first, through a translator, in response to Tanenhaus’s initial question to all the writers. “How,” he asked, “would you define politics in terms of your lives and art?” For Grandes, writing had a lot to do with ideology. “When the writer writes,” she said, “it is his ideology that makes him (or her) look at the world.” That afternoon, the discussion would inevitably loop back to ideology. At one point, Tanenhaus asked the panel to discuss what happens when you have great art and abhorrent politics. Take, for instance, the fascist sympathies of great poet and writer Ezra Pound. A few distinctions were quickly drawn, one by Dieckmann. “Power is the main issue in this case...” she said. ”And it can be corrupt, though the art itself can be incredibly valuable and beautiful.” She essentially argued that you can separate the man or woman from the work — and by work, I took that to mean “quality of work.” As with many things, political, lines were constantly being drawn by all the writers between opinion and art; the particular and the specific; the local and the global, the political and the philosophical, the empathetic and the sympathetic, and so on. That afternoon, it seemed to me that the discussion on art and politics could go on for a very long time; there was simply so much to say. As my ink dried up and writing became futile, I just listened — and then mentally noted a question from a woman in the audience who wondered why PEN had failed to put a writer from the developing world on the panel. She too had drawn a line between “worlds” while making a pretty reasonable point — and a very politically loaded one at that, too. The question, however, was unfairly directed at a panel of writers who had little or no hand in the event’s arrangements; none of them could “speak” for PEN. Danish writer Janne Teller surmised nicely though at some point during the discussion, inadvertently giving us what I thought was a pretty good response to the woman’s question and the general plight of the artist. She said, simply, “As an artist, I am an individual.” Posted by Joy Stocke at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) May 9, 2007 World Voices Goes West by Angie Brenner EDITOR’S NOTE: While we continued coverage of PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, West Coast Editor, Angie Brenner, hopped a plane and followed World Voices participants Gary Shteyngart and Pico Iyer to the Los Angels Times Festival of Books. Here is her report.... "The West Coast Totem is different from the East Coast Totem." — Sam Shepard at PEN World Voices Big-top tents, balloons, cotton-candy, popcorn. “The next time you see me,” says a diminutive young woman, pulling a wheeled cart behind her, “I’ll be a nine foot high shrimp.” She pointed to the nearby, multi-colored stage banner which read: Jumbo Shrimp Circus. No, this isn’t the county fair. It’s the 12th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books held at the UCLA (festival co-sponsor) campus in Westwood, California. A Disneyland of book festivals, and I admit experiencing some culture shock having just arrived from the PEN America World Voices Festival in New York. For a week, I was moved to my core by exiled poets and writers from around the globe as they reflected on world events and the human condition through poems and prose. Only in New York, I thought, can such a diverse dialogue take place. Now, I walk between rows of yellow daisies and white roses in full bloom between venues and the tented bookseller and author signing booths on the campus. By noon, the morning fog has rolled out to the Pacific. Temperatures soar into the eighties, and lemonade hawkers are at the ready to quench our thirst. The LA Bookfair, with over 2000 exhibitors and over 100 author signing opportunities, is decidedly less international in nature then the PEN World Voices Festival. But if the goal is to make the written word accessible to the public at large, the festival organizers have succeed. Children have their own stage. Families wheel strollers through the crowd to hear authors Julie Andrews Edwards, John Lithgow, and Tina Louise read from their books. And yes, there are movie and sports stars. This is Los Angeles after all. Fans can rub shoulders with Michael Douglas, Ellen Burstyn, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But, if anyone has the idea that West Coast readers and writers aren’t serious about the world we live in, they’d be mistaken. Conversations flow freely and sometimes become heated. Michael Pollen discusses food controversy, Amy Goodman, current politics; and directly from the NY World Voices Festival: Gary Shteyngart is on hand for a fiction writing panel. Pico Iyer and Daniel Altman open a discussion on the Global Village, where the panel (which also includes authors Tony Cohen and Rebecca Solnik) conclude that, in spite of the U.S. becoming increasingly xenophobic (or perhaps because of it), writers and artists from other countries are creating their own dialogue without us. A particularly lively and timely debate takes place during one panel on Critical Thinking: The Role of the Reviewer, lead by writer and book editor of the Los Angeles Times, David L. Uline. Panelists, Meagan O’Rourke (cultural editor at Slate and poetry editor for the Paris Review), Ariel Swartley (contributing writer to Los Angeles Magazine), and Mark Ruzzo (writer and former L.A. Times Book Review columnist), discuss the downsizing by most print media of book reviews and arts coverage, and the dismantling of the reviewer. The statistics are frightening: Overall column space loss of arts coverage; the recent firing of the Atlanta Journal Constitution book editor; the Chicago Tribune will move their book review section to Saturday publication. Ruzzo says, “It’s hard to imagine art coverage without the reviewer.” Uline adds that in his opinion, criticism IS art, and as important as a cultural conversation. Swartley, who writes 1500-2000 word book reviews, says that to be able look at a book thoroughly enlarges the conversation. Yet, O’Rourke suggests that she is quite interested in the trend toward the online culture, and doesn't see a “gloomy ending.” With the majority of the panel still unsure about the internet blog culture, it feels a little like I’m listening to a conversation playing out by radio broadcasters during the dawn of the television era. Change is inevitable. However, the need for us to understand each other through our stories, whether in print, audio, visual, or human contact form, is timeless. And now, back to the team in New York... Posted by Joy Stocke at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) May 3, 2007 Up In the Charmed Hotel WHERE AN INTERVIEW BECOMES A LITERARY ADVENTURE by Joy Stocke and Kim Nagy Location: Roger Smith Hotel — Lexington Avenue Between 47th and 48th On a sunny, blue-sky morning, we hurry up Lexington Avenue for our interview with Iraq exile and poet, Saadi Youssef, whose most recent collection of poems, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, published by Graywolf Press, is a Lannan Translation Selection. We look carefully because the hotel hides behind a framework of scaffolding. Look again and spot poet Alain Mabanckou who takes a drag of his cigarette and with a wide smile greets us (strangers) generously when we mention how moved we were by his reading at Town Hall, a poem about homeland, motherhood, motherland. Mabanckou, in black leather jacket, born in Congo-Brazzaville, winner of the Prix Renaudot, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in France, easily agrees to a future interview to be published by Wild River Review this fall. Alain Mabanckou reading at Town Hall Through the door, and there, in a quintessential New York lobby — art deco, bustling with the comings and goings of authors — stands Mr. Youssef, in a cream colored turtleneck and a golden charm hammered into the shape of his beloved country hanging from a gold chain around his neck. Youssef, who has translated Cavafy, knew the great Greek poet, Yiannis Ritsos, and equally great Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, cordially leads us to the elevators and pushes the button to the 16th floor Penthouse where all interviews take place. And we can’t help thinking that we’ve landed in a novel, a novel about New York and its place in world literature, where authors such as Neil Gaiman sit on a chintz sofa talking to a reporter from salon.com. Moroccan writer Layla Lalami sits on a settee with Cuban, Alex Yera. Danish novelist, Janne Teller, pauses for a moment to describe the gathering of authors — the conversations — the readings — as “a breath of the universe.” Layla and Majnoun aka Layla Lalami and Alex Yera In a relaxed interview with Youssef, we discover his deep love of the Arabic language and why it naturally lends itself to creativity. He talks about his nearly 30 years in exile, and what he has learned about poetry from cats. “Ah yes, a cat. You know the cat, how he walks, how tender and sensitive the cat‘s pads are. It is an approach to life and to art, also. Treading carefully on the earth. The art must have that sensitive orientation of the cat to take life tenderly, to walk very quietly, to feel what is beneath our feet. But we must not forget that a cat, too, has claws.” This summer Wild River Review will publish our in-depth interview with Youssef and three of his poems (accompanied by the Arabic calligraphy of Saad Abulhab). Saadi Youssef A New York novel, in which a hotel is a character, must include a mix up with an elevator. In our case, Mr. Youssef goes to copy poems for us. When finished, he waits in the lobby, while we wait in the Penthouse. Finally, figuring this out we take the elevator down, only to find that Youssef has gone up. Returning to the elevator, we see a woman sitting by herself in the restaurant, elegant, petite, her thick gray hair pulled back in a bun. She is reading. She is, we realize, Nobel prizewinning author, Nadine Gordimer. We hesitate, introduce ourselves, and on the spot she agrees to an interview. Clear blue eyes, smiling, she quotes Gustave Flaubert. “I wanted to stay in the ivory tower — but the shit kept getting all over the walls. ” Gordimer discusses the important role PEN plays for writers of all kinds and why the world of the writer must encompass everything—excrement and all. And then she talks about the importance of promoting books as words on paper are increasingly being replaced by the image. She turns to the profound inequities in her homeland, post-apartheid South Africa, and the lack of infrastructure and resources in so many communities. (The complete interview will appear this summer.) Meanwhile, we find Youssef, join him for a drink, and disappear into a world where writers know no borders. THE MOMENT by Saadi Youssef In the room On the roof terrace facing the sea, The retired pirate prepares his meal — Half a loaf of bread A slice of meat A bottle of vodka — He shuts his door firmly And from his ebony box he takes out his ledgers His maps His harbors. Now he is happy... So stay tuned, as we continue to celebrate World Voices with more interviews and commentary. On our site: May 11 — Graphic novelist, Marguerite Abouet in French and in English. Posted by Joy Stocke at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) April 30, 2007 The Power of Conversation by Kim Nagy THE ARTHUR MILLER FREEDOM TO WRITE LECTURE: DAVID GROSSMAN AND NADINE GORDIMER It's a tribute to the depth and richness of conversations during the weeklong PEN World Voices Festival, that on the very last night - the very last of 67 events (over the course of six days) with over 150 authors from all over the world - that a full house sat in rapt attention. PEN American Center's president Francine Prose introduced Israeli novelist David Grossman — this year the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecturer — and South African Nobel Laureate-Nadine Gordimer — two writers who have forged the severe and violent realities of their landscape into unflinching works of literature. The air buzzed with the power of ideas and words by authors compelled to record and reflect upon the lives beneath the surface of newspaper headlines...beneath the blast of gunshots and explosions, alongside laughter and lovemaking, inside the nuances of everyday life. In his speach, Grossman referred to Kafka’s short story, “A Little Fable,�? and echoed the sentiments of the character of the mouse who, confounded by the limitations of its view (and a nearing trap) lamented, “Alas the world is growing narrower everyday.�? In a world of tangled accusations, rapid and repeated media flashes, and seemingly unsolvable problems, Grossman had to agree that “sadly, Kafka’s mouse was right.�? Grossman spoke about the numbing void that grows between the individual and the violent chaos which surrounds his life. “This void never remains empty, but fills rapidly with apathy and cynicism and despair. the despair of the distorted situation….�? To illustrate this narrowness, Grossman talked about the language often employed to describe the complex and terrifying affairs in his own country. Language that quickly becomes "a sequence of clichés and slogans�? and ultimately all that is left are “mutual accusations between enemies�? while the mass media “aims to tell a story easiest for digestion.�? As Grossman emphasized, the protective layers we build out of fear end up suffocating us. But, his message was also one of genuine hope. As an alternative to narrowness, he pointed directly to the liberty he’s experienced in the process of writing. “When I write, the world is not closing in on me.�? For even amongst conflict and uncertainty writing — for Grossman — keeps alive the truth that there is another life. “As soon as we lay our hands on the pen, we already cease to be a slave,�? he said. Grossman, whose son — a member of the Israeli army — was killed on duty last summer, described the manifold ways in which writing not only enlivens the “power of memory�? but renews and reclaims us…�?It is a gesture of opening up. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator…I can breathe with both lungs….a natural full breathing where I manage to escape the claustrophobia of the cliché.�? Novelist, Nadine Gordimer joined Grossman on stage for conversation, and began with an appropriate Proust quote. “Do not be afraid to go too far…because the truth lies there.�? In her interview with Wild River Review (to be published in full next month), Gordimer mentioned another quote she paraphrased from Flaubert that seems relevant to the conversation. “I wanted to live in an Ivory Tower, but the shit kept getting all over the walls.�? Gordimer posed a particularly honest and difficult question to Grossman. “What influence can writers really have?�? Though, Grossman admitted the power of words seemed feeble next to the reality of violence, he concluded that writing was nevertheless essential because it “allows people to know there is an alternative.�? Grossman and Gordimer agreed that the role of good literature is to force readers to look at reality from different points of view. To, as Grossman put it earlier “identify even a little with the suffering of others and suspend moral judgement." Gordimer disagreed with Grossman’s claim that he had turned away from writing about his country for many years (until his oldest son joined the army) for, she claimed, he actually wrote about it anyway, “if you live in an age of conflict, your characters are imbued with the cage of politics and even when a man and a woman are in bed, politics is in bed with them.�? At the end of the discussion, Gordimer asked Grossman how he saw the future of his country, and Grossman agreed when she stressed that justice for the Israelis must mean justice for the Palestinians. Grossman talked about the need for a border, “but not a border that imposes.�? He went on to say, “I want to have hope for the future of my country.�? Salman Rushdie ended the final event of the World Voices Festival applauding the “use of the high language of literature used in the service of human beings.�? He publicly hoped the dialogues initiated during World Voices would continue, and that we “continue to listen and continue to engage.�? For our part, Wild River Review heartily agrees. WRR plans to pursue the conversations embarked upon in the World Voices Festival with an ongoing series on our website featuring interviews, essays, and in this series of blogs. When I look around me, I think of a panel I saw earlier today called “What Makes a Home�? and the words of Lee Stringer, author of Grand Central Winter: Stories from The Street, who lived on the streets for 12 years. Stringer commented that one upside to living on the street was that he began to define home differently — as a place to be found deep inside of himself rather than an emotional state dependent on any four walls. Tonight, Grossman’s words for writers pointed to a mandatory vulnerability and a brave vital awareness with which to exercise their innate voice. A place where we might not always feel comfortable but nevertheless where (thankfully) so many of our finest writers do feel most at home Posted by Kim Nagy at 9:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) April 29, 2007 Remembering Ryszard Kapuscinski, the "Cosmopole" by Angela Ajayi For me, to remember Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski is to recall Africa in rich, exploratory detail, especially as it appears in his book The Emperor and in his collection of essays in The Shadow of the Sun. Having grown up in Africa, I am unable to feign the impartial here, yet in truth, the reason that the brilliant and beautifully written works of Kapuscinski appealed to me in the first place is precisely because of the sensitive and uniquely "human" way he reported on his experiences in Africa, whether they were in Congo, Angola, Nigeria or even Ethiopia. When I heard of Kapuscinski's passing early this year, I found myself tremendously saddened by this — and yet, at the same time, in the mood to celebrate his life and work. At PEN World Voices tribute to Kapuscinski at the New York Public Library, the duality of my own private response to the news of his death was echoed in the speeches given by distinguished writers, most of whom knew Kapuscinski (and/or his work) intimately. And as each writer took to the podium, one thing was clear: there is a whole lot to celebrate in the very man himself as well as in his work. In unanimous agreement, all of the writers mentioned the admirable human qualities that defined Kapuscinski not only as a writer but also as a person — his modesty, his vulnerability, his self-effacing generosity, and his gentleness. For German journalist Carolin Emcke, for instance, who confessed to having little or no interest in the topics that Kapuscinski covered, it was the man behind the written words that intrigued her the most even before she met him — and the way, she said, "he brought his vulnerability into his writing, never claiming to be unmoved by what he saw and writing about the fragility of judgment, about not knowing anything about other people or even himself." In his introductory speech, Salman Rushdie noted similarly, saying that Kapuscinski had "the ability to become a zero" (or, as in Kapuscinski’s own words, “to make himself not worthy of a bullet�? in dangerous situations) — and that this single gift allowed us to have the unquestionably beautiful work of Kapuscinski. Hearing this, one might wonder as did a journalist interviewing Kapuscinski in a brief documentary shown at the tribute, if an attraction to danger fueled his unrelenting pursuit of the story under some seriously life-threatening circumstances. Kapuscinski’s response to this, in a soft but resolute tone, is simple: that danger is a terrible thing and that he never saw people who don’t feel fear. If it wasn’t an attraction to danger, then what was it that drove the lone journalist to risk everything, including life itself? The Polish writer Adam Michnik, who gave some context to Kapuscinski’s early life in Poland as a communist, might have given us the best answers to this question at the tribute. Kapuscinski, he said, "rebelled against the world of privilege, choosing to side with the poor and the powerless." Thus he was fascinated by the postcolonial world where he could write about the “silence of dictatorships�? in all its gruesome and tragic effects on human lives. He chose to write, Michnik continued, about "worlds in which great hopes were being brought down." And write he did, with what American journalist/writer Philip Gourevitch accurately described as "a clear fine-tuned sense of the absurd." At some point during the tribute, Michnik had to remind us that Kapuscinski was Polish, as none of the writers who had already spoken mentioned it — and a “cosmo-pole.�? The audience laughed, and I took note, remembering once again what might have been one of Kapuscinski’s main ambitions and his greatest achievement. Through his exquisitely poignant work, he showed us, simply, that there are others who have different stories and life experiences. Posted by Kim Nagy at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) The PEN Cabaret: Bowery Ballroom — featuring... Joy E. Stocke Emcee Nona aka New Yorker cartoonist Victoria Roberts Musician/Poet Oliver Lake and Chinese Poet Huang Xiang Argentinian/Uraguayan Novelist, Carlos Maria Dominguez Poet, Saul Williams Playwrigt/Actor, Sam Shepard Poet/Musician/Activist, Patti Smith NONA photo by Dale Cotton “Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds...” OLIVER LAKE AND XUANG XIANG photo by Dale Cotton 1. Wild Beasts I am a wild beast hunted down I am a captured wild beast I am a wild beast trampled by wild beasts I am a wild beast trampling wild beasts… 2. Sky What colors I use to paint you From far away you are impenetrable Like a lake of black lacquer… 3. The Wisp of Light There is a sort of space That’s a different vastness There is a heavenly body That’s a different great arch Each cell in my body Is an unattainable distance… CARLOS MARIA DOMINGUEZ photo by Dale Cotton Arises from the audience. Removes his hat and humourously pays tribute to Nona, then reads: The dead girl lies on the ground, naked, her arms spread open… SAUL WILLIAMS photo by Dale Cotton Love is an art form surely removed from its element… Pyramids are first made of flesh and hisses, portals… The greatest Americans have not been born yet, they are waiting for the past to die… SAM SHEPARD photo by Dale Cotton I used to buy Nina Simone ice. She was always nice to me. She called me, “Dahling…” Her performance was aimed directly at the throat of a white audience…and then she aimed for the heart… My mom carried a 45 for a while — a child on one hip; a pistol on the other… PATTI SMITH photo by Dale Cotton Sam and I are old pals. We met in 1970 — we were staying in the Chelsea Hotel in close proximity (laughs). One night I had a strange dream and he said, “You should write it down.” So I did: “Have you seen Dylan’s dog? It’s go wings…It can fly…” Sam got me this guitar in 1970. I still have it and we’re still friends…a 31 Gibson..it’s priceless but most of all because Sam got it for me… photo by Dale Cotton This song is for William Blake…he went through his entire life with no success…but he kept his vision… So throw out your stupid cloak, embrace all that you fear, ‘cause joy will conquer all despair in my Blakean year, in my Blakean year. Mercy hath a human heart, pity a human face, love a human form divine, peace a human dress. Mercy and pity and peace and love, we pray in our distress, and mercy shall embrace, mercy shall embrace, is the mercy, a-ha, a-ha, a-ha. Posted by Joy Stocke at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) April 28, 2007 WORDS + PICTURES: THE COLLABORATION EQUATION by Tim E. Ogline NEW YORK, NY — The synchronized daily rhythm of the life of the world’s greatest metropolis is conducted by the interaction of people and place... of commerce and dreams... of art and life. The calculus of collaborations great and small work together to give this place its tempo and its pulse. And sometimes, this pulse quickens... as it has this week. The influx of 162 writers from 45 countries for the Third Annual PEN World Voices International Literary Festival has brought a shot of adrenaline into the cultural epicenter of America. This gathering of thinkers from around the planet are here in unison — a collaboration of voices having serious conversations about how we all work together... at home and away in far-off lands. And on this particular cool April evening on West 37th Street — that’s just the topic of conversation tonight: Collaboration. Neil Gaiman (see “Myth, Magic, and the Mind of Neil Gaiman”) and Marguerite Abouet brought insight and delight to an appreciative audience in an intimate performance space at Midtown Manhattan’s 37 Arts at this 26 April PEN World Voices event. This dialogue, moderated by Novelist Sean Wilsey, featured a wide-ranging discussion about the collaborative process in the creation of graphic novels as well as working in other media and of the expatriate experience. Gaiman (a 20-year veteran of the comics industry with Sandman, The Eternals, 1602, Violent Cases and many more — as well as New York Times bestselling novelist, children’s book author and screenwriter) and Abouet (whose freshman outing with Aya has drawn international acclaim), with the aid of an interpreter, had some intriguing responses to one of Wilsey’s intial questions about the desire to draw their own comics as well as working with an artist. MARGUERITE ABOUET: I would like to be able to draw myself — but it’s like the English language... I don’t speak it very well. Neil Gaiman discussing the collaborative process and experiencing his work as visualized by an artist. NEIL GAIMAN: I used to wish I could draw as well as some of my artists do. And then I made the fatal mistake of trying to draw — and it was a thing called the “24 Hour Comic.” It was an invention of Scott McCloud. You had to write, draw and letter a 24 page comic in 24 hours. And I saw the type of comics that my friends who could draw were doing and I thought that I could do something as good as this. I tried... and failed. In fact I did a 14 page comic in 24 hours. But, by the end of that I was definitely cured of any desire to draw my own comics. I realized that part of the fun of writing comics is to be able to say, “And then 5000 spaceships come over the hill.” SEAN WILSEY: And you’re done. NEIL GAIMAN: And I’m done. And the idea that five hours later that you’re sitting there still drawing spaceships going, “What idiot wrote this? My hand hurts.” I’m also think I’m very, very fortunate that I get to work with brilliant artists that can draw some of what’s in my head. And when I want to have complete control, I go off and write a short story or a novel. But I take no pleasure in novels. I take no pleasure in my own prose. I can’t pick up a prose work that I’ve written and look at it and think what a wonderful piece of work this is. Whereas, I look at something that I’ve scripted with pleasure — and think what a great job they did. This is great. I can be proud of it in a way I can never be with my own prose. Wilsey also inquired about the expatriate experience as a citizen of a colonial power now living in its former colony (Gaiman) and a denizen of a former protectorate residing in the former patron state (Abouet). Marguerite Abouet on Aya as a hopeful and spirited coming of age story in Ivory Coast. NEIL GAIMAN: I think it’s very good for a writer to be an expatriate in a way. I think it’s good for a writer to be out of their own environment because it’s good for a writer to be anywhere that makes them feel slightly uncomfortable and watch things. SEAN WILSEY: Creatively speaking, does that distance inform what you’re doing? MARGUERITE ABOUET: As a citizen of a colonized country who emigrated to the dominant country, I’m very proud to write a story about my country about the good side of my country and show that to the French people. NEIL GAIMAN: When I moved out from England to America I found myself writing for the first 8 years fiction all set in England it was in some ways easier to write about the place that I had left now that I had distance. MARGUERITE ABOUET: Same thing with me. I understand — that happened to me too. I thought I would have forgotten everything that I had lived in Africa. So when I arrived in France, I could remember easily all the stories that had happened back in my country. It’s true that it’s easier. The conversation was punctuated with Wilsey’s clelever banter, Gaiman’s gentle wit, and Abouet’s earnest remarks. The hour-long program was followed by a book signing. Posted by Tim Ogline at 7:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) A Human Wave Of Refugees And Their Stories by Wendy Fulton Steginsky Tales laden with uncertainty, anxiety, loss, and displacement filled the room at Hunter College as the panel of speakers at PEN’s World Voices Festival spoke of their individual journeys as asylum seekers across the world. Ishmael Beah — whose book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, was just published in February 2007 — initiated the conversation. During the recent Civil war in his native Sierra Leone, at the age of thirteen, having lost his parents and other family members, he left one destroyed and burning village for another, running all day and night with his brother and friends, sleeping on bare floors and on tarpaulins. In subdued tones, he recounted how he was recruited by the rebels to fight as a child soldier. "Innocence was replaced by fear," he explained. "We could not think of a future beyond each minute. But if we lost hope, we lost faith." In 1964 there was a revolution in Zanzibar and although novelist Abdulrazak Guhma was in no immediate danger, he decided to leave for a new life in England. "Nobody held a gun to my head but I wanted to be unafraid." Gurnah looked at the refugee emergency from the point of view of the receiver and the anxiety that can cause. He pointed out that anxiety about refugees is often generated by what the press talks about and how they talk about it. And he posed questions: How dangerous does the situation have to be that you’re running away from? What can be done to help the plight of the refugee? Gurnah also had some answers: Refuse to be ignorant. Refuse to respond reflexively. We must insist on understanding what is going on. Laila Lalami, Moroccan born author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, discussed how she’s been around refugee emergencies all her life. The crisis of poverty creates its own refugees, she said. The northwest tip of Africa, Morocco is the gateway to Europe. It has become both the sender and recipient of refugees as some reach Morocco, but get stuck there becaue they can't afford to emigrate. Women, in particular, fall victim to the toll that traveling long distances puts on them. They are often abused or prostitute themselves to survive. Pregnant women or women with children can be denied a ferry ride across the straits to Spain. Saadi Youssef, a prolific poet and novelist, was forced to depart his native Iraq as he sought to be free and independent. He had a complicated “voyage�?as he described it—you have to look in an atlas to find all the places he went in his search — Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, France, Cyprus, Lebanon. But he learned that the voyage is more important than the destination, teaching him how to respect people and cultures as sources of love, art, nature, and history. Although over two million refugees have been created in Iraq alone over the past few years, Lalami noted that a recent picture in a European newspaper showed a group of tourists sunning themselves on the beaches of the Canary Islands, oblivious to the washed up bodies of Africans on the adjacent shores. All the panelists agreed that the situation has now become a catastrophe which we cannot afford to ignore and for which we all bear some responsibility. Posted by Joy Stocke at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) April 27, 2007 Understanding Home and Identity through the Eyes of the Poet by Wendy Fulton Steginsky Adriaan van Dis found out he was Dutch in Paris. Pia Tafdrup went from Denmark to Jerusalem to look for her Jewish roots. Alain Mabanckou lives in Los Angeles with the Congo in his heart and in his memories. At Thursday afternoon’s PEN World Voices event, “Multiple Passports,” held at Hunter College, van Dis, Tafdrup, and Mabanckou generously shared what homeland and identity mean to them in conversation, and through their poems, stories, and travel books. Van Dis had three “brown” half-sisters born in Indonesia, an Italian father, and never felt Dutch in Holland. He never identified with any of his family but said he was trained to be an outsider — “it is always the other who will tell you who you are,” he laughed ruefully. But he has never felt an outsider with language — “it is always under my skull.” At the age of forty Pia Tafdrup, an established poet, playwright, and novelist, went from Copenhagen to Jerusalem to discover the Jewish part of herself. She wrote the poem, “Horizon�? there, in an attempt to confront her Jewish identity and try to understand it. She learned that there are many ways to be Jewish and for her it is an inner feeling. Mabanckou left home at seventeen to be educated in Paris. He joked that you have to know a minimum of seven languages to be able to date a girl where he was born in Congo-Brazzaville. All these languages are oral so when he is writing in French it can sometimes take him a week to find the right word. He can feel it in his native language but there is no written equivalent. All three agreed that it is important for them to travel to feed their creativity. Mabanckou said, “Traveling can change an artist’s way of writing. Distance is important to give you the best means to depict your country.” Tafdrup who said she is able to live everywhere but feels at home in her language, traveled to Jerusalem to write about what she didn’t understand. For Van Dis, who is most comfortable writing in Dutch, it is all about style. From a global perspective, Dutch, Danish, and the 200 oral languages in Congo-Brazzaville are small but they are very real languages to each of these writers. They have been the means by which they have learned who they are and what is most important to them. Posted by Joy Stocke at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) April 26, 2007 Not Your Average Town Meeting by Joy Stocke, Kim Nagy, and Angie Brenner Thursday afternoon in the lobby of our hotel. Untangling threads of the conversation we heard last night at Town Hall. Salman Rushdie, a warm smile on his face, looking out over enthusiastic cheers of the crowd, saying, “Another full house. It’s getting to be a habit.” The crowd laughing in acknowledgment that we had the hottest tickets in town. Steve Martin comes to the podium and reads an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Born Standing Up. Reads about passing Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop, auditioning at The Hungry Eye, home of the Smothers Brothers. An early gig at a comedy club where he put a napkin on his face, stuck his tongue through it, and got a laugh. With that and the laughs that followed, he realized, “I was about to start my life.” Tatyana Tolstaya, auburn hair falling across her brow, reads about Moscow 200 years in the future — where families have reverted to the old days, heating their hearths with wood. And “Moscow becomes a small village.” Fifteen minutes later, the auditorium fills with the French lull of Alain Mabanckau, tall and dapper with a beige cap — the audience so silent it is if we are in church. When the translator takes the stage, we — who do not know French — are transported to Congo, Mabanckau’s homeland. Nadine Gordimer opens by saying she wants to talk about those who have no voice, that is refugees, and what they encounter on their way to a new land. The terrain she writes about is the African Bush, where refugees wait for the animals to finish drinking at a watering hole before taking their turn, and where food is so scarce they live in hunger. Enchanting Neil Gaiman, dressed in his trademark black, reads one of his poems on how to write fantasy, summing up everything a writer needs to know about plot and character. What happens when we come upon a witch, a dragon? In the next few days, we’ll publish the poem online. Kiran Desai — cheekbones illuminated as she traces the life of an illegal Indian immigrant working as a delivery boy for a Chinese Restaurant in New York. And on to the Iraq of Saadi Youssef — an Iraq of memory — a place Youssef was forced to leave in 1978. Gentle, precise, soft-spoken. Youssef says, “Beirut-Cyprus-Beirut-Damascus... Aden, Cyprus, Belgrade, Tunis, and at last: Paris. What am I doing in Paris? What am I doing in non-Arab land? Exile includes the idea of abrogation — abrogating the relationship of the individual with heaven, earth and society. There is a vertical line connecting heaven — where the worshipped is — with earth — where the ancestors lie in the long repose of death. And then is a horizontal line ordering the village or the town where homes, memories and childhood playgrounds are. At the point of intersection between those two lines stands the individual. The horror of exile is in the uprooting of the individual from this point of intersection and transplanting him in another spot, which is not a point of intersection, where neither heaven is the primordial one nor the ancestors are ancestors; where there are no homes, no memories and no childhood playgrounds. What remains therefore?” For Youssef — this is what remains: Life. “Welcome life,” he says. “Welcome my other lover.” Posted by Joy Stocke at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) April 25, 2007 Standing Room Only by Joy Stocke and Angie Brenner What do you do when you’re running late and the hotel concierge sends you to Lincoln Center for a reading at a bookstore in Chelsea? First, you curse your high heels, then you call said bookstore, and then you hop a cab and head downtown. The bookstore in question, once you find it — 192 Books — has an obvious address: 192 10th Ave. (Cross Street 21st). So there we are, Angie and me, standing outside the door of one of the more beautiful book stores we've seen, a reading in full swing with a back drop of Kafka, Milosz, Frost, Ginsburg, Woolf. A packed house. Angie tries to quietly open the door and pulls instead of pushes, startling the crowd already shoulder to shoulder into the tiny vestibule. Once inside, heat and bodies — a fashionable, hip crowd. Women, young, middle-aged, old. Men the same. Bodies against bodies creating warm, moist, almost cloying air. But who cares? Luis-Anton Baulenas reads in his native Catalonian, a language that moves with soft shirred consonants. We are riveted. Ugandan writer, Moses Isegawa, reads from his novel, Abyssynian Chronicles. An excerpt that takes place in his adopted home, Holland. An excerpt that describes how the Ugandan diaspora lives in its adopted home. Think flower industry, and a an apartment building fit to bursting. “The toilet was always flushing,” Isegawa reads. And a cell phone goes off, ringing a disco beat, momentarily shifting the crowd’s attention. As we all start turing off our phones, Isegawa continues, and we’re back with him in a tenemant outside of Amsterdam. I had interviewed Norwegian writer, Per Petterson, via the internet. Now he sits in front of us, looking much like his photograph only his eyes are more blue, his beard whiter, and his hair a ruddy shade of red. I had fallen in love with his book Out Stealing Horses. And had so thoroughly inhabited it, that it seems strange to see the author from whom the story sprang filling the room with the resonance and timber of voice. Carlo Luccerlli launches into gorgeous Itallian at a rapid pace. We have no idea what we’re hearing until his interpreter takes a seat next to him and begins to read a scene from a seductive noir novel. We take a closer look at Carlo as the interpreter reads about a detective waiting to see a gypsy fortune teller only to be accosted by a mysterious, full-mouthed, red-lipsticked blonde. If this isn’t enough to keep the crowd enraptured, Francine Prose, the new president of PEN, in ruby slippers, and striped glasses brings up the rear with a love letter. Actually, an invented rebuttle of love letters written by Franz Kafka to his lover, Felice Bauer, a woman to whom he was twice engaged and to whom he wrote reams of purple prose. As Francine so eloquently puts it, letters more for his own benefit than for the heart of Felice. “O to sixty in sixty seconds” is how Francine encapsulates the ill-fated romance. When the reading ends, people linger. All the writers are gracious beyond anything required of them. Bookstore manager, Patrick Knisley, takes a moment to talk with us about the bookstore’s three and a half year success. Could it be the authors who read here? John Ashberry, Joan Didion, Laurie Anderson; and tonight, John and Martha McPhee? Or is it the utterly exquisite collection of books? We’ll have to return to find out more because it’s time to catch a cab and head back uptown to Town Hall. Saman Rushdie, Steve Martin, Nadine Gordimer, Neil Gaiman, Kiran Desai, Saadi Youssef... they’re reading in an hour. Stay tuned for more... Posted by Joy Stocke at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) They were young Americans by Christopher Tiefel You never had to be born in America to be an American, and in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists 2, seven of the twenty-one authors included were born outside of U.S. borders. Selecting from nine attending contributors including Daniel Alarcón, Nell Freudenberger, Olga Grushin, Gabe Hudson, Uzodinma Iweala, Jess Row, Akhil Sharma, Gary Shteyngart, and John Wray, editor Ian Jack said he had arranged the readings to “reflect the flavour of the new issue — a difference in American writing—the voice of the immigrant.” Daniel Alarcón opened the reading, his lulling voice weaving a tale of a village boy trying to become a dockworker. His theme of escape and shifting identity was echoed in Olga Grushin’s reading of “Exhile” where a lost Russian stumbles upon a piece of his past in a Paris bookshop. Akhil Sharma punctuated a tone shift that would ride out the evening, his story about women in bikini’s and pondering the contents of hot dogs approached adjusting to an American identity with humor. These laughs segued nicely into Gary Shteyngart’s reading from Absurdistan, a comedy about adjusting to American identity by exploiting it. The cheeky cover of Granta’s issue, with a combination of recognizable, branded fonts, seems to be a commentary on American globalization, however, the American brand of writing no longer is centered in suburbs, or produced “factory fiction,” and the night’s reading was about the hyphenated identity of the writers involved — Russian-American, Latin-American, and Hindi-American. These outward readings reflected both new voices in American writing as well as the expansion of words outside borders. Sometimes it may just take a British literary magazine to show Americans that home and away are much larger than fifty states. Posted by Christopher Tiefel at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) Wild River, Green Thoughts by Kim Nagy and Angie Brenner Salman Rushdie, Green Thoughts, April 24, 2007 — photo credit: Dale Cotton PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2007 Eleven writers including Geert Mak, Gary Shteyngart, Roxana Robinson, Moses Isegawa, Billy Collins, Janne Teller, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, Pico Iyer, Marilynne Robinson, and Salman Rushdie, stood at the podium at Cooper Union Great Hall in New York City tonight to read about the subject of the natural world. The natural world, our planet, which is everybody’s home, as Salman Rushdie pointed out when he related tonight’s subject to this week’s overall theme of PEN’s World Voices Festival Home and Away in his introduction. And it strikes me soon after listening to the first speaker Geert Mak talk about warmer winters in the Netherlands and the potential disaster movie just starting, that writers have a crucial role to play in moving the global conversation about environmental “issues” forward — or outward anyway. For any writer worth their salt appreciates paradox and complexity — and — one would hope — views oversimplification and/or oversentimentality as roadblocks in their quest to understand. In the readings tonight, there were laughs — Gary Shteyngart brought down the house with his reading of George Saunders short story in which the narrator boasts of 130 degree Syracuse days where two child-melting SUVs morph into one color. In his reading, Jonathan Franzen noted that we had “an ethical responsibility to consider other creatures besides ourselves,” and read Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders, calling it a parable about human addiction, desire, and the wild in wilderness. In it, an adopted polar bear, whose human father has taught him to read and speak, eventually returns to his innate and terminal master — hunger. With a mix of humor and poignancy, Colson Whitehead told the audience how he celebrated reading Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic, The Road (2006) over baby-back ribs and beer and soon found himself fighting back tears in public. Marilynne Robinson spoke with the most gravity. With eloquence, she read from her own work, and referred to the stories of Genesis, which “made it clear that our deficiencies are enough to bring the whole world down.” About the environmental movement (which she felt had failed), she suggested that the public focus on specific events sadly often led to the dismissal of wider issues — “as if such phenomena were singular and exceptional.” After the lecture, I asked her to expand upon this comment, and she graciously replied, “We all know that the sea is in trouble. And the sea is directly related to the atmosphere. Yet, we focus too closely on each isolated problem as if these problems could actually be separated!” She went on to point out that there are so many more complex ways to discuss environmental issues and yet, we usually revert to the same old predicatable polemics. And it does seem true that we often cling to familiar arguments instead of addressing hard truths and venturing out into new uncomfortable territory. — Kim Nagy, Commissioning Editor Marilynne Robinson, Green Thoughts, April 24, 2007 — photo credit: Dale Cotton PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2007 Tonight, when the lights dimmed in the arched assembly hall of Cooper Union, acclaimed authors from a half dozen countries took their turn at the single podium to speak on the global environment for the PEN World Voices Festival. Their topics, culled not from their own writings — in most cases — but from other poets and authors of their choosing, were as diverse as the authors themselves. Salman Rushdie, a long time supporter of PEN America and festival masters of ceremony, opened on a serious note by stating that while the week long festival was a literary event, it carries a political element. “As it should be,” Mr. Rushdie added, and went on to say that “America is in danger by stopping the talk with the rest of the world.” Several authors followed in a similar tone. Geert Mak, from the Netherlands, talked about the warming in his own country where apricots blossomed in January, and April was the hottest month on record. “Nothing is eternal in my country anymore,” he said. Ugandan author (Abyssinian Chronicles & Snake Pit), Moses Isegawa, choose a poignant and somber piece which spoke of the oppressed and the oppressors, those who own the ‘machines’ and the wealth, and those who continually work the machines. The seriousness of his selected piece reflects a life lived in Uganda during the reign of dictator, Idi Amin. But it was Marilynne Robinson who garnered the most environmentally charged impact with the audience by reading her own essays of planet destruction, describing nuclear power as going from the fire to the frying pan. Her comment that wilderness is a place where the intolerable can be hidden, brought to mind recent events currently taking place near my home in southern California, where the war-profiteer company, Blackwater, has plans to purchase 824 acres of wilderness land for private mercenary training of soldiers. Interspersed between the more serious were, Gary Shteyngert, Jonathan Franzen, and poet Billy Collins who used the creative device of humor to engage the audience and lighten the mood — because sometimes the painful truth can only be accessed through laughter. Author Pico Iyer was a unique voice of among the impressive list of writers tonight. He spoke like a true Buddhist of “the open spaces in the mind,” (a landscape of our own choosing and therefore not subjugated by outside influences). Iyer turns to ‘the greats,’ he said, such as Emerson and Thoreau, for inspiration, and read from one of the foremost contemporary writers on nature, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. For six, too short, minutes, we were lost in mossy Himalayan mountains. While talk on global issues often winds up in a frenzy of hand wringing and preaching to the choir, and some of tonight’s offering were no less so, most of us in the audience felt a sense of gratitude for these writers committed to the task of enlightenment, one story at a time, and for their varied and eloquent voices to carry the conversation forward. — Angie Brenner West Coast Editor, Wild River Review Pico Iyer, Green Thoughts, April 24, 2007 — photo credit: Dale Cotton Posted by Joy Stocke at 3:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) April 24, 2007 Green Thoughts and the Goat who Choked on a Plastic Bag by Joy E. Stocke Tonight at 6:30 at PEN’s kick-off event at Cooper Union, writers from around the world will read from their work on a topic that anyone who who wakes up and turns on their radio, tv — or reads a newspaper or magazine — can hardly miss: the destruction of our planet. It makes me think of a goat I saw ten years ago in southeastern Turkey in the Mesopotamiam desert where two rivers flow: The Tigris and the Euphrates. Our bus drove along miles of dusty, scrub-filled land where on top of homes in villages beds were set out for the night. And men in white robes and pale lavender headscarves sat in the shade. There were cotton fields, newly planted with water that flowed in channels, part of the The Anatolian Gap project, and there were sheep and goats walking in long columns to where I was not sure. A romantic scene if you didn’t look too closely. If you didn’t look along the side of the road where blue and yellow and white trash bags flapped like birds trying to loosen themselves from spindly branches. I tried to avert my eyes, tried to will those bags away. We stopped for a tea break and that’s where I saw the goat retching, a plastic bag half in half out of its mouth. Wretching and bleeting. No one seemed to pay the goat any mind, and so I tried to forget him too. Tried. There are books and books and books, and if it’s out there, I would love to read a book about the history of the plastic trash bag, and what happens to our intestines when we eat one. Posted by Joy Stocke at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) April 23, 2007 To New York City Via Cuba and Australia by Joy E. Stocke If the journey creates the story, then Wild River Review’s presence at the third annual PEN American Center’s World Voices Festival begins in Cuba, ancestral home of Managing Editor, Raquel Pidal, whose column “I’m Not Yelling, I’m Cuban,” is on hiatus while she completes her coursework in the graduate program at Boston’s Emerson University. Raquel brought us to PEN American Center where her cousin Anna Kushner directs the Freedom to Write program. Anna has also written eloquently about Cuba, politics, the splitting up of families, longing, and how a culture adapts and changes in a new land. And so, with our commitment to free speech and global conversation, we begin a week of coverage from New York City at PEN American Center’s Third Annual World Voices Festival. In addition to our continuing series of in depth-interviews with Festival authors, we will cover numerous events throughout the week beginning tomorrow night at Cooper Union where Billy Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, Roxana Robinson, Janne Teller, and Colson Whitehead kick off festivities with a discussion about Writers and the Environment. So stay tuned. This year, PEN has a new Director, Caro Llewellyn, former director of the acclaimed Sydney Writers’ Festvial. World Voices Festival Chair and former PEN President Salman Rushdie says, “Caro Llewellyn comes highly commended by a number of the world’s leading literary figures. Writers recognize her as dedicated, intelligent and passionately committed to literature. We are lucky to have her." Although, Caro has literally been working around the clock to coordinate schedules of writers from all over the globe, she took time to answer a few questions: WRR: What convinced you to leave Sydney (where you ran a very successful literary festival) and relocate to New York? I loved being the Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival — it was truly a life-changing position and there was never a day that I didn’t want to go to work! However, as the Festival’s CEO and Artistic Director, I chose the writers and curated the entire event. That was wonderful and I was very lucky to have been given that kind of autonomy. But, that being the case, I had always felt very strongly that it was important for the Festival and the people of Sydney to get another point of view — to have someone else’s literary opinion and vision. Right from the start I said that I would do four or five years because I felt it was important for there to be artistic turnover. We all love the writers and genres we love and my artistic vision and choices very much reflected my literary passions. But for an event to stay ahead of itself, I think it’s important that it continually goes in new directions. This year, is the 10th anniversary of Sydney Writers’ Festival — it was tempting to stay and do that milestone event, but I also felt it would be a good symbol for a new director to kick-off with such a celebration. I had achieved the things I wanted to do with the event and felt for all the above reasons that it was a good time to go. WRR: What are the differences in the two festivals? And the similarities? The PEN World Voices festival has a theme each year. There was no theme in Sydney. The mission of Sydney was very broadly to promote books and reading to a wide audience. We also were to reflect Australia’s position in the Asia Pacific region. Promoting books and reading is obviously PEN’s mission too, but this Festival has also the political task of breaking down US cultural isolation, by promoting works in translation and encouraging American readers to look outside of the US to the wonderful works of writers from different parts of the world. WRR: You are a recent resident of New York. Does that play any role in the title of this year’s festival: Home and Away? No, the theme of this Festival was set by the Board before I arrived. WRR: As the oldest literary human rights organization in the world, PEN champions and works for the right of every author to exercise free speech. How do you see the festival fostering this mission? In an era of growing linguistic and cultural isolation, this festival celebrates and promotes free expression and international literary fellowship, and is a week in which people from all over the world can come together to enjoy an incredible mix of language and cultures from around the globe. WRR: For those of us who love literature, the list of authors you and PEN have gathered leaves us breathless. Could you recommend a few authors who are up and coming that we should seek out? There are so many wonderful writers descending on New York this week from all over the world. I would hate to try to name one or two, because in doing so, I’d be leaving out so many others. Come to the Festival, hear and discover their voices for yourself. Buy their books, take them home, enjoy them and then spread the word! WRR: Are you finding time to sleep? I don’t sleep a whole lot in the run-up to a Festival, but it’s only out of excitement about what’s about to take place! Oh, and with an international event like this, everyone’s in different time-zones so there is a certain amount of working around the clock! And, it’s worth it! Posted by Joy Stocke at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) IN BLOGS The Age of Reasonable Doubt Diary of a Writer in Midlife Crisis The Long Road to the Promised Land WRR@LARGE
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