On April 27, novelist Christos Tsiolkas visited Sampsonia Way to give a reading with Sofi Oksanen and Tommy Wieringa. The event was sponsored by City of Aslyum/Pittsburgh in partnership with PEN/America. While he was here, Tsiolkas sat down for a chat with Sampsonia Way editor Silvia Duarte.

In his work Tsiolkas explores the changing lifestyle of Australia’s middle-class and confronts issues such as multiculturalism, homophobia, and infidelity. His book, The Slap, is itself a slap to stereotypes and prejudices associated with contemporary family life.

In this interview, Tsiolkas —Winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize— talks about the pitfalls of political correctness, the smugness of his generation, and The Slap.

In The Slap you tell a story through eight interconnected people of different generation and personalities. Tell us about the process of getting inside the minds of these characters.

Writers steal from what we see around us. I am becoming more and more interested in getting into other people’s minds. How does a woman think? How does a man think? What is the difference between those two? There was a Turkish writer who said, “When a writer picks up their pen, they are bisexual.” She didn’t mean in terms of sexuality, she meant in terms of the mind. You can inhabit a man or a woman’s mind.

It must have also helped that you come from a huge family and were surrounded by many voices.

I grew up in a house that we shared with two other families. So we were always on top of each other. You can stand back and say it was really crowded, but it was a fantastic way to grow up.

I think that the other reason I like to get into other people’s mind is that I feel like an outsider because of my Greek heritage in an Anglo-centric country.

Why are you so interested on the relationships between parents and children?

I’ve taught in the public school system, so those issues were really interesting to me.

It’s also because people of my generation are always talking about how to raise children. The way we discuss families and children can be an obsession sometimes. How harsh people can be about choices that mothers and families make! I wanted to write about it.

I was really worried that my friends—who in the U.S. context would be Democrats and progressives—were making choices to send their kids to private schools. They were making really conservative choices about where they were living and they were always using their children as an excuse.

Where did the idea of Hugo—the four-year-old boy who received the slap of your title—come from?

The germ of the idea came from a barbeque that mum and dad had at their place and lots of people came. My mum was in the kitchen cooking—she was getting a bit frantic—and Jack, the son of friends of mine, was playing around her feet and taking out pots and pans. Mum kept saying, “no, Jack, no” and Jack wasn’t stopping. And at one point Mum turned him around—it wasn’t an aggressive act—and said, “Jack, I said no.” And he said, “No one is allowed to touch my body without my permission.” And my mom was just looking down at him mystified.

It was not at all an aggressive moment. But I thought those differences between these two generations are very interesting in terms of the way we see children and the way the children see adults.

I don’t know what the situation is here in the U.S., but in New Zealand, which is a neighbor, they passed a law making it illegal for a parent to hit a child, and it is quite controversial. For my mum who grew up in Greece during World War II, it was acceptable to hit a child, and suddenly she is looking at this little boy who is telling her, “You can’t touch me.”

Your book is also about families, different generations and, above all, conservatism. I really enjoyed reading about Aunuk, the character who doesn’t want to have children. What did your Australian readers think of this character?

In a way Anuk is a little bit of my alter-ego because she is someone who doesn’t have children of her own. And people have asked me why I put Anuk in and why she has the second chapter. But I am glad that you like her. I think a lot of people don’t really like Anuk, and I’m not surprised by that.

For a long time Australia has produced these terrible soap operas that are very popular. They are very terrible, but if you look at them everyone is blonde and blue-eyed and everyone lives in big houses and women are married and have children. So it was important for me to have her work in that industry and to ask what kind of Australia we want to represent to the world and to ourselves.

This novel is also about classism and discrimination.

Yes. Uppermost in my mind while I was writing the book were the tensions between the more established immigrant groups in Australia and the hot politics around refugees. Under John Howard [the Australian Prime Minister from 1996 to 2007], there were a lot of people afraid that every Muslim was a terrorist. There was a real turning away from the politics of multiculturalism and a turning back to nationalistic politics about who belonged in Australia. Also we still haven’t been able to even approach reconciliation with the indigenous people.

Behind the conflict of classes is the issue of political correctness. How can political correctness be dangerous in a society?

I tried to understand political correctness and I think there is a valid element. Well, in the school system, for example, it is actually important to teach young kids that they must not use some words. But, on the other hand, it gets tricky because then we get scared of words and we get scared of writing and we get scared of looking at the complexity of the issues and we get scared of debate.

How are we scared of debate?

Let me give you an example. When I came to Los Angeles I kept noticing posters about America in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was on a panel about writing contemporary lives and all the other writers were from the U.S. So I said, “I have a question for you. How does the fact that you are in a state of war affect the stories you are writing?” And it was like I farted in the room. It was like I asked an embarrassing question. And it was astounding to me that those questions aren’t asked all the time. How do we respond to this reality?

Other thing that surprised me was that on page seven of an L.A newspaper there was a little article about two U.S. soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan. If two Australian soldiers were killed, they would have been on the front page and there would be a huge debate. But here this was buried on page 6 or 7. Even someone who supports the war, how can they support what is happening in the media?

So coming back to The Slap you killed a lot of stereotypes with this book.

But what is the point of writing if you are just going to write stereotypes. You want to inhabit your character. You want to live your characters. They are flesh and blood. They are real.

Read Silvia’s bio.

Damage caused by Cyclone Nargis, Photo: © alaphia.blogspot.com

Zaw Thet Htwe is a Burmese sports journalist. In 2008, Htwe was working with Burmese comedian Maung Thura -also known as Zargana- to deliver aid and support to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma on May 2, 2008. While working as humanitarians for the Burmese people, Htwe and Zargana were placed under arrest by the Junta government.

Htwe was visiting his sick mother in the town of Minbu, when police detained him for an alleged violation of the Video Act and the Unlawful Associations Act. Sentenced to a nineteen-year prison term, Htwe won’t be released till June 12, 2027. Burmese officials confiscated his cell phone, computer, CD’s, and other various documents to build a case against him.

In the past, he worked as the editor of the First Eleven Sports Journal, which is widely received throughout Burma. This is not the first time Htwe was arrested. In the 1990′s, he was arrested for his work with the Democratic Party for a New Society and in 2003 he was detained under suspicions of treason for publishing specific articles as the editor of the journal.

This arrest in 2003 was almost the end for Htwe because he was sentenced to death by the military court. Luckily, the sentenced was reduced to a three year term. We can only hope his current sentence will be reduced in a similar fashion.

Here are a few ways you can help protect freedom of expression in Burma:

Sign the Free Burma Alliance Petition

Watch the Call to Action video

Check Voices of Burma for more ways to help.

What other ways can you make a difference in Burma?

Read Brian’s bio.

Carl Phillips outside of House Poem on Sampsonia Way

This past Thursday Cave Canem held writers’ workshops in City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s houses. That evening, they attended a reading by  Colleen J. McElroy, Carl Phillips, Claudia Rankine, and Sapphire under a tent on Monterrey Street.

Using the five houses that COA/P renovated along Sampsonia Way, 54 African–American poets from all across the United States shared a sample of their writing with poets Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Ed Roberson, Phillips, McElroy, and Rankine. This was the third of a five-part series of workshops, most of them held at the University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg. Phillips, who ran a workshop for the second year in a row, was surprised by the outright enthusiasm of the poets he led.

The liveliness of the group was different this time because everyone remained at ease when critiquing each others’ work, despite their excitement, said the author of numerous books of poetry, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Professor of English, and of African and Afro–American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I try not to be prescriptive. I figure out what they are trying to say and explain how successful they were in relaying that message. This is a wonderful setting for the discussion and improvement of that message,” added Phillips.

Rickey Laurentiis, Carolyn Matthews, & Yalonda JD Green in front of House Poem after the workshop

Coming from New York, Tennessee, and Kentucky, Rickey Laurentiis, Carolyn Matthews, and Yalonda JD Green agree that the Cave Canem’s writing retreat helps them come together in a normally isolated discipline.

“To get these different perspectives helps me to be a stronger and more effective writer,” said Green.

“It’s an intergenerational community in terms of class, social status, and age,” said Matthews.

“You meet people who think similarly to you and this gives you a new sense of confidence….Especially because we are working with other black poets, added Laurentiis.

Participant Glenis Redmond, who is a performance poet, mother, and teacher from North Carolina, also felt a unique sense of community and solidarity while participating in Cave Canem’s workshops. “Writing a poem each day of the retreat helped me to improve my craft and gain a wide range of perspectives on my writing. You get a snapshot of your writing process in these couple days that you can’t typically capture,” said Redmond.

Kelly Harris, a staff member of the New Orleans based Afterschool Partnership, and Darrel Holnes, a current writer in fellowship at the University of Michigan, both enjoyed the atmosphere not only as a place to discuss their writing, but to help improve their careers.

Kelly Harris on Sampsonia Way

“I found the tools you need to expand your craft,” said Harris. This will help her more clearly communicate the goals of the Afterschool Partnership and help keep libraries in New Orleans open, she added.

Writer Darrel Holnes outside of House Poem

While Holnes hopes that fine-tuning his sense of voice at these workshops will help him write his first novel.

More photos from Poetry on the Northside

Read Brian’s bio.

Introduction by Sherrie Flick

Nancy Krygowski’s work has been with me for a long time. I’ve followed her poems (her boyfriends, her apartments, her vintage dishware) from New Hampshire to California to Ohio to Nebraska to Pennsylvania. So when her debut collection Velocity was published I thought I knew the book already, like you think you know your sister until she wears that new sequin dress and you set down your coffee cup and say (to yourself), pay attention.

And so, I came to be on a bus, the 54c to be exact, with Nancy’s new book in my bag. (I was carrying it around, awash in friend-pride.) I opened it, there on the bus, and the poems—honed and beautiful, sad and simple, lonely and lusty—all came together as a whole. Bing. I read through the book, front to back, right there in my window seat, and I saw everything, not just Nancy, but the world itself anew.

Isn’t that what we all want from poetry? Let me answer that: Yes. Yes, it is.

READ THE EXCERPT FROM VELOCITY

CLICK HERE to purchase a copy of Velocity.

“Heaven As We Know It,” “How She Learned to Listen,” “Everything,” and “What the Next Voice Said,” are from Velocity by Nancy Krygowski © 2007. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Introduction by Nancy Krygowski

For years, I’ve used the phrase a thin layer of white chocolate to refer to Sherrie Flick’s perfectly detailed imagination, a gift that is central to her fiction.  The story goes that on a cold December morning, towards the end of an almost non-stop cross country trip with our then boyfriends, Sherrie and I drove a New England highway, raving about the cheesecake Sherrie’s boyfriend’s mom had served us the night before–its denseness, its not-too-sweet flavor, the buttery crust–when Sherrie mentioned the thin layer of white chocolate.

Huh?  The boys and I were puzzled because, well, it didn’t exist, except in Sherrie’s mind and taste buds.  But the way she talked about it made us wish it had.  It sounded divine, the extra touch that could make a really good cheesecake into something heavenly.

That thin layer of white chocolate is everywhere in Sherrie’s writing.  It’s in her ability to create the perfect—but perfectly strange—metaphor.  It’s in her ability to delve into her characters’ psyches so that you feel like you know these people (or, in some cases, sheep)—or you are these people.  It’s in her ability to evoke an era in such exacting detail that you’re living it again through the characters but also through your own memories.  It’s in her perfect, complex sentences. It’s subtle.  Delicious.  It’s something you want to savor.  Dig in.

READ THE EXCERPT FROM RECONSIDERING HAPPINESS

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of Reconsidering Happiness

Reprinted from Reconsidering Happiness by Sherrie Flick by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

The crowd at Gist Street. Photo by Jonathan Green (Popcity.)

The first Friday of each month around 6:30pm, a line begins to form along Gist Street in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood. If it’s raining, people clutch umbrellas. If it’s summer, they stand in the sun, fanning themselves with newspapers. In winter, they huddle together in coats.

They look like they are queing up for the opening of some new hip club, but they are there for literature. They are waiting for one of Pittsburgh’s most popular reading series to open its doors.

The series began in March 2001 and is directed by fiction writer Sherrie Flick and poet Nancy Krygowski with the help of playwright Rick Schweikerts. It is held on the 3^rd floor of James Simon’s sculpture studio.

While organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts are wringing their hands about declining readership, the Gist Street series regularly sells out and often turns people away. This is all the more unusual because it is a series dedicated to emerging writers who are either publishing in national journals and magazines or publishing their first or second books.

Part of the reason for the series’ success is the atmosphere. It’s as much a reading as a social occasion with folks bringing food and beer and a raffle that includes books by the readers and treats from Flick’s garden.

“I had the feeling that I was reading for a group of friends,” said City of Asylum/Pittsburgh writer-in-resident Horacio Castellanos Moya. “I was deeply impressed by the fact that there were so many young people—not students obliged to go to a reading in a university classroom—but young people that really enjoy sharing literature, drinks, talk. That was fantastic.”

You would think that being such tireless promoters of other people’s work would mean their own would suffer. Not true for Krygowski and Flick. Reconsidering Happiness, Flick’s first novel, was published last year and Krygowski has been publishing steady in nationally recognized journals since her book Velocity came out in 2007.

We asked these two long-time friends to introduce each other’s work.

READ the excerpt from Sherrie Flick’s Reconsidering Happiness.

READ poems from Nancy Krygowski’s Velocity.

Brenda Cárdenas of Letras Latinas

Earlier this month, law enforcement officers pulled over a vehicle that ran a stop sign on Pittsburgh’s South Side. One passenger was arrested after he failed to produce immigration papers. According to immigration rights activist Sister Janice Vanderneck, the arresting officer scoffed,  “Welcome to Arizona.”

Arizona’s new immigration law gives police sweeping powers to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally and makes failure to carry immigration papers a crime. State Representative Daryl Metcalfe is proposing a similar bill in Pennsylvania. Opponents of the bill say it will lead to harassment of Latinos and racial profiling.

At a time of growing hostility toward Latin American immigrants, it is all the more important to celebrate the voices of Latino writers and poets and acknowledge their contribution to American letters.

On Wednesday City of Asylum/Pittsburgh will host a reading in partnership Cave Canem and Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to providing nationwide literary programming, Letras Latinas sponsors a poetry prize, residency, and an oral history project. They also run writing workshops for Latino youth.

Letras Latinas director Francisco Aragón

Letras Latinas director Francisco Aragón will read along with poet Brenda Cárdenas, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Aragón is the author of two books of poetry, Glow of Our Sweat and Puerta del Sol, as well as the editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. Cárdenas earned her MFA at the University of Michigan. Her works include From the Tongues of Brick and Stone and Boomerang.

Both Aragón and Cárdenas write poetry that deftly weaves together multiple influences.  Robert Vasquez said of Aragón’s work, “[It] synthesizes William Carlos Williams’ appreciation for the local with Pablo Neruda’s trajectory toward the infinite.” Cárdenas’ poetry braids together Spanish and English in innovative forms, reminding her readers how Latin American influences are threaded into American culture. In her poem “Report from the Temple of Confessions in Old Chicano English,” she writes,

Se Cruzan canyons             en el templo de confessions.

Languages lies            across the barbed lines,

piles of its limbs          pierced y pinchados.

Here language is embodied as limbs torn by the barbed wire that stretches across borders. Language is a liability under the Arizona Law and the law proposed by Metcalfe. Because these laws empower police to detain someone merely on the suspicion that they are illegal, an accent can mean a night in jail—or deportation as is the case for the man arrested in Pittsburgh.

Francisco Aragón and Brenda Cárdenas will read on Wednesday at 7:00 at the House Poem (408 Sampsonia Way.) Click here to reserve a seat.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

A pregnant teenager waits for care in a medical facility in North Kivu.

Photo by Lynsey Addario

In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag writes, “Photographs are a way of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged or the merely safe might prefer to ignore.” But for Sontag, pictures create moral dilemmas when they are separated from context. A photograph of civilian corpses after a bombing, she writes, creates “general abhorrence” for violence—one that can be allayed by simply looking away. It does not, she argues, create a greater understanding of the particular war and therefore does nothing to incite the viewer to act or speak out against what they are seeing.

In essence, viewer becomes voyeur.

Congo/Women, an exhibit of photographs documenting the effects of gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, asks viewers “too look and to learn and then to act,” according to a statement from the exhibit’s website. The exhibit features the work of photographers Lynsey Addario, Marcus Bleasdale, Ron Haviv, and James Nachtwey and is accompanied by video and audio testimony of survivors. It will be on view at the Space Gallery downtown until July 25^th.

The exhibit’s website provides links to organizations who are working in the Congo and access to a visual petition in which visitors can upload their own portrait as a show of support to the women and girls of the Congo.

“Pittsburgh has a Congolese community,” said Space gallery curator Murray Horne. “The arts groups in the Wood Street Galleries office space have drawn my attention to the necessity to further a more comprehensive view such as gender-based violence and lack of healthcare in Congo, and the possible solutions.”

Space Gallery is located at 812 Liberty Avenue. Phone: 412-325-7723

Read Sampsonia Way’s previous coverage of sexual violence in the Congo.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

This weekend protestors planted saplings in Burma, flash mobs formed in Great Britain, supporters held a solidarity march in Washington, D.C., and activists from nearly thirty countries voluntarily confined themselves to their houses for 24-hours— all in honor of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s 65th birthday. She has been under house arrest since being detained during the 1990 elections in which she was elected Prime Minster.

Here on Sampsonia Way, City of Asylum writer-in-residence Khet Mar and her family marked the occasion by drawing and painting portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Than Htay Maung

Khet Mar’s husband, Than Htay Maung, and their two sons, Linn Thit Nway Oo and Wa Than, posted their pictures on Facebook and Moemaka, a blog run by exiled journalist Maung Yit.

“The boys are growing up among the people who love and respect Aung San Suu Kyi,” Khet Mar said. “I think it is important for the boys to know about a woman who loves her country very much. They need to know her courage and her sacrifice for Burmese people.  

Linn Thit Nway Oo

Sampsonia Way is dedicating its July issue to Burma and the stories of activists, journalists, and leaders who are—despite arrest, torture, and exile—speaking out against one of the most repressive regimes in the world. The issue will feature a story about journalists in exile, including Maung Yit and a portrait of the Burmese refugee community in Pittsburgh.

Wa Than

One refugee, who asked his name to be withheld because he still has family in Burma, said Aung San Suu Kyi taught him what democracy really meant. Before1988 when she returned to Burma after studying and working abroad, he said the only information about democracy he had access to was in government-approved publications. These publications cited Burma and China as democracies—both countries that violently repress opposition.

Than Htay Maung

“She taught us we are human,” he said. “The men in uniforms are human and we are human and we have the right to walk around the street in demonstration.” The same year Aung San Suu Kyi joined the pro-democracy movement, he decided to protest with a group of students in Rangoon. There he saw his friends gunned downed by the Burmese military. He fled Burma in 2002, eventually settling in Pittsburgh.

“I am really sad because I lost my family,” he said. “But I am 47-years-old and alone in Pittsburgh and she is 65-years-old and alone in Burma so I can’t have hard feelings.”

He added, “She gives me light, before her my mind was dark.”

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

Nay Phone Latt before imprisonment
Photo: © Asia Observer

On May 26th, Burmese poet Saw Wei was released from prison five months after his sentence had ended. Wei had been imprisoned in Burma for two and a half years after “inducing crime against public tranquility” through one of his published poems.

The poem, entitled ‘February the Fourteenth’ was published in the Rangoon-based weekly magazine Love Journal, is an eight-line verse about Valentine’s Day. However, when the first letters of each line of the poem are put together, they read “General Than Shwe is crazy with power” in Burmese. The weekly magazine quickly sold out as word of the coded message spread.

Wei is lucky to have been released from prison. “While we are pleased that Saw Wei was finally released today, we are profoundly disappointed that officials kept him in prison more than four months after his sentence was due to expire,” said Larry Siems, Freedom to Write and International Programs Director at PEN American Center.

However, not all Burmese prisoners were as lucky as Wei. Prominent blogger Nay Phone Latt, was sentenced to 20 years after the government discovered a cartoon depicting junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe in one of his e-mails. Latt’s jail time was reduced by eight years, but with the prison system’s past record of inconsistent sentences there is no certainty when Latt will truly be released.

In April 2010, Latt won the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award for his dedication to the National League of Democracy in Burma. PEN awards this honor to people “who have fought courageously in the face of adversity for the right to freedom of expression,” according to PEN’s website.

Read Brian’s bio.