Page Turner Focus: Porochista Khakpour

This Saturday, November 14, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop will be hosting Page Turner, its first literary festival—an all-day lineup of panels, readings, and award presentations at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena featuring a slew of great writers. I’ll actually be taking part in the festival that afternoon as the moderator of a panel on “queering the Asian-American coming of age story” with Alexander Chee, Abha Dawesar, and Rakesh Satyal, so I hope New York area-readers of Beatrice might be able to come by and say hello. In the meantime, it’s my good fortune to be able to share with you some mini-interviews with a few of the other authors who will be appearing at the festival. (Thanks to Ken Chen and Vyshali Manivannan for putting these together and sending them my way.)

Let’s start with Porochista Khakpour, the author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects. She’s one of four writers who’ll be taking part in a panel called “The New Eclectics,” which promises to be one of the funniest segments of the festival. She lives in New York City except when she’s out in Pennsylvania teaching creative writing at Bucknell.

So, what’ve you been working on lately?

Grading! Also working on my second novel, doodling some essays, trying to resurrect hopeless short stories.

We all know that writers can be exceptionally good at procrastinating when they should be writing. What do you typically do to procrastinate?

If it’s not the internet or just worrying a lot, then it’s the best case scenario: turning from one form of writing to another. I really only got into essays and creative non-fiction as a way to avoid writing my second novel. Journalism, in general, has always been my way out from fiction. Writing to avoid other writing… I keep the cheating in the family.

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9 November 2009 | events |

Fady Joudah & the Late Styles of Mahmoud Darwish

Here’s the opening lines from If I Were Another, a posthumous collection of the lyric epics of Mahmoud Darwish, as translated by Fady Joudah:

…As I look behind me in this night
into the tree leaves and the leaves of life
as I stare into the water’s memory and the memory of sand
I do not see in this night
other than the end of this night
the ticking clock gnaws at my life by the second
and also shortens the life of this night
nothing of the night or of me remains to wrestle over.. or about
but the night goes back to its night
and I fall into this shadow’s pit

I invited Joudah to discuss his connection to these poems, which span fifteen years towards the end of Darwish’s life, a time during which, as Joudah explains, Darwish began to feel that he had truly come into his voice… which is true, but as Joudah reveals, that doesn’t mean that voice wasn’t capable of changing even further…

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6 November 2009 | in translation |