Marlon James & the Talented Students of Girls Write Now

Last week, I attended an event for Girls Write Now, a creative writing and mentoring program for New York City high school students, where National Book Award-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed talked about her own love for writing as a young girl and how it led her to history and novelist Marlon James read from his new novel, The Book of Night Women. (I’m a few chapters into it, and it’s absolutely blowing me away.) After all the students and their mentors had shared the pieces they were working on, I asked James a few questions about how he came to the event and what it had meant to him.

“Talk about fearlessness,” he said of the young girls’ work, which was frequently quite powerful, drawing in many cases upon their experiences and their family lives. “When you learn at such an early age the value of truth—and truth doesn’t necessarily mean fact—writing what you’re supposed to write, writing as you’re led and not being [made] afraid by society or taboos and what you ‘should’ and ‘should not’ say… For them to learn that at such a young age, while the rest of us are still struggling with that… I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to write at 20.”

The next Girls Write Now event will be the annual spring reading, held on June 14 with a special appearance by Jean Thompson. The organization could no doubt use help from more adult women writers willing to mentor teenage girls, so if you’re interested, I hope you’ll contact them!

17 March 2009 | interviews |

John Wray: Looking Back at Brooklyn

The City section of this weekend’s New York Times features an essay by novelist John Wray about the time he lived in a DUMBO warehouse. He’d told me a little bit about that experience when I interviewed him back in 2001, because it was during that time that he wrote his debut novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, but the Times essay goes into greater detail, and also goes into his friendship with Mr. Toast, a neighbor of sorts who lived “in a late-model Hyundai Excel that he parked in a vacant lot next to the East River” and taught Wray the lay of the land.

Wray’s third novel, Lowboy, was published earlier this month, and last week he marked the occasion with a reading on the New York subway—the L train to Williamsburg, on the way to a more traditional reading/party. To promote the event, his publishers took a copy of Lowboy onto the subway and invited other people to read from it. (Wray’s the one who opens the video.)

15 March 2009 | uncategorized |