Honoring Greg Djanikian in the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette

I felt blessed when Pennsylvania Gazette editor John Prendergast invited me to write a 3,000 word story about Greg Djanikian, who trusted me to teach at Penn, who talks with  me many spring-semester Tuesdays when I arrive early to teach, who inspired a key character in my forthcoming Florence novel One Thing Stolen, and who writes some of the most gorgeous poetry anywhere. I wrote of his most recent book, Dear Gravity, here.

To write this story I spent an afternoon in Greg's beautiful home (filled with the artistry of his wife), interviewed Stephen Dunn, Julia Alvarez, Al Filreis, Gerald Costanzo, Fred Muratori, and others, and returned to a dear student, Eric Xu, who brought valuable insights to the Greg's beloved teaching.

The story can be found here.

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In English 135.301: Not Black. Not White. Mary Karr and Janet Malcolm on Writing Truth

This was the yard as we pulled up last evening, following a just-right birthday celebration for my dad. It was this black and white (I've done nothing to the photo). It was clear, and cold.

But real life isn't like that. Real life is ambiguity and surprise, rubbed away places where righteous rightness once made claims. Memoirists live inside the gray scale. We battle with ourselves. We rarely win.

Today, my Penn students will be discussing Mary Karr's memoir The Liars' Club, a classic "traumatic" memoir, to use Sven Birkerts' term—equally scathing and tender, explosive and cohering. They'll be learning about each other through a muffled-sense assignment that was inspired by a Greg Djanikian poem ("My Uncle's Eye"). And they'll be debating these two assertions—one from Karr herself and one from Janet Malcolm, who visited Penn last spring as part of Al Filreis's much-loved Fellows class. Karr is writing about the impact of her memoir—which certainly exposes the rough edges of people she loves. Malcolm is talking about journalists. The passages still stand side-by-side, ready to be dismantled.

As certain facts had once scalded all our insides and almost decimated our clan got broadcast a thousand times, we got oddly used to them. Call it aversion therapy, but the events seeped in a little deeper. We healed more—though that had never been the point—through exposure. Our distant catastrophes became somehow manageable. Catharsis, the Greeks call it.

Mary Karr, Introduction to The Liars' Club, anniversary edition

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

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Dear Gravity/Gregory Djanikian: Reflections

Gregory Djanikian's new volume of poetry, Dear Gravity (Carnegie Mellon University Press), arrives cloaked in shimmer colors on a brutally cold winter day. Sun, I think. I open the book to a random page and I read "Why I Have The Radio On." It starts off easy: The family has gone off for a week. It quickly turns: and I've stayed back to do/significant work which might crank/the century a couple of notches forward,/something with the wild odor/of the unsayable in it The poem commands my attention all the way to its final lines, and this is something, this is truly something, for my mind had been messy with so many other things and had not known itself open to a poem.

But that is the power, I discover in the very early hours of this morning, of all the poems in Djanikian's new collection. They override the muck in the reader's mind. They knock, step in, and stay. They assert the familiar in unfamiliar ways without relying on games or smug pretensions. They feel winnowed down, therefore essential, therefore as close to true as language gets. They are as accessible as they are quietly electrifying.

Dear Gravity offers five groupings of poems, each named solely by a roman numeral. They move from stories about violence and impossible yieldings, to the cherished-haunted memories of childhood and adolescence, to confessions about the writing or not writing of poems, to the hard fix and sweet breath of the natural world, to sometimes sparring, sometimes relenting reflections on the passing of time. There are poems here about a mother's old car, about a high school bully, about a pre-induction physical during the height of the Vietnam War. There is the story of a roadside accident, the story of a near accident, the story of loved people dying or perhaps soon dying, the story of first loves and enduring ones, a red-haired wife on a horse. There are lines like these:

The dark was unfolding its many hands. ("Song of Imponderables")

The wind today is a woman with long hair/entangling all she loves. ("Arizona Wind")

I teach memoir. I don't know the vocabulary for poems—the word, for example, for that long rushing comma-less poem that revealed itself so beautifully that I knew precisely where to stop the sounds in my head, where to pause ("The Book of Love"). But it occurred to me, as I read this morning, that I would like my students to know this work, to see what can be done with honest language, and to see for themselves how talented this Greg Djanikian is, this director of the undergraduate creative writing program at my own University of Pennsylvania, this man whose office sits above the room where I teach during second-semester Tuesdays.

In "Writer's Block" Djanikian is both teacher and poet. I leave you with the final two stanzas:

Whatever you choose, the hope is
to begin with something open-ended,
some small parabola of thought
which might suddenly zoom you
in a gust of inspiration
upward on hoof and wing

where you might rarely travel
in your prim and Sunday clothes,
but from under whose sleeves
there might appear
in one epiphanous moment
the utter stranger
you have always been.

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Eric Xu publishes a poem, Christine dances at Annenberg, and we celebrate the moments

There are three beautiful people in this photograph and one very lucky one. The three? A scientist/poet. A scientist/dancer. A scientist/artist. Phenomenal writers, all.

(Scientist, for me, is anyone brave enough to take any course that leads toward a degree in engineering or the medical arts.)

These are some of my last-semester students (Angela, sadly, arrived too late for this photograph), which is to say, these are members of my family. Eric, over there on the left, just had a magnificent poem published in Apiary, and he has sent it to me, and I have read it, and I am not in any way surprised by its quality, nor by its heart, nor by its collectively powerful imagery. Not surprised, for I know Eric. I know the strength of his character and the reach of his art.

If you click on the link here, you will find his poem, which was written during his class with Professor Greg Djanikian. Greg's office sits above my classroom at Penn. On very good days, I have a chance to talk with him. It's because of Greg that I came to Penn to teach memoir as an adjunct. Because of him that I was allowed to teach a second class after conducting a first and sometimes (because of its small size) wobbly class.

Because of him that I have people like Eric in my life.

And also Christine, who is performing this evening and tomorrow evening in a show that she herself choreographed. Curtains are up at 7 PM at the Annenberg Prince Theater. I'd give anything to be there, but I cannot. Please go in my stead. Give her your love and your awe, for Christine inspires awe; she is endowed with specialness.

And also Chang, our remarkable artist, our no-way-is-English-her-second-language writer, our kind soul and purveyor of hot chocolate, our wise one. If you go up and down the campus at Penn you may find her writing, you may find her drawing, you may find her solving Organic Chemistry problems. She does it all. She does it with love.

And also Angela, who taught us all so much about love and forgiveness, who made us cry, who wrote the heck out of every single sentence. Someday I will have a picture of her, too, but in the meantime, look for beauty.

I am, as I said, the lucky one.

And I'll be back on the campus Monday night, at 7 PM, for a Live at the Kelly Writers House taping, joining Andrew Panebianco, Katie Samson, and Raphael Xavier for a WXPN event with Michaela Majoun. We'll be there on behalf of the 12th Annual  First Person Arts Festival, which is launching in a matter of days now. Toni Morrison will be in town for that festival. Rita Dove. Ana Castillo. Sonia Sanchez. Others. I'll be joining Dani Shapiro on the stage and also teaching a memoir workshop focusing on food and kitchen spices, and so we'll be at Penn on Monday, talking about all this with WXPN.

Where would I be without my alma mater?

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walking West Philadelphia with the incredible documentary photographer, Lori Waselchuk

Eight years ago I was honored by a Pew Fellowship in the Arts grant. It was a gift of time; it was also a gift of hope. I was working on that odd Schuylkill River book (Flow)—the book no one got, the book no one could label. I was given the chance to keep working on those prose poems/narratives/not fictions and to find them an eventual home (Temple University Press) and then to go out into the world and meet those open-hearted readers who didn't give a whit if the book could not, for the life of itself, conform to a category.

But there are many gifts associated with the Pew, and they continue. Yesterday, all these years later, was the gift of Lori Waselchuk, who won a Pew last year for her incredible photography—work that has shown up in the New York Times, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Lori is also the creator of the book Grace Before Dying, which, in the book's words "tells the emotional story of the extraordinary breakthrough in humanity that has helped transform Angola, once one of the most dangerous maximum security prisons in the United States, to one of the least violent..... Waselchuk not only shows a culture of caring and compassion that challenges stereotypes of incarcerated people, but also provides an intimate and personal perspective on what long-term and life sentences signify for those inside." Lori's photographs speak. They humanize.

I met Lori for a long-awaited conversation at the edge of the Penn campus. We had no plan, just an idea about fellowship. I'm working, or should be working, on a book that partly takes place in West Philadelphia (this book also partly takes place in Florence, Italy), and I've been walking that neighborhood each Tuesday before class. Lori happens to live there. Lori happens to actually know things about the puzzle of the place, its great ethnic charms, its upstairs bars, its blue grass, its mosques, its thrift stores, its cats, its park, its schools. I didn't have to do much more but express my curiosity, and we were off for one of the best guided tours in my personal memory. We capped the walking with a meal at Manakeesh. We had stuff to say, and kept on saying it. I found myself with a copy of Lori's book.

By the time I returned to the Penn campus to meet one on one with my fifteen students (and then, later, with Alice Ma, my fellowship student), I was in that exhausted/exhilarated place a mind/body backs into after days of long hours and little sleep. Who better to run into, then, but Greg Djanikian, who leads the creative writing program at Penn and has for quite a while. Greg is beloved. Just last week one of my students was talking about what happens to a poem when Greg reads it out loud. It gets lifted, my student said, into greater meaning. I sensed what a great man Greg was by reading a book of his own poems (So I Will Till the Ground) for review many years ago. Every single conversation since has been affirm-atory.

And so there Greg was, near the campus edge—busy, I'm sure, but perfectly willing to stop and talk, to not steer clear of the vrooooom of my enthusiasms, to let me be me.

I love people like that.

I loved the day.

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if you walk through life looking for the good—at Penn, yesterday

I had all sorts of prospects for my class at Penn yesterday. Just two classes to go, and I had a plan in place, some thoughts about teaching the art of putting another's gestures, postures, cheekbones, eyes on the page. I had things to read, photographs to study, Annie Dillard, Anton Chekhov, Francine Prose, and Cynthia Kaplan in my back pocket. But before we would get to that, we would hear from the students themselves, who had been interviewing each other and writing "practice" profiles.

Except. These were no practice profiles. These were fully developed, deeply moving, vastly important gifts crafted scrupulously for one another. It became important to simply dwell with these pieces, to slow things down, to take note of all the progress my students have made this semester, to honor the insights and the care embedded in their most recent work. There were students who had entered my classroom in winter proclaiming that they couldn't write; how wrong they were. There have been those who have worried about getting things wrong; time and again they got so much right. There were those who cautioned that they might not come to every class, and would probably be late with the assignments. Okay, so. There was only one of those, and he lied. He came. He wrote. Not just extremely well, but also (he amazed us) on time (give or take three minutes).

Soon I'll be able to share one of my student's works, for it will be published in an esteemed magazine. Someday I'll be able to tell you about the others—their gains, their triumphs, their stories.

But for now, in the midst of what has become the busiest season in my life, I want to take a minute and thank my institution, the University of Pennsylvania, for giving me the chance, again, to fall in love (thank you, Greg Djanikian, and thank you, Al Filreis). This is a great privilege, spending time with these students, watching them grow. And it is a great privilege to work at my alma mater. The final project my students will produce is a profile of an individual who inspires. Many of my students have chosen a university professor, and in reading through the profile proposals this morning, I am awed by the many professors I've never met who are radically changing student lives.

If you walk through life looking for the good, you find students like my students. You find an institution like my own.

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HANDLING THE TRUTH: a little publishing news

It is just after five in the morning, and I have been sitting here searching for words, wanting to begin this post in just the right place.

But I am perplexed, for there are so many beginnings.  I shall begin at the end, then, and share what is, for me, such day-breaking, joy-making news:

April 17, 2012
Non-fiction:
General/Other        
Memoirist, fiction writer and National Book Award finalist for A SLANT OF SUN, Beth Kephart's HANDLING THE TRUTH, a book devoted to the reading, teaching, and making of memoir; about consequences and libraries, privileges and pleasures, and finally knowing ourselves -- providing a proven framework for teachers, students, and readers, to Lauren Marino at Gotham, by Amy Rennert at the Amy Rennert Agency (world). 

HANDLING THE TRUTH emerges from my years of writing, critiquing, and teaching memoir.  It erupts from a place both scorched and urgent.  It means so much to me because my students mean so much to me, and because memoir—the form, the possibilities—must, I think, be both reconsidered and defended.

But no book emerges on its own.  This one will exist because my agent, Amy Rennert, received the first 70 pages of this book on a Saturday morning, read it on a Sunday morning, and called me that Sunday afternoon.  She already had a plan.  She was certain.  She took the book out into the world, and before I even had a chance to dream, she had found this book its right home.   Shore lady, she wrote to me last week, as I was contemplating dolphins and sea, we have a deal. Lauren Marino is the executive editor of Gotham Books, a Penguin Group imprint (who doesn't love Penguin?). She has worked with Diablo Coady, Isaac Mizrahi, Thomas Moore, Jeffrey Zaslow, Ann Crittenden, Ruth Reichl, Jane Green, Cindy Crawford, Willie Nelson, and others.  I am honored by the chance to write for her.

I am delighted, too, to share this one other small thing at this early hour:  HANDLING THE TRUTH is a book that once sported another title.  And then one morning, while grousing on Facebook about a nonfiction writer who takes (in my opinion) far too many liberties, Melissa Sarno posted a video clip meant to make me laugh and (perhaps, who knows?) to silence my rant.  All day long I kept thinking about that clip and about how much I love Melissa.  I knew by dusk what I had to do.  Sarno, you are loveliness supreme.

I have many people, then, to thank today.  Gregory Djanikian, for inviting me to teach at Penn in the first place. Al Filreis of Penn's Kelly Writers House, for supporting my work in the classroom.  My students, whose work and faces and stories thrill, inspire, uplift me.  Amy Rennert, for believing so much in this book, for making sure it had the right home, for being a friend through all these years.  Lauren Marino, for your (joy-making) faith.  And, of course, Melissa and Jack.

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Peregrine magazine: standing among giants (and friends)

"You stand among giants," I could often be heard telling my students this semester, and there wasn't a speck of exaggeration in the claim.  For I had a class—oh, I had a class—and they taught me and one another.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that this past Tuesday, Peregrine, the Creative Writing Program magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, began to make its way into mailboxes and classrooms. It's the fourth issue of this beautiful publication, and all credit goes to the great poet, teacher, and CWP director Gregory Djanikian, who quietly sifts and mingles the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of faculty, students, and alumni to bring this book to life.

I am so honored to be included in this magazine, and I am so touched to find myself here among the likes of C.K. Williams and Charles Bernstein, Alicia Oltuski and Rick Nichols, and my dear friends Karen Rile, Alice Elliott Dark, and Kate Northrop.  I've set this afternoon aside to read.  It will be time extremely well spent.

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An evening at the Kelly Writers House

This is the season during which the work days never end, and the skies darken for long stretches, and the rains come, and the tree limbs scratch their chaos into the tired stucco walls of this house.

This is that season, again.

But last night, through what was cold and what was dark, I made my way by train and collapsed umbrella to the University of Pennsylvania campus, which Al Filreis and Greg Djanikian have turned into a second home for me.  I traveled there to hear New Yorker editor David Remnick speak of journalism—then and now.  I traveled to sit with my dear student Kim, and to hear of her life, how it unfolding.  I traveled for the chance to chat with the great fiction writer and teacher, Max Apple. I traveled to sit among students intent on learning all they can—there, here, now—and among teachers and working writer/editors (Dick Pohlman, Avery Rome, more) who are generous with their own stories.

A gift, all of it.

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English 145 (5):

I arrived at the Penn campus early yesterday, first to have tea with Gregory Djanikian, a poet, a mentor, and the director of the creative writing staff. We talked of students and what might be yielded to them, talked of what remains, or should. We walked, then, to the eastern wedge of the campus, where Greg has a standing Monday squash game, and where I, by virtue of proximity to a once-familiar structure, remembered my own days on the varsity team.

I said goodbye to Greg, then met Jay Kirk on the library steps. I had an elephant's eye for him—glass, a taxidermist's tool, an object found at Paxton Gate during a San Francisco trip. Up Locust Walk, then, Jay and I went, talking of books, rehearsing history, recalling the days, mine, when again and again my work was rejected for its lack of commercial viability. We talked about English 145, and about Jay's narrative nonfiction, and about what I hoped he might relate to the students of my class.

After lunch, Jay was there, in Room 209, engaging these young writers, as I knew he would, with stories about funeral home directors and brothels, a lesbian retirement community, Rwanda's post-genocide tourism business. In structure lies meaning, Jay told the class. Scene making is story making. Write your authentic self—your fears, your not knowing, your questions—directly onto the page.

They do. They have. For we critiqued the students' memoirs then—powerful, personal stories that demanded respect and received it. Talent matters in writing workshops, of course it does, but so do intellectual integrity and kindness. My students bring all three to class. They move me to tears. I can't help it.

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