39th Annual UND Writers’ Conference

Now that Christmas, New Year’s, Valentines, and most recently St. Patrick’s day have passed us by and left our checking accounts on the barren side, what’s there to do when Easter finishes off the holidays once and for all and we’ve spent the last of our cash on Cadbury creme eggs and hollow chocolate rabbits? Well, your St. Patty’s day luck hasn’t run out yet because the UND Writer’s Conference is the week after Easter and is free and open to the public.

Being in its 39th year, the conference has established itself as an unrivaled and unique event, not only because it has remained free and open to the public since its very first incarnation, but also because of the consistently high-caliber authors that the conference brings to the region each year. As Heidi Czerwiec, an English professor at UND and co-director of the conference explains, “We have an incredible quality of writers that come here. It’s a completely unprecedented event in the upper-Midwest. There’s nothing like it. So it’s one of the few opportunities that people have in the area to get this kind of a celebration of the arts, primarily literature, but also film and visual art, all tied together for free.”

Moreover, despite have such big names as Salman Rushdie featured as readers and panelists, the conference still maintains a relaxed environment that allows the public a more open exchange with the writers in attendance. “I think what makes the UND Writer’s conference unique aside from being free and open to the public is the unprecedented access that we provide. We try to invite authors that are willing to be available to the public, that are the panelists, the audience is able to ask questions of them, interact with them at receptions, and get their book signed. So it’s very friendly, casual, and not as formal as some conferences.”

Perhaps one of the most important highlights about the conference is not the notable names that appear as featured authors, but the breadth and scope of what “writer’s conference” means.  For one, the coordinators involved in the conference manage somehow to keep the idea of literary art out of a pigeonhole. This year the definition of literary artist ranges from poet to fiction writer to non-fiction writer to graphic novelist to memoirist.

Secondly, the public is really very involved in the various events that take place. Rather than simply attending readings, the conference is made up of much more. “We’ve been trying to expand the types of events that are available...we have the tie-in films, art, as well as readings beyond our core featured writers. We have the open mic each day at 10 o’clock where the public can go and sign up to read for about 5 minutes each on each day.  There are also community workshops on Saturday in both fiction and poetry.”

While there’s definitely plenty to do and see, the theme is what brings it all together. “To tie in with UND’s 125th anniversary’s theme of “From Tradition to Tomorrow” we thought that the theme “Revolutions” would fit in with that. And it’s purposely plural to indicate that there’s not just one revolution, that there are numerous revolutions, that they are ongoing, and more than just sociopolitical revolutions, but also revolutions in style of writing and in technique in various genres”.  Over the course of five days of panel discussions, screenings of author-recommended films, the art exhibit, and of course, the work of the authors themselves, the theme “Revolutions” encompasses this celebration of literary arts.

Most of all, though, the theme should foster a revolution of mentality for each individual who attends. “I hope they come away with an enlarged sense about how literature matters deeply to us in our daily lives. That it’s not just a once-a-year thing. I hope that they’re reading the books, that they are finding connections between the authors in interesting ways that we’ve started to present but that they can continue for themselves. Literature isn’t something that’s written by those white men that you studied in English class; it’s an ongoing, living, exciting enterprise.”

Russell Banks

A formerly rich man is asked how he lost all his money. “Gradually,” the man says, “then all of a sudden.” This is how Russell Banks’ stories operate. Certainly he’s best-known for his novels, some of which, like The Sweet Hereafter, have been made into movies. His short stories, like those in his 2000 collection The Angel on the Roof, deserve as much attention. He tells gradual stories in which many different moments come together. As his stories progress, these separate moments swirl toward the one time, the one scene, the one moment when everything is suddenly magnified and important.

“The Fisherman,” already one of my favorite stories ever, begins this way: “In the northcountry, if you have an abstract turn of mind, you tend to measure the approach of winter by the sun” (43). Later, Banks contrasts this, saying “Or, on the other hand, you might measure the approach of winter by the ice, which seems a more direct, less abstract and mathematical way of going about it” (43). Regardless of how you measure it, winter comes - gradually then all of a sudden.

Merle Ring, the title character of “The Fisherman,” chooses to examine the ice, “reading its depth, clarity, hardness, and extension the way you’d examine a calendar” (44). He is an ice-fisherman. His ice-house, once the ice is feet thick and sturdy, is his refuge against time. Only winning the state lottery interrupts his timeless months spent on the ice-unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.

Once news of his luck reaches his neighbors in the trailer park, they pop into his ice-house uninvited, asking for money or giving unsolicited advice. These interruptions become the way the story measures time. Also like time, they advance, becoming more and more insistent, until there is no more privacy for “The Fisherman.” I won’t ruin the story’s ending, but I can tell you that it ends, like the man who lost all his money, gradually then all of a sudden.

Russell Banks is the Presidential Lecturer for the 2008 UND Writers Conference, and will read Friday, March 28, at 8pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom.

-Evan Nelson is a Masters student in the Dept. of English at UND

Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller’s debut book, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood,” was a New York Times Notable Book, the Booksense Best Non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002. Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin Press) won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. Fuller has also written extensively for such magazines as The New Yorker and National Geographic.

Fuller grew up in Rhodesia in the 1970s, where her family became increasingly absorbed by that country’s intensifying bloody struggle for independence. The Fullers farmed close enough to Mozambique that they could hear the border landmines going off when people or animals stood on them, and both her parents joined up to fight against the liberation army - her father as a soldier and her mother as a Police Reservist. Fuller’s experience of that war has informed all of her books which are, at heart, anti-war stories.

But they are also love stories: “People think the book is a love letter to Africa,” Fuller has said of her debut memoir, “but really it is a love letter to my mother--a fiercely glamorous, hard-drinking woman capable of terrifying and sometimes racist madness and equally terrifying compassion, and a woman whose madness was fueled by the death of three of her children.”

Watching the celebratory atmosphere in the aftermath of independence gradually--and then precipitously--turn into the horror of Mugabe’s one-man attempt to take a country to the grave with him has also informed Fuller’s work. While she has not written anything overtly political, she says that everything we do is political from the decision we make to wake up in the morning to the clothes we put on our bodies to the words we have the courage to speak.

“Africa is a great teacher,” she has explained. “We’re not a good example of much, but we’re a terrible warning of power run amok and of the long, high price of oppression.”

Alexandra Fuller will read on Wednesday, March 26, at 8pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom at UND.

-Dr. Heidi Czerwiec is Assistant Professor of English and Co-Director of the Writers Conference at UND.

Junot Diaz

Junot Díaz first connected with a mass audience in 1996, when his collection of linked stories, “Drown,” was published to much acclaim and became a best seller. Born in Santo Domingo and raised near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Díaz shapes his experience as a Dominican immigrant into stories that bring cultural alienation to the forefront of American consciousness.

In 2007 Díaz published his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has been highly praised by both the literary and mainstream presses. Like Drown, Díaz’s novel keeps one foot in New Jersey and the other in the Dominican Republic. Oscar Wao is the particular yet panoramic story of “GhettoNerd” Oscar de León, his family, and their curse, the dreaded fukú.

Oscar is a hopeless romantic who can’t get a girlfriend, a sci-fi loving, Tolkein-reading, genre-fiction-writing social outcast--a walking contradiction of everything a Dominican male is supposed to be. Throughout his desperate search for love, Oscar never compromises the “nerdiness” that makes him who he is, just as Díaz never wavers in his vivid, unapologetically voice-driven style.

Oscar’s story is told through the perspective of Yunior, a ladies’ man with literary aspirations who courts Oscar’s strong yet troubled sister, Lola. According to Yunior, language itself is the zafa, or the cure for fukú: “Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell.”

Although Yunior’s character remains in the background, his voice, a deliciously readable mixture of English and Spanish dialects, slang, profanity, and pop-culture references, is the most prominent feature of the book. Díaz pushes the boundaries of language to send Oscar back to his home country and to the past of his fierce mother, Belicia, in this equally fierce exploration of history, cruelty, identity, and above all, love.

Junot Díaz will give a reading of his work at the UND Writers Conference on Thursday, March 27, at 4 pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom.

-Jennifer Groucutt is a doctoral student in the Dept. of English at UND

Alice Fulton

In her 1999 essay collection Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, Alice Fulton writes that “after years of circumlocution, perhaps it’s time to admit that, yes, poems are about something.”

In the context of the essay, this statement challenges the conventional wisdom among many poets that the content of a poem is less important than its form.

In practice, Fulton has created a poetic style that is remarkably “about things,” in the sense that her poems explore their overt subject matter deeply and uphold their convictions with rigor.

Cascade Experiment, a new selection of poems culled from her previous five books of poetry, amply demonstrates not only Fulton’s broad range of interests but also her continual and evolving sense of how to use the most seemingly insignificant details to illuminate the nuances of difficult moral ideas.

In one of her early poems, Fulton writes, “You’ve seen kids on Independence Day, waving / sparklers to sketch their initials on the night? / Just so, I’d like to leave a residue / of slash and glide, a trace- / form on the riled air.”

Heavily influenced by Emily Dickinson, over the course of thirty years writing poetry, Fulton has written on every topic available to her, written smartly and beautifully, and has left her name etched, burning and bright, into the air of contemporary poetry.

Her honors are numerous, and have been awarded to both her poetry and fiction, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for poetry, given by the Library of Congress. She currently teaches at Cornell University.

Alice Fulton will give a reading at the UND Writers Conference on Thursday, March 27, at 8pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom.

-Thom Caraway is a Doctoral student in the Dept. of English at UND

Peter Kuper

Commenting upon Peter Kuper’s graphic novel adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the New York Times said “The ride from book to comic can be bumpy. Kuper navigates the transition with precision.”

Creating a narrative in a graphic format is a complicated act in which an artist must balance dialogue and image in a finite space. Each image is in essence a snapshot of a moment and not only must be symbolically meaningful on its own, but must flow coherently from what came before and to what follows. Within any page, an image’s size, scope, color and dialogue are all factors with which a talented artist uses to weave a narrative together.

Kuper illustrates his skill in moments such as the sequence of scenes where Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself changed and despite a series of eight speechless images, a sense of the character’s frenzied panic is palpable.

Kuper has spent almost thirty years honing his craft. Through such publications as the politically conscious artist’s forum, World War 3 Illustrated, which he co-founded in 1980, to being the man behind the scenes of Mad Magazine’s long running Spy vs. Spy since 1997, and the creation of his own graphic autobiography, Stop Forgetting to Remember, he has distinguished himself as a major figure within the genre of graphic literature.

Of the numerous accomplishments that he has achieved, it is WW3 Illustrated that serves as one of the greatest contributions to the genre. The publication was created to be an open forum for artists to publish uncensored political commentaries of the world, and particularly the reality of the effects of war. It has served as an artistic, critical representation of our cultural history for the better part of three decades, commenting upon political figures both intra and internationally, multiple wars, race relations, and 9/11.

Peter Kuper will give a presentation at the UND Writers Conference on Wednesday, March 26 at 4pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom.

-Ronald Hoff is a Masters student in the Dept. of English at UND.

Sir Salman Rushdie

Sir Salman Rushie is one of the most successful, controversial, and celebrated writers of our time, the author of such international bestsellers as Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses.

Sir Salman, whose life has been a constant displacement--from Kashmir, to India, to Pakistan, to Britain, and to numerous safehouses during the ten years of the fatwa--reflects this displacement in the compelling characters that inhabit his novels.

Born at midnight on the date of India’s independence, Saleem, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, is displaced not only from his home, but from history and memory: “Please believe that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically. . .my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, . . .has started coming apart at the seams.” “[I]t is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes. . . .

“ Blown from an airplane explosion, the antagonists of The Satanic Verses are suspended between past and present, dream and reality, religious fervor and apostasy: “[T]he two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall. Up there in air-space, . . .most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible - “

Rushdie addresses this fragmentation in his essay, “Imaginary Homelands”: It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss. . .[but] our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities.

In Rushdie’s most recent novel, the ambassador’s daughter, India, knows neither India nor her mother: “Her mother had been Kashmiri, and was lost to her, like paradise, like Kashmir, in a time before memory.” Her father’s assassin, Noman Noman, takes the alias Shalimar the Clown, from the famous Kashmiri gardens now as lost as Kashmir, or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”

A Conversation with Salman Rushdie will be held on Tuesday, March 25, at 7pm at the Chester Fritz Auditorium as part of the UND Writers Conference and the Great Conversations Series.

-Dr. Heidi Czerwiec is Assistant Professor of English and Co-Director of the Writers Conference at UND.