Last Saturday, June 27, 2015, I had the great honor of presenting the commencement address at the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program’s graduation ceremony. Congratulations again to all the graduates. I followed a beautiful, inspiring student address on fame and work by poet Peter Boisvert.
For the next ten days I’ll be in residence at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program, located in Forest Grove, Oregon, which is as wonderful and grove-ish as it sounds. Look at this faculty. I’m also honored to be delivering the commencement address at graduation.
Today I’ll be talking with Doug Storm of WFHB’s Interchange, out of Bloomington, Indiana, about my New Yorker Page-Turner essay on Guantánamo Diary and American slave narratives. The program begins at 6p EST; my segment begins at 6:30. This post will be updated with the episode once it’s been archived.
UPDATE: Link to the show can be found here.
Following on my Guantánamo Diary essay at the Virginia Quarterly Review, this week the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog ran an essay from me that finds a damning generic touchstone for Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s book in the American slave narrative.
Here’s one moment from the piece:
While the scope and duration of American slavery dwarf those of the C.I.A. detainment program, and some, I'm sure, would rather not see the two compared at all, reading Slahi's book in light of the slave narrative brought to mind a phrase from J.M. Coetzee's “Elizabeth Costello”: “Degrees of obsentiy.”
I have a new review essay in the Spring issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. The whole issue is about food, and my piece, “Forced Feeding,” is about the role of Ensure nutrition shakes in torture.
Here’s a snippet:
I can’t tell how appropriate it is that a few weeks spent reading about torture calls to mind the way my stepfather died and how we fed him in the end. But the effect of the memory is sympathy. And thinking back to a death you know strikes me as a natural response to reading the details of torture, if only because torture exposes the likeness, the porousness, between death and life.
Last fall, the Coucil for Wisconsin Writers asked me to judge the 2014 Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award. Winners were announced last week. John Hildebrand won for his beautiful book of essays, The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac (Wisconsin Historical Society Press). The Honorable Mention was Tom Pamperin’s Jagular Goes Everywhere: (mis) Adventures in a $300 Sailboat (Cedar Street Press). Congratulations to the writers!
I’m pleased to announce that on July 14, 2015, Beacon Press is releasing the paperback of Light Without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College.
Thursday, April 2, I’ll be participating in a one-day public event at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study: “David Foster Wallace and the Ethics of Writing.” At 6 pm, I’ll be moderating a panel featuring Wallace biographer D.T. Max and David Lipsky, author of Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.
The day will also feature readings, talks, and other panels with Maria Bustillos, Paul Elie, Matthew Sitman, Samuel Cohen, Kevin Timpe, NYU’s Greg Erickson, and a host of students. Closing the event will be an excerpt from A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN, conceived and directed by Daniel Fish.
For more information and to RSVP, please visit here.
Big news this week about the subject of my book Light without Fire. After a process that takes years, Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, has just been recognized as the first accreditied Muslim college in the United States. The school’s president, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, made this statement after recieving the good news:
“Five years ago, we introduced an undergraduate liberal arts program inspired by the idea of restoring the holistic education that had been offered in the great teaching centers of Islamic civilization. Today, Zaytuna’s accreditation roots this vision in a reality recognized within American higher education. It gives our community its first accredited academic address in the United States. And we hope, God willing, that there will be more such Muslim colleges and universities to come.”
I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations.
Monday, February 2, from 6-8 pm, join me for a public conversation with Leslie Jamison (Empathy Exams), Jen Percy (Demon Camp), and Ben Ratliff (Coltrane): “Reporting Pain,” sponsored by NYU Journalism’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program. We’ll talk about the complexities of writing about the suffering of others—trauma, illness, violence, poverty—in various reportorial modes: journalistic, critical, essayistic. We’ll discuss the intricacies of journalist-subject relationships, the boundaries of privacy, and the dilemma of subjectivity.
7th Floor Commons