By early 2003, Malek was unable to reconcile the values of civil rights with the policies of the Bush Justice Department and the government’s response to 9/11. She left the Justice Department on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, ultimately to pursue a career as an author and journalist, another venture in which she could lend her voice to the cause of social justice.

Malek’s first book, A Country Called Amreeka (Free Press 2009), retold U.S. history through the stories of Arab-Americans, thereby offering them a place in a historical narrative that had not previously acknowledged them.

Malek’s second book, Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, published earlier this month by the McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series, collects the oral histories of U.S. citizens subjected to post-9/11 injustices. The book’s narratives document the xenophobia and Islamophobia that rose up in the wake of 9/11, and the federal government’s unjust treatment of individuals on account of their race, ethnicity, or religious beliefs.

Malek has written that United States is a mosaic, but that we have excluded certain groups from the picture. “Filling in some of the missing tiles from the American mosaic is what I seek to do in my work and with this book,” Malek writes in the introduction to Patriot Acts.

I met with Malek in Washington, D.C., at a Dupont Circle coffee shop, on a rainy early evening in late August after the earthquake but before the arrival of Hurricane Irene. She is quick, funny, soft-spoken and kind. She is also intensely curious. When my Iphone’s voice memo recorder wasn’t running, she spent practically every minute of our meeting asking questions, and she even slipped some into the interview itself.

We were also joined by my friend Lucia Graves, a journalist in Washington.

 ***

The Rumpus:  So, holy smoke, we had an earthquake.

Alia Malek:  Yeah I know, right?

Rumpus:  Where were you for that?

Malek:  On my bed, working on an assignment. I was working on my laptop, and my bed started to rattle, and I thought, “Is the floor right beneath my bed caving in?” And then, as a New Yorker, my first thought was, “but the subway doesn’t pass underneath here.”

Then I saw the walls shake, and I heard stuff falling off bookshelves, and the chandelier downstairs was rattling, and I thought, “How are we having an earthquake? This is not California.”

Then I thought, “Door frame. Run into the door frame.” But when I got there I thought, “This doesn’t actually feel any safer.”

[pause]

Malek:  The environment is so screwed.

Rumpus: Any plans for the hurricane?

Malek:  I know, earthquake on Tuesday, hurricane this weekend. It’s like the END OF DAYS. I can’t believe it.

Rumpus:  So tell us how the Voice of Witness book came about.

Malek:  After A Country Called Amreeka, I was thinking, “OK, what is the next book going to be about? And I was taking freelance assignments, because when I’m starting to explore what comes next, out of that come little freelance pieces, although I’m always thinking about something in longer narrative form.

Rumpus:  And you said Dave Eggers contacted you.

Malek:  Dave Eggers asked me to participate in a conference call. And I said, “OK.” I was on the phone with him, you know, multi-tasking, and he said, “I want to do this book on post-9/11 injustices, oral histories.”

And I said, “Yeah, that’s great. You should totally do that.”

And he said, “I’m kind of thinking you should edit it.”

And I said, “What?”

So that’s the second book. And that’s why I’m back in the States for two months, to promote it. I’m at my parents’ house until the tour starts on Tuesday. But I haven’t seen the book yet. You said you were able to find it?

Rumpus:  I’ve got a copy.

Malek:  Can I see it?

Malek:  [Examining book.] It’s cool. It’s fantastic.

[Pause.]

Malek:  How do you guys feel about the title?

Lucia Graves:  I like the title. I think it’s poetic.

Rumpus:  Your first book was about Arab-Americans, but this book is about a larger group.

Malek:  This book is about a much bigger group of people. I mean, let’s just go through the Table of Contents . . . Adama is West African. Talat is Pakistani. Rima is Palestinian. Gurwinder is Indian. Khaled is Lebanese. Amir is Black American. Rana Sohdi is Sikh, so he’s Indian. Hani is half-Indian half-Pakistani. Zak is a white guy. Then it goes Pakistani, Egyptian, Pakistani, Colombian, Indian, Iraqi, white guy.

So the book is about more than just Arabs, and the people affected by the crackdown on civil rights and civil liberties are not just Arabs.

Rumpus:  There’s a term to describe these communities . . .

Malek:  AMEMSA. It stands for Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian.

But the thing to keep in mind is that the darker elements of the war on terror don’t victimize only those people. I mean, Nick George, he’s white, and he ends up being arrested because he’s going through airport security with Arabic flash cards. He’s studying Arabic, and TSA gets its panties in a bunch over it.

So yes, the immediate impact group is disproportionately from the AMEMSA communities, but not only, and then I think the country as a whole really suffers from this behavior.

You know, Dick Cheney was just on television today, still defending waterboarding. I don’t think he realizes how bad that is, that it doesn’t just impact the “bad guys,” that it really dehumanizes us.

Rumpus:  All of us.

Malek:  Yeah. When we traffic in that kind of behavior, it’s not the country the founding fathers envisioned, and I think it also dehumanizes us.

When I lived in the West Bank Gaza, obviously my first sympathies are with the Palestinians. But every time I saw that 18 year-old Israeli soldier dehumanizing someone else, I thought, that person’s soul is dying a little bit right there.

Rumpus:  Why do you think this backlash takes place? I mean, in law school everyone reads Korematsu v. United States. . .*

* Korematsu v. United States, a case in the United States Supreme Court, challenged the United States’ internment of Japanese-Americans in domestic concentration camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Supreme Court upheld Fred Korematsu’s detention, but in 1983 his conviction was overturned by a federal court on the basis of newly-disclosed government documents revealing there had never been any military necessity for the camps.

Malek:  Yeah, I wanted Karen [Korematsu, Fred Korematsu’s daughter] to be the foreward writer.

Rumpus:  That was your idea?

Malek:  [Laughing.] Yeah, couldn’t you tell? But doesn’t it make perfect sense?

Rumpus:  She was the perfect choice because that’s the lesson we should have learned.

Malek:  I often tell this story when I give the Amreeka book talk: I was at DOJ, in the Civil Rights Division, after 9/11, and one of my friends in the Criminal Division, a Haitian-American attorney, told me, outside the building, “You are not going to believe what they are talking about.” He said, “We were brainstorming around the table, and some of these folks threw out the idea of de-naturalizing all Arab-American citizens.” You know, taking away their citizenship.

So as far as internment camps go, I don’t think we were all that far away, really.

Rumpus:  So, again, why does that happen?

Malek:  You mean why do we scapegoat?

Rumpus:  Yeah.

Malek:  I think other countries are not as obsessed with race as the United States. We have this tendency to racialize the enemy, to think in those terms. We inquire into who committed this act, and then people of the same race or ethnicity become collectively guilty. We have a history of assigning collective guilt, and of thinking of people of color in collectives.

Rumpus:  In many of the narratives in Patriot Acts, what seems to drive the injustice is that people in authority assume their own inability to deal with people from other cultures. They treat them in brutal ways because they don’t know how to interact with them as human beings.

Malek:  Well, listen, I think in the United States we perpetuate this false idea of what America looks like. I’ve been watching TV abroad, and I’ve been thinking, “Wow, we really don’t live like Gossip Girl.” But Gossip Girl is what America looks like on TV.

Or 90210. If you’ve been to Beverly Hills you know it’s all Persian. But there were never any Iranian characters on 90210.

But our narratives of contemporary America don’t include portrayals of these people. The only time we check-in with Arab-American communities, for example, is in the wake of a terrorist attack. Or when we want to do the Arab-American story.

But Arabs came through Ellis Island at the same time as Italians and Greeks and Eastern Europeans, people we think of naturally as Americans, that we would never doubt as having a place as real Americans.

So I just think we have a false idea of our history and of contemporary America.

Rumpus:  Do you think cultural difference has a tendency to take over our narratives?

Malek: Definitely. There’s a reporter at the New York Times, for example, who attaches so much significance to things that just are not significant. In one of her pieces, for example, she has her subjects always saying, “Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah,” which is “God willing, God willing, God willing.” And she made the piece all about Allah, and the importance of religion.

I had the opportunity to tell her, “Americans are always saying ‘My God, my God, my God,’ or ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ And what if someone from the outside came and said, ‘You know, they are always invoking the name of their God’”?

[Laughter.]

Malek:  You know? I say “Jesus” all the time, but I’m not consciously invoking the name of the “Messiah.”

Rumpus:  That’s funny.

Malek:  Or the veil. The veil takes on all this significance for people that . . .

Rumpus:  I know two women who wear the veil, and for both of them it’s not a big deal. It’s like you’re blind to your own cultural signifiers, but then you look at someone else, and you give something like the veil all this weight that it doesn’t necessarily deserve.

Malek:  And we all do that. And my question to that reporter that day was not, “Why do you have these biases and lenses?” Because we all do. My question was how are you consciously checking yourself?

Because I do it, too, even as an Arab-American. I just came back from Cairo, and I have to check myself sometimes. Or: I’m an East Coaster. And when I go to the “heartland,” it’s tempting to think, “They have a pickup truck, and a shotgun, . . .”  [laughing.] But it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, you know what I’m saying?

Rumpus:  It seems that, with Muslim-Americans or Arab-Americans, there’s a prescribed or constructed narrative that the journalism is feeding into.

Malek:  Yes, I think so.

Rumpus:  Does your journalism work against that dominant narrative? Against that grain?

Malek:  Well, yes, it’s playing in that sandbox. Because it’s acknowledging those gaps. But, for example, I think most people think Arab-Americans came here after ‘65, after the liberalization of immigration law. But Arabs started coming over here in the late 1800’s. My first book sort of tried to correct for that.

And I think most people think most Arab-Americans are Muslim, but the majority are actually Christian. The book tried to correct that as well.

Rumpus:  It can be a problem on the Left, too. That we fetishize these cultural differences, make them the most important thing.

Malek:  You have to crawl before you can walk. I think the fact is that you have to re-insert — this is something I’ve said before — contemporary America is a mosaic. And there are a lot of little pieces that are missing. So the picture is not entirely clear. You have to re-insert those pieces, and you have to correct the idea that American was a country of X,Y, and Z people, when it was really a country of A-to-Z people. Who we understand ourselves to be and what we understand our history to be has to be corrected first.

And then maybe we can move past that, and I can just be a chick from Baltimore, along with all the other things that I am.

Rumpus:   And people won’t characterize you by your –

Malek:  But we are not past race. And in the United States today, Islam has been racialized. You know, Islam is practiced by blonde people, by Black people, by all kinds of people. But if you say “Muslim,” we think, “brown, kind of swarthy” — we already have a racialized type to go with that.

The Rumpus:  In Patriot Acts, a lot of the narratives are about Americans not being treated as Americans. Like Adama Bah, she says, “I didn’t know I wasn’t an American until I was sixteen and in handcuffs.”

Malek:  She meant it literally.

Rumpus:  That’s true. Well, you kind of grimaced when I quoted her. Why were you reacting that way?

Malek:  Because that’s what you don’t want to see happening.

Rumpus:  Right. It’s painful.

Malek:  My vision of the United States is that all these people belong. I think we’re a better country for having them, for welcoming them.

What makes the United States so special is that, from its inception, it was ready — even if it did it badly at points — to absorb new peoples. Without sanitizing the US history of what happened to the Native Americans or how African Americans were brought here as slaves, many of us are here in the U.S. because we chose to be here, and to join in creating American society. Culture here feels more dynamic than anywhere else because we are all active participants in its creation.

And that vision? That place? It can be amazing.

Take New York. I love that I interact with so many people, and everyone’s a New Yorker but everyone’s brought a little piece of somewhere else. And look what it’s created! Is New York not one of the greatest cities in the world? I am biased, of course, because I love New York.

I just feel the U.S. has a desire, all of a sudden, to homogenize. But I think that, whether it’s your stock portfolio or genetics, diversity is a wonderful thing.

Graves:  You said “all of a sudden.” Was there a turning point?

Malek:  In the U.S.?  I feel like nativism comes and goes, but I think since 9/11 . . .

You know, I wrote this piece for Granta, about looking back on the decade. And it was sort of like the perfect storm. The 2003 recession, and now the financial place that we’re in. We look a lot like we did in the early 1900’s. The 1920’s nativist rise of this idea, with the xenophobia, this idea that there’s a “pure” America, which is a myth. The 90’s didn’t feel like that. In the 80’s I was more of a kid. But the 90’s didn’t feel like that.

Graves:  So it’s a fear thing.

Malek:  I think part of it is fear. Part of it is we’re not good at accepting blame. We’re always lashing out when things go bad. I think homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, are all three sides of the same three-sided coin. And the struggle is define what America should look like.

But the U.S. is always changing, that’s the thing. Some people want to impose a single idea on America, but America has always gone through constant change, much more I think than other countries. And change is a fantastic thing.

So yeah, I don’t even know what the question was anymore.

[Laughter.]

I always find it funny being on this side of the recorder.

Rumpus:  What are your hopes for Patriot Acts?

Malek:  My hopes for Patriot Acts are, first, that the experience for the narrators was empowering and cathartic, if catharsis was something they were seeking. I hope readers will be left with a complete picture of the post 9/11 decade, and that the book piques their curiosity to learn more about the communities impacted by this decade, whose stories are otherwise undercovered. And if I can be greedy, I’d like to hope some folks decide they can play a role in what the next decade looks like, and work to make it more humane, more just, and more fair.

Rumpus:  What comes next, after the book tour?

Malek:  I’m already researching my next book. So that means I’m also doing some freelance work, because I’m over there, in the Middle East, and it’s kind of hard not to work when you’re there.

Rumpus:  Do you know what the next book will be about?

Malek:  I don’t know yet. It’s going to be about the Middle East, and the moment that it’s living, but it’s all about deciding how to tell the story. Because history is happening in the moment, but I’m also trying to work in the richness of a long history, to put today’s moment in perspective. So I don’t know yet. I’m still working, seeing how good my access is going to be, what the story is.

Rumpus: Alia Malek, thank you for your time!

Malek:  Thank you!

***

Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, edited by Alia Malek, is the latest book in the McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series.

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“Yeah, Wendell, but why the hell Georgia?” Nina wants to know.

“I could only offer scattered answers,” Steavenson writes. “A lonely epiphany watching the Vltava, black ink at night, flow beneath me, a strange affection for concrete Khrushchev housing blocks, rumours of wine and orange trees, milk and honey . . . . These triggers were half-identifiable (Nina would nod, nonplussed but kindly) but they belied a reservoir sunk deep out of explanation. To be honest, this was my own sinkwell. Who knows from where it sprang; spirit, soul or only runaway.

In any case, I got on a plane.”

It would be enough that Stories I Stole is, throughout, just this direct, captivating, beautiful, and strange. But about halfway through you realize Steavenson is doing more than playfully bending your ear, that she is artfully constructing an epic tale; in her case a story of wanderlust, romance, cigarettes, and cold feet, all of it salted with an abundance of local color. It’s like The Year of Living Dangerously except the journalist-hero is a woman, the setting is a former Soviet republic, and all of the stories are true. Maybe it is even better than The Year of Living Dangerously.

Steavenson is not just a great writer; she also knows how to tell a story. In the sketch that prefaces the collection, for example, she describes a visit to a mansion outside Tblisi and its collection of historical Stalin kitsch. “I was with Thomas,” she writes; and then she describes how, in a back room lit only by a dimming pencil torch, she and Thomas intertwined fingers at the sight of Stalin’s corpse, “laid out in an open coffin, his chest heaped with dusty plastic carnations.”

“All religions are weird,” Steavenson tells Thomas as they are leaving. “It’s their job to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. We should go home and drink a glass of wine and make love and realize that corporeal is more important.”

And that is all we get about Thomas. No explanation of who he might be, or how he fits into Steavenson’s life, just the image of his hand in hers, and the couple wandering off to recover from their experience of the macabre. Like Hemingway, Steavenson writes her stories through their essential information only. The rest she holds back, and that withholding gives her stories their power and their art. When, about halfway through the book, Thomas re-enters the narrative and things go haywire, the story of what Steavenson endures for him is so powerful because, in the beginning, she made her tale so spare.

There are other wonders in Stories I Stole, but I will mention just one more, involving Steavenson’s tribute to her favorite Georgian novel, Ali and Nino.

“All the time I was trying to steal stories for my collection,” she writes, “anecdotes and incidents and roundabout tales of Caucasus extremes and write them down, this book, an ordinary paperback with a dull, ugly green cover . . . sat beside my bed, lay in my bed, underlined and thumbed and ragged with reference, reproving me with perfection.”

Ali and Nino is a Baku love story between an Azeri boy and a Georgian girl, but for Steavenson it doubles as a guide to Georgia’s history and culture. “How could it be,” she asks of the novel’s characters, stories, and observations about the pre-Revolution Caucasus, “that eighty years later it was all exactly true?”

She really loves this book: “Ali and Nino was our guide and our touchstone, beautifully written; gem-like, compact, full of perfect sentences, rich but never verbose. The story is epic; but it is the details that clutter up the background — the wizened wise Azeri cleric, Nino’s outrageously hospitable Georgian cousins, the soft-fat Armenian — the deft precision of observation that made it so funny. I could pick it up at random and read any paragraph and it would make me smile.”

Ali and Nino is a novel that doubles as a travel guide. In Stories I Stole, Steavenson has written, in reply to the epic she admires, a travel memoir that doubles as a novel. Fittingly, Steavenson’s praise of Kurban Said’s Georgian love story best describes her book, too: Beautifully written, gem-like, compact, full of perfect sentences, rich but never verbose. You can pick it up at random, read any paragraph, and it will make you smile.

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It was one of those chance encounters with a kindred spirit that makes AWP so great. It was also noisy and dark, and I was slightly buzzed on sweet tea vodka. Chris explained that he is a professional jazz musician just breaking into writing, and was about to release his newest album as a book of stories.

“You’re doing what?” I asked.

“Give me your e-mail,” he said. “I’ll send you a copy.”

Several weeks later I found Rest of the Story in my mailbox. It is a jazz CD packaged as a story collection. There is a drawing of a falling man on the cover, four beautifully illustrated short stories inside, and a hole drilled though the center of the book to accommodate the CD. In the acknowledgments, Tarry thanks his writing mentors Roy Kesey and Jim Shepard, and their inflfuence is evident in his work.

Chris and I talked over e-mail about the book, music and writing, and how great Roy Kesey and Jim Shepard are.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s start with the thing. What is it? A book? An album? It contains stories and drawings but it comes with a compact disc.

Chris Tarry: It’s an album first and foremost. The record label, Nineteen Eight Records, sees it as such, and I see it that way too. It doesn’t have an ISBN number. It’s a CD and is printed as such. I look at it like an album with super crazy liner notes. That said, it looks like a book, though slightly an odd shape and size. So, yeah, who knows. Maybe we have to come up with a new name for what this is. A Rook (record book)? Wow, that’s terrible.

Rumpus: There’s something about the size of it. It’s like an art object.

Tarry: Jeff Harrison, the designer, spent a long time messing with it. They were worried the hole in the middle of the book would make the paper left behind a little too brittle, so the whole thing kept getting widened (or so they tell me). Once I finally held the book in my hand, I was amazed at how well Jeff and everyone involved had nailed the size. I’m not sure if you’d agree, Sean, but for me, it feels like a CD and a book. It’s wide like a CD case, but a little taller. It doesn’t feel like a normal book in your hand. Plus, with the center of the thing missing and a CD in place of the paper that would normally be there, it’s very light. Kind of the weight of a standard CD case. So all this together made me very happy. It’s exactly what it was intended to be, a true “Rook” through and through.

Rumpus: I think we should also mention that there is a drawing of Inuit people. A more conventional approach might have been to try to land these stories in magazines. Why did you decide to make them part of this book? And how did the book come together?

Tarry: I love the Inuit! Well, actually, all of the stories have been published in various places. I knew I only had room for about four stories (the concept of having the hole drilled through the last 70 pages of the book to accommodate the CD was decided on very early in the design process) so I knew I had about 40 pages to work with. I actually have a real life-sized collection that I’m shopping around to various publishers, and a few of these stories are part of that, so I wanted this to be something clearly different than a collection.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the falling man. He looks like he could be in his early 30′s, he appears to have jumped out of a Piper Cub, and he’s falling toward a hillside town with gabled rooftops and a church steeple. His shoe has come off. Who is he, and how did he make the cover?

Tarry: The designer and illustrator for this project (Jeff Harrison and Kim Ridgewell from Rethink Canada) came up with Falling Man. He’s a loose take on the character Gary Needleman from my story “Jump” that is part of this small collection.

I think Kim showed Jeff and me one early version of Falling Man, we made a couple of comments, and then she finished him off from there. All the illustrations are basically what Kim came up with after reading the stories and listening to the music. I’m not entirely sure how Falling Man made the cover.

He actually appears in a number of places in and around the book. Almost in a “Where’s Waldo” kind of way. My favorite spot being on the back cover under the dust jacket, where he’s printed in beautiful blue-foil ink. This image on the back cover was something Jeff added at the last minute, and man, it was one of those wonderful eleventh-hour decisions.

Rumpus: He’s well hidden there because the back jacket flap folds so tightly under the CD inside the back cover. How did you end up working with Rethink Canada?

Tarry: I like the hidden quality of a lot of the artwork. I keep discovering new things every time I look at it. As far as Rethink, my brother works there, in Vancouver, and he introduced me to Jeff and Kim and everyone involved in the eventual production of this book/CD. It ended up being a team of about eight people in the end. Jeff blew my mind with the design concept and Kim did the same with the fantastic illustrations. I basically told them I wanted to marry my new jazz album (which has no words) with my short stories, and then sat back and waited to see what they came up with. I believe strongly in this hands-off approach. It’s important to let people do what they do, and I’ve found that this has yielded the most surprising and consistent artistic results, musically and otherwise, over the years.

Rumpus: How long have you been a musician? How did you get interested in writing stories?

Tarry: I started playing music (bass) professionally when I was seventeen. So, I’ve been making my living as a bass player for 23 years now. It’s a wonderful thing, to do what you love for a living. I really do consider it a gift.

I’ve been writing all my life, but never gave it much thought (doing it for real that is) until about 2008. Around that time, I wrote a little short story and it got published, success straight out of the gate, and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe it! So I thought, Wow, maybe I should pursue this.

A few years later, and after much less success at getting things published, I found a good teacher, one of my favorite writers and our mutual friend, Roy Kesey. From there I just started trying to learn all that I could about improving as a fiction writer. I wrote a novel and it almost sold, there was a lot of learning that went into that whole experience.

Then, a few short stories started to get picked up, and in 2010 I got accepted into the Breadloaf Writers Conference, which was a wonderful surprise. There I met the great Jim Shepard and he changed the way I thought about writing, forever. Breadloaf was a pivotal experience for me. Jim, along with continuing to study with Roy, opened me up to the possibilities of what a great story could do.

Rumpus: I know what every reader of this interview is thinking at this moment: What is the secret knowledge you learned from Jim Shepard that forever changed the way you think about writing? Will you spill any secrets by sharing it?

Tarry: Ha, well if I told you that . . . Actually, most of what Jim talks about can be found online in various places, in YouTube videos of post-reading question-and-answer-period type stuff. I urge everyone to head over there and find what they can find. His ideas on having the fiction provide operating instructions for the reader within the tentacles of a story was particularly eye opening for me.

Remember, I had never been in a high level workshop before. I’m a bass player, for christ sake, what do I know? Not much. I was squarely out of my element, so that could have had something to do with the whole transformative nature of Breadloaf for me. I kind of felt like I won the workshop lottery.

Rumpus: What was the most important thing you learned from him?

Tarry: For me, specifically, he taught me the value of “earning” the emotional weight in my stories. I’ve always been able to write funny. I come from funny. I know funny. And so does Jim, he’s one of the most hilarious guys I’ve ever met. One of the pieces I workshopped at Breadloaf was the story “Jump” that appears in Rest of the Story. I had a tendency in my writing back then to “riff funny” to the point of making my characters cartoonish. Funny, yes, believable, no. And then I’d ask my reader to make some huge emotional leap in the end, hit them upside the head with something heavy they were supposed to learn from the story. Jim said something very simple to me—What happens when we see a cartoon character get run over by a steam roller? We don’t give a shit, that’s what happens.

And it was like a light went on. I realized that funny works best when real life is earned. So now I concentrate on those things. Because in the end, if you can make funny and serious work together, like Jim can so well, you’ll hit it out of the park almost every time.

Rumpus: I know what you mean. Sometimes you have to push in the opposite direction of your gift.

Tarry: But lets not forget Roy Kesey. He is merciless with me as far as critiques go. It usually takes me a good two weeks to recover when I get his notes on a story. And that’s the way it should be. It’s a rare thing to nail a story right out of the gate. Roy gets down into the atoms of the stuff, and makes me look at everything. I’ve learned a lot about POV from him, language details, saying more with less. All such important things. In fact, I just completed a story about a fisherman in Newfoundland. I was all excited to send it to him until I found out he did an actual stint as a professional fisherman at some point in his life. Jesus, I thought, good luck on this one, Chris.

But Roy is like that, he’s studied a bit about everything. I feel like if I sent him a story on the Space Shuttle, he’d say something like: Well, when I flew the Space Shuttle, it wasn’t anything like this. You know it has wings, right?

Rumpus: Yeah, there’s something about having the capacity to be so generous and deeply critical at the same time, critical in the best sense. It’s like what George Saunders says about Zen Buddhism and holding two contradictory thoughts in your imagination simultaneously. (That’s also on YouTube, by the way.)

The Rumpus has been lately featuring the work of a number of musicians who have taken up writing. There’s Wesley Stace, for example, who is the musician John Wesley Harding, and Ted Wilson is apparently some kind of tuba and harpsichord player. Is there a connection between making music and writing stories? Do you find yourself drawing on your musical talents when you are writing?

Tarry: Wow, a tuba playing harpsichord player, now that is something I’d pay serious money to see.

It’s a great thing, I think, when anyone decides to start writing. But maybe musicians, the ones that compose anyway, have a bit of a head start. They’ve thought about structure, rhythm, and pacing. I truly believe that a good melodic line, even one without lyrics, has to tell a story. I think music and literature share that. The idea that some kind of narrative must be present, literally and harmonically, in order to reach the listener/reader. “Tell a story when you take a solo,” one of my teachers once told me, and I’ve never forgotten it.

I’ve talked a lot about how these two disciplines influence each other in my work. And I have to say, the most exciting part for me, and one I never saw coming, was the huge effect writing would have on the way I compose music. I’ve always had a bit of a knack for writing music, could kind of plink out tunes on the piano from a young age. So, in a sense, before writing came along, I’d honestly have to say that I was a lazy composer. I routinely took the easy way out. An okay melody here, a just good enough bridge section there.

I’ve been fortunate enough to play with some of the best musicians in the world, and they can make anything sound great, so my stuff was good enough, wonderful in their hands. But then writing came along. And this thing called revision. And good God I loved it, going back in, over and over something until it was as close to right as I could get it. I took that love for revision into my composing, and it changed everything. I would throw out whole sections, chord progressions, melodies. Things I would have kept in the past. I became relentless and the music became better for it.R

Rumpus: It’s been great talking to you, Chris. If Rumpus readers are not lucky enough to run into you in a bar, where can they get your Compact Book?

Tarry: Ah, Compact Book, I like it! It’s available directly through Nineteen-Eight Records.

Rumpus: Thanks so much, Chris.

Tarry: Thank you, Sean! It was great running into you during AWP in that crazy bar. Man, I just remembered, I had the greatest meatloaf at that place. Watching the Literary Gong Show and eating a huge plate of meatloaf, now that was surreal.

***

(For the record, Sean and Chris met at Madam’s Organ, a blues and new country bar on 18th Street in Washington, D.C., and it is true that the meatloaf there is very good.)

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Harlem’s past and present are the principal subjects of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ tender historical memoir Harlem is Nowhere. Rhodes-Pitts describes her life as a Texas native transplanted to Lenox Avenue, but Harlem and its history are her larger subjects. And while she has borrowed her title from Ralph Ellison’s 1948 landmark essay on Harlem’s confounding mixture of opportunity and alienation, a beautiful lament on the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s “Mo Better Blues” might also describe her work. Throughout her studious love letter to her adopted home, Rhodes-Pitt is singing the Harlem Blues.

Ellison’s landmark essay, which Harper’s published in 1964, and which appeared in Ellison’s collection Shadow and Act, was powered by two radical observations. The first concerned the vertiginous and almost incomprehensible nature of Harlem life in the 20th Century. Ellison described a class of refugees swept through a historical vortex that had no precedent. Merely by crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, Harlem’s African-Americans had traveled from slavery to the condition of industrial man, from folk sensibilities to modern urban culture, and from feudalism to freedom. Their transformational journey deposited them in a land of opportunity that was also a kind of modern Hell. Of the residents of Harlem Ellison wrote:

Ralph Ellison

Rejecting the second-class status assigned them, they feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions: Who am I, What am I, Why am I, and Where? Significantly, in Harlem the reply to the greeting, “How are you?” is very often, “Oh, man, I’m nowhere” — a phrase revealing an attitude so common that it has been reduced to a gesture, a seemingly trivial word.

Ellison’s second critical observation was that, contrary to the conventional wisdom of his day, the anxiety and alienation afflicting urban African-Americans in the North was a product of their condition rather than their character. (Isabel Wilkerson makes the same point in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.)

In retelling Harlem’s history through her discovery of her adopted home, Rhodes-Pitts seeks a timely return to Ellison’s concerns. Ellison wrote about Harlem in the mid-20th Century but it is now the 21st. We have elected our first African-American president, and we are told we live in a “post-racial” America. Harlem is even gentrifying. Rhodes-Pitts seems to want to know, in the face of all this, how much and in what ways Harlem has changed.

She tackles the question by reframing Ellison’s inquiry. Instead of “Who am I and Why?” her questions are “Where is home?” and “Will I ever get there?” Or, as she asks at one point, “Do the people of Harlem stand with forty years of wilderness stretched out in front of us, or is deliverance close at hand, the Exodus already at our backs?”

Her narrative about Harlem’s history, her own experience, and Harlem in the present day draws the possible responses these questions into a single pointed and incontrovertible observation: “It all comes down to a point that is as simple as it is terrible,” she writes. “It is a fact that closes in on itself, like the mythical serpent that devours its own tail: This is our land that we don’t own.”

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

In the final chapters of Harlem is Nowhere, Rhodes-Pitt joins a protest against a development that will, she writes, turn 125th Street into a valley of high-rise luxury apartment buildings; she attends the funeral of a longtime resident of her Lenox Avenue building; and she joins the African American Day parade, an annual celebration whose tragic conclusion will symbolize how far Harlem has, and has not yet, come.

I enjoyed walking at Rhodes-Pitts’ elbow as she discovered Harlem and taught herself its history. I enjoyed listening to her meditations on her life there. She writes as a new arrival to the neighborhood, as a young initiate to Harlem’s ways, which is the perfect narrative station from which to introduce the neighborhood and tell its history. The energy and urgency of the final chapters will sweep you up.

All travelers sing the blues. Ralph Ellison wrote that Harlem’s residents had taken an almost unimaginable journey across a short distance of space and time. As a result of their experience, they had difficulty finding themselves. More than fifty years later, Rhodes-Pitts has written a worthy companion to Ellison’s work. Its final pages find her marching in the African American Day parade, one with her fellow Harlem residents and at peace with who she is, traveling to, searching for, and determined to find her way home.

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My favorite poem in In Their Cups, A.J. Rathbun’s almost-pocket-sized anthology of drinking poems, is “Assumptions” by the Kansas poet Amy Fleury, and it starts like this:

Only the plain girls stay in this town
where the quiet is so violent
that sidewalks seethe and pitch,
where wind will chasten a face.

Beyond yawning gates,
the church spire punctures
pure sky and transgressions
are never forgiven.

In the next stanza we’ve wandered into a local tavern, where “The register rings to the rhythm / of guest checks pierced on a spindle / and the twitch of the driftwood clock” while outside “drivers pass through on their way / to Denver, Omaha, or some other / butter and eggs route.” “Whatever you believe about a place,” Fleury writes, “well, it’s going to be true.”

To anyone on friendly terms with the vast middle of America, Fleury’s imagery will ring familiar and true. It could have been written from my Wyoming hometown, where I saw guest checks pierced by spindles every day, and where, from the high prairie to the east of town, the semis on I-80 looked unnaturally small against the barren horizon. Even as they ran away from their own sound, you could see them fighting the wind.

Every reader of In Their Cups will, I expect, find something in it that lands close to home. There are ancient poems, rhyming poems, traditional poems, modern poems, poems that tell stories and poems that paint pictures, all of them written out of the malleable experience of tipping a glass. Rathbun’s approach to his theme is tied to the book’s design: It looks like it belongs at the cash register, next to “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea,” and those handbooks of outrageous foreign phrases you will never use. This is a book meant to bring poetry to the masses, in other words, and so Rathbun has thrown in something for every taste, if only to ensure that every reader will find something to love.

I think he’s chosen pretty well. Emily Dickinson’s wonderful poem “I taste a liquor never brewed,” is literally about getting drunk on nature. Richard Hugo has a gritty entry about a lakeside tavern burned to cinders (“Death of the Kapowsin Tavern”). In the strangely charming poem “Fragmentia: On Honorable Life,” by Emily Bedard, the poet watches as her life challenges a bartender to a duel (it doesn’t end well).

There are actually more than a few sly entries. “Poem 27″ by Cattulus has been translated by Ed Skoog into the hard-boiled language of the genre fiction detective. Here the ancient Roman poet delivers a modern hero’s gruff aside to a bartender. “Are you tending the bar, kid? Pour me the strong stuff,” he says, “and one for yourself. We’re going to need it.” In “Describe Divorce to Martinis,” Tod Marshall weaves together the images of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin to mine the tensions between youth and fading light and drinking’s joys and sorrows. “Ask the comedians where laughter ends up living after the split,” he writes, “the meaning of a pocketful of toothpicks and olives.”

There’s even a poem by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a sure sign Rathbun is throwing in the kitchen sink. The former Chief Justice’s entry is about lending out a punch bowl — that’s actually the title — but the shocker is (wait for it), that it’s pretty good. At the end of his days Holmes famously lamented, about his years on the bench, that he had spent his life on trifles. Maybe he should have written more poetry. (I can’t resist adding this thought experiment for those reading at home: Try imagining Chief Justice John Roberts writing a poem. Now, as a second step, try to imagine his poem being any good. At all.)

Of course, not every poem in In Their Cups will suit every taste; that’s the other side of the coin Rathbun is polishing. My patience, for example, was tested by the 10-page, 37-stanza ode to the gin-twist. And a few of the poems struck me as more ambitious than anything else.

I was going to wrap up my review here, hopefully with some clever line that tied everything together, but I am compelled, for reasons you will soon understand, to add a note about the editor of this anthology, A.J. Rathbun.

I won’t claim that editing an anthology of drinking poems is the most idiosyncratic undertaking, but reading this anthology did nudge my curiosity about Rathbun. After all, you don’t often read an author bio that lists cookbook credits and appearances on Martha Stewart’s Sirius radio show next to publications in Crazy Horse, Gulf Coast, and ZYZZYVA. Who is this Rathbun, I wondered, who has one foot in the indie lit scene and the other planted so firmly in the star-crossed world of popular cuisine?

Alas, for all of the 40 minutes of internet searching I devoted to this question, Rathbun remained an enigma. I did learn that he hails from Seattle, where he writes and produces small films about cocktails. From the photos on his blogs, it appears that he may actually have a basement tiki bar. He keeps two blogs, “Spiked Punch” and “Six Months in Italy.” They are, respectively, about cocktails and Rathbun’s life in Seattle, and cocktails and his life in Tuscany. From this we can only conclude that Rathbun recently moved to Tuscany, or that he travels too much, or that there are two of him.

In my fondest imaginings, Rathbun and his wife are living out the Frances Mayes memoir, “Under the Tuscan Sun,” although without the failed past marriage and the money-pit country estate.

I had almost concluded I would come no closer to understanding Rathbun when I found this — a short film of his called “The Jogger.” It is set in a sleepy Seattle neighborhood and features a bowling ball and the soundtrack from Chariots of Fire. You need to watch this film. It captures something beautiful about our intrepid anthology editor that can’t be said in words:

I have watched this 59-second film more than 20 times. It is, itself, a kind of poem. There is something primitive and elusive in it. Eve, yes, something profound, although I say what. Watching it is like listening to an oracle, or trying to comprehend an ancient myth. Maybe you only need a copy of In Their Cups if your library has a drinking section, or you haven’t finished your holiday shopping, or you become possessed to want to sample 52 widely varied poems about recreational drinking. I don’t know how well A.J.Rathbun’s anthology will do in stores, but I hope he keeps publishing small books like this one, for he is clearly some of kind of eccentric, wacky genius.

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“Pardon me,” the stranger says, “but I couldn’t help overhearing. Did you say that Jesus never existed?”

When Berlioz answers, and further confirms that he and Homeless, along with most of Russia, don’t believe in God, the foreigner is delighted.

“Oh, how lovely!” he cries, and then he swivels his head and shakes Berlioz’s hand.

“Allow me to thank you with all my heart!”

So begins Mikhail Bulgakov’s charming and subversive masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. The shimmering foreigner, it turns out, is the Devil, and he’s just discovered the perfect city in which to wreak havoc and settle some scores, the oldest of which took place in ancient Jerusalem, almost 2,000 years before, and involved the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and a thief he once condemned to hang from a cross.

Having found a city that seems perfect for them, the Devil and his henchmen — an ex-choirmaster with checkered pants and a cracked pince-nez, and a coal-black tomcat who walks upright on his hind legs — plunge Moscow into chaos. They burn down the meeting house of Moscow’s foremost literary society. They perform a series of enchanting and horrifying black magic shows at the Variety Theater. The poor poet Homeless is confined to a mental hospital with the Master, a novelist tortured into insanity by his critics. The Master’s lover, Margarita, who only wants to release her beloved from his torment, accepts the Devil’s invitation to become a witch and, in my favorite episode, slathers her body with a magic potion so she can fly naked and invisible on a broomstick over the rooftops of Moscow.

All of this — and so much more in the novel — is amazing, but the true genius of The Master and Margarita lies in the larger stories it tells. For Bulgakov’s enchanting love story, and his winning satire of politics and art, is also the brilliant sequel to the greatest story ever told. That story, as Bulgakov would tell it, concerns a thief who was the son of God, and who was once led into the colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great, his hands bound behind his back, to be sentenced by an equestrian who wore a white cloak with a blood-red lining, was the cruel fifth procurator of Judea and the son of the astrologer-king, and has never, in all of history, been forgiven for his crime.

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The characters in Dostoevsky are always breaking out in histrionics. They bustle about, shake their fists, and call each other scoundrels. They “fly” to wherever they are going and “fly at” each other when they get there. “What on earth does it mean to ‘fly at’ somebody?” David Foster Wallace once asked, in an exasperated footnote in his essay on Joseph Frank’s literary biography of the Russian novelist.

The weirdness in Dostoevsky (Wallace also called Notes from Underground “one weird little book”) belongs to the larger strain of absurdity in Russian letters. In Gogol’s famous short story, a collegiate assessor’s nose roams St. Petersburg disguised as a state councilor. That would be odd enough, but Gogol keeps interrupting himself to address the reader. “This all dissolved into mist, and we don’t know what happened next,” he says, dropping one narrative thread to pick up another. “The Nose” ends with Gogol intruding again to explain that, upon reflection, his story is too implausible to be true. Then he takes that back, too. If you add one thing, he points out, and then another, and then a third… “Say what you like,” he concludes, “but such incidents really do happen in the world.” Clearly, we aren’t supposed to know what to think.

In Russian literature there are ten Gogols for every Checkhov. In Oblomov, the main character spends the first third of the novel in bed. The Master and Margarita is about the Devil’s surprise visit to Moscow and the fantastical havoc that ensues. Keith Gessen and Anna Summers recently translated a collection of stories by the famed Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, whose characters are always crossing into and back from the shadow world. In one story, a woman shares a seaside mansion with Poseidon’s widow and her son, who spends his days scavenging the ocean floor.

So it’s perfect that the stories in The Possessed, Elif Batuman’s collection of essays about her graduate studies in Russian literature, are so quirky and funny and strange. The content of Batuman’s book couldn’t be better married to its style. The Possessed is literary criticism as smart comedy writing; it is Gogol meets Susan Orlean in the Stanford Ph.D. program.

Like all great comic figures, Batuman has the narrative advantage of never knowing exactly what she’s doing. In the introduction we learn that she was never cut out for fiction writing. Literary criticism will be her calling. Then, in the essays themselves, we learn that she doesn’t really have a knack for that either.

Or does she? The Possessed turns on a sly commentary about whether one can truly know a literary text. Just as you can never really know another person, Batuman seems to say, because a person’s essence remains elusive (“Where exactly is the person?” she keeps asking), so too you can never truly know a literary text, no matter how intensely you study it or how much you learn about its author. Batuman travels the globe in a series of comically absurd literary investigations, all the while speaking between the lines to the ghosts of her Russian subjects, asking what it will finally take to understand them.

My favorite essay is “Who Killed Tolstoy?”, in which Batuman cadges a trip to an international conference at the great Russian novelist’s Moscow estate to investigate whether he was poisoned. Aeroflot loses Batuman’s luggage, making hers perhaps the only forensic literary investigation conducted entirely in sweatpants.

Was Tolstoy really murdered? Batuman makes a good case, but of course we cannot know. Whether we are mulling the rudiments of our daily existence, the things that make us who we are, or a great writer’s inscrutable end, the world will always be too absurd for us to understand. The genius of so many Russian writers was that they expressed this truth so well. And yet we have no choice but to go on reading them. “If I could start over today,” Batuman writes, “I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I think that’s where we’re going to find them.”

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The problem is that there is no clear path to literary success, no way to know what you’re supposed to do.

“Immature poets imitate; great poets steal.” So goes T.S. Eliot’s explanation of the difference between merely borrowing something and creatively transforming it. Beg, Borrow, Steal, Michael Greenberg’s collection of personal essays about his life as a writer in New York, suggests a variation on Eliot’s adage: Forget about neat distinctions between who begs, who borrows, and who steals. The accomplished writer has to do all three.

Beg, Borrow, Steal collects 44 essays from Greenberg’s Freelance column for the London Times Literary Supplement, his series of literary dispatches from New York. Each essay tells a personal story in 1200 words, just enough room for a set-up, some exposition, and a well-paced scene. Their effect is best summed up in the direction Greenberg’s TLS editor offered at the start of the project. Each piece, he said, should “spill a drop of blood.”

The collection contains stories with unlikely O. Henry turns (“A Tailor’s Fortune” and “$493 in Singles and Fives”), fascinating historical pieces about New York (“‘Negros Burial Ground’” and “Hart Island”), and essays that bear more directly on Greenberg’s long struggle, as a writer of little means, to build a literary career.

New York, naturally, provides a great setting for the story. Greenberg attends high school in the Village with the children of blacklisted leftists. He lives in a public housing project where Chinese restaurant workers sleep side by side in red blankets on the floors of small apartments. A ride in the motorman’s car of a subway train on the Pelham Bay line gives Greenberg an unseen view of the city, with diamond switches on the tracks and graffiti in hidden corners of the underground flashing by.

That long dark journey might be a metaphor for Greenberg’s own. There are hard times in the Bronx and on the Lower East Side. Greenberg meets failure as a street peddler, a cab driver, and a waiter. His writing career never gets off the ground. Yet Greenberg retains his spirit, relating his adventures with great sympathy and style, not to mention a comic’s perfect timing. His book is a pleasure to read.

He signs on, for example, to ghost-write the tell-all memoir of a former Manhattan restaurateur, only to discover that she doesn’t have a decent story to tell. Worse, she can’t even cook. The chef, it turns out, was her husband, and he’s serving eighteen months for tax evasion. All Greenberg gets out of the deal is his hourly rate and some grilled cheese sandwiches wrapped in tin foil.

In a later piece, he sends the completed draft of his novel to one of his heroes, the editor Ted Solotaroff, who gets back to him right away. “This manuscript represents everything I hate in fiction,” Solotaroff writes. “Good luck finding it a home.”

The problem is that there is no clear path to literary success, no way to know what you’re supposed to do. Indeed, Greenberg seems to regard the very idea of a literary “career” with wry hopelessness. When an MFA student, who has dropped by to inquire about renting Greenberg’s writing studio, lists her literary accomplishments to him, Greenberg seems taken aback. “She recites her credentials,” he says, “in the way of one who approaches writing as if it were a rational, upwardly mobile career.”

And so it goes. After decades of odd jobs and dubious literary exploits, success finally arrives with Hurry Down Sunshine, Greenberg’s touching memoir of his daughter Sally’s descent into madness. The book, which Other Press published last year, is a harrowing and beautiful work of art. Its publication secured Greenberg’s literary reputation, sent him on book tour, and provides charming fodder for the collection’s final essays. (Vintage will publish the paperback of Hurry Down Sunshine on September 9, the same day Other Press will publish Beg, Borrow, Steal.)

By the end of Beg, Borrow, Steal Greenberg has found, in his daughter’s story and his Freelance columns, material that is both dangerous and close to the heart. He has found the stories he was meant to tell.

Yet even this success comes at a cost. In the title essay of the collection, Greenberg writes about the trouble with taking literary material from personal experience. The story involves Eric, a former landlord who spent years sharing his draft novel-in-progress with Greenberg, only to learn, when he read Hurry Down Sunshine, that Greenberg never took him seriously. In trying to work out whether he betrayed a friend, Greenberg notes how closely he listened to Eric when they talked. Close enough, he writes, “to steal a piece of his soul.”

***

Michael Greenberg took time out from his pre-publication schedule for Beg, Borrow, Steal to answer some questions:

The Rumpus: What inspired you to compile this collection? What larger story did you want these essays to tell?

Michael Greenberg: I always intended the stories to be together. In a way they came out of me as a single narrative, the portrait of a writer’s precarious, unpredictable existence. What defines the writer’s life more than anything is a kind of omnivorous curiosity. Literary life doesn’t take place in the salon or at a cocktail party or workshop; it occurs wherever a writer happens to be, usually in the most “unliterary” places. What I hope readers take from this book is a sense of openness towards experience, be it mundane or exotic – the immense pleasure to be had in unpeeling the mystery of oneself through others.

Rumpus: Can you pick a favorite essay in the collection and tell us what drew you to its subject?

Greenberg: One story I have special affection for is “A Tailor’s Fortune”, about my neighbor in a poor housing project, an Auschwitz survivor who worked as a tailor in the basement of Macy’s department store. He wanted to leave me his life’s saving so I could write with less worries. The challenge was to give it the spare, honest, unsentimental dignity that it deserved.

Rumpus: Your editor at the TLS limited you to 1200 words. Were you ever tempted to expand any of these stories into a longer form?

Greenberg: Almost never. The form became like a second skin. It felt just right. On the few occasions when I did try to expand a story, I found it would lose some of its magic.

Rumpus: What responsibility do you owe to your subjects? What, if anything, do you owe to how someone may feel when they see themselves, as you have put it, “as a manipulated object in the drama of their own life”?

Greenberg: This is a question I wrestle with all the time. Most people haven’t asked to be written about. It can be disturbing to see the reflection of yourself, a mere flake of your true being, objectified in print. It’s a very strange and unique phenomenon. People feel robbed in some essential way, even when no ill will is intended. Not long ago, my former wife sent me the manuscript of a book she had written about a period in our lives when we were in our early twenties and living in South America. I realized I was getting the news about myself when she complained that I was uncomfortable when we were close, and could manage intimacy only in brief spells, when my guard was down. My recollection is slightly different, and I found myself silently defending myself, but getting nowhere. That’s the curse of being written about: you can’t reply. The writer has to forge ahead anyway. It’s one of several diabolical aspects of the job.

Rumpus: There are suggestions, in interviews you’ve done and in the stories in Beg, Borrow, Steal, that for many years you struggled as a fiction writer. Did you find your voice as a nonfiction writer? Why or why not?

Greenberg: It’s a funny paradox. I learned to write by toiling away at fiction for years in obscurity. When the time came to write Hurry Down Sunshine all those thousands of hours of work were there inside me, ready to be put to use. Everything coalesced around this true story, perhaps because it meant so much to me and I felt a keen pressure to do it justice. The writer, like everyone else, is at the mercy of what life happens to throw at him.

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**

One year and five killed stories later I was gone. Did I mention I have a book coming out? about 2 hours ago from web

“There’s a new artist in Chelsea.” “You’re forgetting, David,” I said. “I don’t live in New York.” about 2 hours ago from web

“Health care.” “Been done.” “Political unrest in Georgia.” “Please, David,” I said, “you’re not trying.” about 2 hours ago from web

“That’s a long way away,” I said. “What else have you got?” about 2 hours ago from web

Remnick said “write about the Mayor of Mexico City.” “I would rather not,” I said. “Then write about the Maoist revolution in Tibet,” he said. about 2 hours ago from web

Those are the differences, as I see it. about 2 hours ago from web

Except that mine is being told in these aggravating, reverse-order, posts on this novel medium. That and also I have a book out. about 2 hours ago from web

Oh yes. Many writers come and go from the New Yorker. Happens all the time. My story is really no different from any of their stories. about 2 hours ago from web

Where was I? about 2 hours ago from web

for cause. about 2 hours ago from web

Although it’s not as good as, say, being a mid-level manager at a consulting firm, where you would have benefits and could only be fired about 2 hours ago from web

It’s also better than freelancing, where you have no contract at all. about 2 hours ago from web

This, however, is better than the Letterman show, which keeps its writers on three-month contracts, and can let them go at any time. about 2 hours ago from web

Let me be clear: The New Yorker keeps all of its writers on one-year contracts. You can be let go at any time. about 2 hours ago from web

It was the fact that I had never written for the New Yorker that made my firing so painful. about 2 hours ago from web

. . . never been on staff. about 2 hours ago from web

And it’s true. My 15 some-odd Shouts and Murmurs were politely rejected, I’ve never pitched a Talk of the Town piece, and I’ve never been about 2 hours ago from web

I know what you’re thinking. Sean Carman? When did he ever write for the New Yorker? about 2 hours ago from web

Will now break the public silence, and write about my firing from The New Yorker. about 2 hours ago from web

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