Truth is the Writer's Revolution

If love is the highest ideal in society, the foundation and currency of any sustainable societal and human improvement, then truth is the way a writer loves. If love is patient, kind, never envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude, not insistent on its own way, not irritable, or resentful, not rejoicing at wrongdoing, but with the truth; if love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and never ends, telling the truth is the way writers demonstrate love for a story, our characters, and most importantly our readers. Writing is a ministry.

It’s a sacred undertaking that requires constant meditation and witness, an eye and a heart for details seen and unseen, and the compassion to document what we observe with precision and humility. It’s profane too. It demands we enter the toilet of the human heart and sit in our own filth. It necessitates stripping ourselves, slashing ourselves open, and then parading and broadcasting the wounds that gape and whisper unspeakable things, which, of course, requires ego.

Writing requires the yearn and the fight to be seen and heard in perpetuity, and so it needs to be able pass through the fire. It cannot bow to the vicissitudes of political whim, cultural norms, or prevailing powers, yet it must be vigilant enough to reflect on how these impact the human experience through whatever device or genre the writer is gifted to employ. Which means the writer must be at once emotionally available,  insensitive enough to prod, pick, ply, pry, and laugh, and militant about being both.

If love is the underpinning of empathy and service, the instinct that aspires to equal justice even at the cost of one’s own advantage, the passion that penetrates hierarchy and division (and initiates this penetration), the primal motive that channels the Supernatural, then truth is the writer’s expression of love to and for the current and future reader. Truth is all a writer can leave to posterity. Truth is the only way forward.

But if truth is the actual state of a matter, conformity with a verified or indisputable fact, proposition or principal, an obvious or accepted fact or platitude, an agreed upon standard; if truth is reality, actuality, fidelity, or constancy, is it, in fact, disputable? How can we know the actual state of a matter when it is impossible to know all of the facts of a situation or scenario? How can we trust or accept as indisputable that which is often verified by adulterated agenda and/or vastly different experiences of reality? How do we agree upon a standard, when the standard is often set by some at the expense of others? If we can’t always agree, can we accept that there are multiple truths, some of which compete with and deny the other truths, even truths we may hold as self-evident; or must we concede to one truth for convenience, as a sort of truce?

The writer’s attempt to answer these questions, for herself and through her work, requires love. That is, patience devoid of arrogance, commitment to resisting insisting on his/her own way, and the rest. This is the struggle. This is the revolution.

Bob Dylan's Nobel Speech: "Are My Songs Literature?"

Bob Dylan receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom May 29, 2012

When Bob Dylan was named recipient of the The Nobel Prize in Literature, response among writers and cultural critics was mixed. In “Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Gotten a Nobel,” editor and author Anna North argued from the New York Times opinion section:

 

“Yes, Mr. Dylan is a brilliant lyricist. Yes, he has written a book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Yes, it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan’s writing is inseparable from his music. He is great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.”

Conversely, cultural critic Sean O’Hagan believes those who dismiss Dylan’s literary credentials because he is not a writer in the traditional sense are missing the point. Writing “Fascinating, Infuriating, Enduring: Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel prize” for The Guardian, O’Hagan contended:

“Bob Dylan exists in a world of his own, stubbornly out of step with the prevailing culture just as he once singlehandedly defined it. He is not a songwriter in the classic sense, nor a poet in the traditional sense, nor does he create literature in the accepted sense of the word; that, in fact, is the whole point – he has sidestepped these definitions on his singular journey. He’s Bob Dylan.”

For his part, the reclusive songwriter and musician did not immediately acknowledge the honor, announced in October, and ultimately did not attend the December 10th Nobel Banquet to receive it in person. But in the acceptance speech he penned, which was delivered by the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji, he squarely addressed the question surrounding his worthiness of the award.

“Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, ‘Are my songs literature?'” he wrote, citing Shakespeare as a playwright who, in the bard’s day, was likely preoccupied with the mundanities of producing and staging his work rather than whether it would one day be received as literature. Dylan, however, closed the speech expressing gratitude to the Swedish Academy for the time they spent preoccupying themselves with the question, and “providing such a wonderful answer.”

Azita Raji, U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, delivered Bob Dylan’s acceptance speech at the Nobel Banquet December 10, 2016. (Photo via NewsInfo.Inquirer.Net)

Read the full transcript of Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech, published by the Nobel Foundation, below:

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I’ve been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don’t know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It’s probably buried so deep that they don’t even know it’s there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn’t anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I’ve been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I’ve made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it’s my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I’m grateful for that.

But there’s one thing I must say. As a performer I’ve played for 50,000 people and I’ve played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

My best wishes to you all, 

Bob Dylan

The 2017 PEN America Literary Awards Longlist Is Here

Rion Amilcarr Scott

On Friday December 9th, PEN America announced the books longlisted for 2017 PEN America Literary Awards. Finalists will be named on January 18, 2017, and winners on February 22nd, in advance of the awards ceremony on March 27th at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York. Here they are:
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000): For a fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.

*Insurrections: Stories by Rion Amilcar Scott

*We Show What We Have Learned by Clare Beams

*The Mothers by Brit Bennett

*The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang

*When Watched: Stories by Leopoldine Core

*Hide by Matthew Griffin

*Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

*Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss

*Hurt People by Cote Smith

*Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000): For a book of essays that exemplifies the dignity and esteem of the essay form.

*The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood by Belle Boggs

*Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole

*Against Everything by Mark Greif

*A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and The Mind by Siri Hustvedt

*The Girls in My Town by Angela Morales

*Soul at the White Heat by Joyce Carol Oates

*Becoming Earth by Eva Saulitis

*Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter by Peter Singer

*Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change by Andrew Solomon

*Hungry Heart by Jennifer Weiner

 

PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction($10,000): For a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective.

*Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever

*Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

*White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

*Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar

*Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips

*Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

*The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez

*The Train to the Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II by Jan Jarboe Russell

*Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor

*Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship by Anjan Sundaram
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000): For a book of literary nonfiction on the subject of the physical or biological sciences.

*The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

*What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe

*Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets by Luke Dittrich

*Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature by Jordan Fisher Smith

*Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores

*How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of a Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

*Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

*The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

*The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel

*The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World’s Most Coveted Fish by Emily Voigt
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): For a nonfiction book on the subject of sports.

*Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution by Jonathan Abrams

*American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise by Joe Drape

*The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers by Michael Leahy

*Catching the Sky by Colten Moore with Keith O’Brien

*Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss

*Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre by Jeff Pearlman

*Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town by S.L. Price

*Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcom X by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith

*Fastpitch: The Untold History of the Softball and the Women Who Made the Game by Erica Westly

*Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop and Street Basketball by Onaje X.O. Woodbine
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000): For a distinguished biography published in the United States.

*Jean Cocteau: A Life by Claude Arnaud, translated from the French by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell

*A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charyn

*Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

*Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman

*Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson

*A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley by Jane Kamensky

*Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow

*Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand

*American Luthier: Carleen Hutchins–The Art and Science of the Violin by Quincy Whitney

*Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow by Laurie Wilson
PEN Open Book Award ($5,000): For an exceptional work of literature by an author of color.

*Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett

*Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt by Yasmine El Rashidi

*The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah

*The Big Book of Exit Strategies by Jamaal May

*Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

*What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

*Look by Solmaz Sharif

*Problems by Jade Sharma

*Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair

*Blackacre: Poems by Monica Youn
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): For a book-length translation of prose into English.

*Confessions by Rabee Jaber, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

*The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Muller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm

*Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb

*Between Life and Death by Yoram Kaniuk, translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav

*One Hundred and Twenty-One Days by Michèle Audin, translated from the French by Christiana Hills

*Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap, translated from the German by Tess Lewis

*Justine by Iben Mondrup, translated from the Danish by Kerri A. Pierce

*The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas

*The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

*Limbo Beirut by Hilal Chouman, translated from the Arabic by Anna Ziajka Stanton

 

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): For a book-length translation of poetry into English.

*Pearl: A New Verse Translation, translated from the Middle English by Simon Armitage

*Abyss by Ya Hsien, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom

*Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Andrew Davis

*Building the Barricade by Anna Swir, translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk

*Algaravias by Waly Salomão, translated from the Portuguese by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

*Preludes and Fugues by Emmanuel Moses, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

*Tales of Ise, translated from the Japanese by Peter MacMillan

*In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laâbi, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson Smith

*Absolute Solitude by Dulce Maria Loynaz, translated from the Spanish by James O’Connor

*Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems from Orit Gidali by Orit Gidali, translated from the Hebrew by Marcela Sulak
The recipients of the following awards will be announced on March 27, 2017:

*PEN/Jean Stein Book Award ($75,000): For a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact.

*PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature ($50,000): To a writer of any genre for his or her body of work.

*PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History ($10,000): For an unpublished literary work of nonfiction that uses oral histor to illuminate an event, individual, place, or movement.

*PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards ($7,500 & $2,500): Three awards which honor a Master American Dramatist, American Playwright in Mid-Career, and Emerging American Playwright.

*PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): For a writer whose body of work represents an exceptional contribution to the field.

Lydia Polgreen is the new Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief

Lydia Polgreen

Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times associate masthead editor and editorial director of NYT Global, is succeeding founding editor Arianna Huffington at the Huffington Post. In an interview she gave the news and opinion site, Polgreen indicated how she plans to steer the content focus in the wake of the media echo chamber the 2016 election exposed and exacerbated. She said HuffPo has the “potential and the possibility of really meeting this populist moment that we’re living in and meeting people where they actually are.”

Polgreen added, “just as there were moments when the Washington Post or The New York Times or the Times of London during World War II had a huge mission, we, too, have a huge mission. And that is to listen, to report, to tell stories, to seek out the stories and voices that aren’t being heard, even ones that might feel uncomfortable to us.”
 In a 2014 report commissioned by A.G. Sulzberger, son of Polgreen’s former employer New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, the Times’ Newsroom Innovation Team acknowledged that HuffPo “in just a few years has eclipsed The Times in total readership.” The report cited advice from “a former leader of The Huffington Post… [who] told us that if we want to improve our reach, we must think differently about what it means to publish a story: ‘At The New York Times, far too often for writers and editors the story is done when you hit publish. At Huffington Post, the article begins its life when you hit publish.'”

Octavia Butler's Word of Encouragement to Herself

Sometimes, you have to encourage yourself. With 2016 coming to a close, take a page out of Octavia E. Butler’s discovered notebook, and write down your dreams for your writing career. Believe they will come true. “See to it!”

2016 Miles Morland Winners Announced

And the Winners are:

*Abdul Adan – Somalia

*Ayesha Harruna Attah – Ghana

*Lidudumalingani Mqombothi – South Africa

*Nneoma Ike-Njoku – Nigeria

—

Julie Iromuanya, author of Mr. and Mrs Doctor, is shortlisted for a 2016 Miles Morland Scholarship

The fourth annual Miles Morland Scholarship for African writers has announced an impressive shortlist:

*Abdul Adan – Somalia (Shortlisted for the 2016 Caine Prize; Founding member of the Jalada collective)

*Jekwu Anyaegbuna – Nigeria (Shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize: Africa; Shortlisted by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for the Farafina Trust International Creative Writers’ Programme)

*Ayesha Harruna Attah – Ghana (Shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; author of two novels including Harmattan Rain and Saturday’s Shadows)

*Rotimi Babatunde – Nigeria (Winner of the 2012 Caine Prize; Longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award; included in the Africa39 Anthology)

*Dayo Forster – Gambia (Author of Reading the Ceiling)

*Amy Heydenrych – South Africa (Author of the short story “The Money Shot“)

*Abubakar Ibrahim – Nigeria (Author of The Season of Crimson Blossoms, The Whispering Trees, Daughters of Bappa Avenue, and The Quest for Nina;  winner of the 2016 Nigeria Prize for Literature; included in the Africa39 Anthology)

*Nneoma Ike-Njoku – Nigeria (Author of the short story “Daddy Lagos;” Recipient of a Writing for Peace Young Writers Prize)

*Julie Iromuanya – Nigeria (Author of Mr and Mrs. Doctor; Shortlisted for the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award and PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction; Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction and the Etisalat Prize for Literature)

*Hamse Ismail – Somalia (Author of the short story “Mediterranean Bird: A Quest for Love in Paradise,” a Mandela Washington Fellow at the University of Delaware in Newark)
William Ifeanyi Moore – Nigeria (Author of Lonely Roads and 30/30: Short stories on love, life and other such nonsense)

*Lidudumalingani Mqombothi – South Africa (Winner of the 2016 Caine Prize)

*Nick Mulgrew – South Africa (Author of Stations, The Myth of This is that We’re All in this Together; Co-Editor of Water: New Short Fiction from Africa; Founder of the poetry press, uHlanga)

*Otosirieze Obi-Young – Nigeria (Author of “The Lion in Harmattan;” 2015 Pushcart Prize Nominee)

*Okwiri Oduor – Kenya (Winner of the 2014 Caine Prize; included in the Africa39 Anthology and One World Two: A Second Anthology of Global Short Stories)

*Adeola Opeyemi – Nigeria (Editor at WriteHouse Collective)
Olawale Olayemi – Nigeria (Freelance Writer)

*Troy Onyango – Kenya (Winner of the 2016 Inaugural Nyanza Literary Prize)

*Mary Ononokpono – Nigeria (Winner of the 2014 Golden Baobab Prize for Early Chapter Books; Shortlisted for the 2015 Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship; included in the anthology of Water: New Short Fiction from Africa)

*Koye Oyedeji – Nigeria (Writer; Critic; Literature Professor)

*Bryony Rheam – Zimbabwe (Author of This September Sun; Winner of the Best First Book prize at the 2010 Zimbabwe Book Publishers’ Association Awards)

*Sandisile Tshuma – Zimbabwe (Honourable Mention in the 2010 Thomas Pringle Awards for the best short story published in a newspaper or journal in southern Africa in the preceding two years)

The Miles Morland Foundation will award one Fiction grant of £18,000 to be paid monthly over the course of 12 months, and one Non-Fiction scholarship at the discretion of the Foundation of up to £27,000, paid over an 18 month period.

Election Post-Mortem

It’s been almost a month since candidate Donald Trump became President-Elect Donald Trump, and among the many other things his win has exposed, it has revealed how easy it is to exploit our balkanized news media to selfish ends. In principle, journalism is about enlightening the public with “information that is accurate, fair and thorough,” but, many news articles today amount to extended Facebook posts or Tweets–heavy on opinion and personality, with less concern for fact.

Opinion columns (by unpaid contributors) are arguably integral to the business model of news outlets like The Huffington Post, and opinion sections take up more and more real estate on sites like TheGuardian.com. Cable news shows are populated by hosts and pundits unabashedly affiliated with right- or left-wing agendas, and cable news stations are either run by outspoken supporters of the right or left, or billing themselves as stations that will deliver news stories in a way that appeals to supporters of the right or left.

Fox News Host Sean Hannity appeared in a pro-Trump political video, a conflict of interest considering he was reporting on the election for the network. In response, a network spokesperson told POLITICO.com: “We were not aware of Sean Hannity participating in a promotional video and he will not be doing anything along these lines for the remainder of the election season.”

Then there’s Facebook and Twitter. With most Americans consuming or learning of breaking news via social media, and these outlets serving up only the content their mysterious and ever changing algorithms believe we want to see based on who and what we most interact with, engaging with the news has become a masturbatory exercise.

We are only exposed to the ideas and stories we either already agree with or want other people to know about. But if we are reading or watching only the outlets that reflect our persuasion or only following people we agree with online, we block the opportunity to broaden and inform our perspectives with legitimate points of opposition, and we lose basic human empathy for one another.

People who don’t agree with us are dismissed as “liberal elites” or “wing nuts”–us vs. them. We calcify in our respective corners, not speaking to or hearing each other, which makes us easy pawns for interests and individuals that don’t care about us or them. The truth becomes less important than “message,” and whosever message is most seductive wins.

Highlights from the 2016 Survey of the Association of Newspaper Editors

Watching many of the political analysts on both Fox and CNN at points during the campaign cycle, it seemed clear their sole concern was delivering their candidate’s message. Period. Message for the sake of message, even when their message was inconsistent.

For example, in one breath, a Trump supporter would leverage a scathing critique of Bill Clinton’s treatment of women, championing their candidate’s trotting out of Clinton’s female accusers–then, in the next breath, dismiss Donald Trump’s bevy of accusers as pawns of the liberal media. Likewise, a Hillary Clinton supporter would rail about Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, but ardently defend her refusal to release transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms or her infamous deletion of multiple emails. Ironically, far right outlets seemed to express little alarm at the fact that the Russian government was alleged to be behind the leaks of DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign emails–but cited her handling of classified emails and their potential exposure as criminal.

This faction impulse is understandable. As Ann Friedman wrote in a pre-election post for New York Magazine entitled “Supporting Hillary While Reckoning With Bill’s Sexual Past”:

With an openly racist accused rapist running as the other party’s nominee, it doesn’t seem like the right time to voice any of my concerns with Hillary as a candidate. Certainly not now, in the final weeks of a campaign that offers no room for nuance. And certainly not when it’s apparent that most of Trump’s defenders care more about defeating Hillary than about ensuring survivors’ voices are heard.

But faction mentality is easily duped by exaggeration and outright fiction.

“I don’t like fooling people,” said Yaman A., creator of three fake news sites including Hot Global News. His motivation? “It’s really just the money.” 

This summer, Buzzfeed posted an interview with a teenage creator of three fake news sites who admitted that many of the stories he creates mislead and incite fear, and influence political perception, but says he actually has no political affiliation. “It’s really just the money,” he admits, that motivates him.

We need Google to adjust their algorithm to clearly identify fake news sites. We need our news sources, including Facebook and Twitter, to segregate actual news from fake news and opinion/editorial pages, as they (still try to) do with news and advertising/sponsored posts.

If there aren’t already, we need laws in place to ensure that unbought, unaffiliated journalists are delivering the news, not people with financial or career interests tied to specific individuals or corporations. We need our newsrooms to keep pushing to reflect diversity of backgrounds and perspectives so the news is balanced and corrected for implicit biases.

Additionally, we need to talk about money.

The internet has created a bottomless desire for content, but since there is no bottomless source of money, online news outlets are paying far less than they pay print journalists, and, as a result, less experienced, sometimes untrained writers are taking more of these jobs. Additionally, since internet journalism is even more dependent on nabbing a scoop before a competitor to increase their Google search rank and, ultimately, the amount of revenue they can charge advertisers, fact checking is de-prioritized, added to the writer’s plate rather than a professional’s, or non-existent.

via Contently.net

We need publications with healthy fact-checking teams to ensure the news we get is accurate. We need some sort of protective provision for news gathering publications so they don’t have to be profitable or account to shareholders, and, thus, be beholden to clicks and shares in the same way as a blog or retail site.

If we believe our news media is rigged or biased, we need to hold them accountable. We need to burst our own bubbles.

Bob Dylan Won the Nobel Prize in Literature!

Our cultural definition of literature has officially been blown wide open with the Swedish Academy’s award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to songwriter Bob Dylan. Past prizes have recognized essayists, playwrights, poets, novelists, and writers of various genres of non-fiction prose, but this is the first time the Nobel has been awarded to an artist primarily known for writing songs.

The Swedish Academy awards lifetime achievement in six categories–Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Medicine, Peace, and Economic Sciences–evidently using “Literature” as a catchall for all arts and letters genres, while approaching the sciences with a bit more nuance. This reading of Literature in the broadest sense has sparked confusion, derision, and appreciation at the inclusion of an artist most people have heard of.

@n_martinsson tweeted: “Probably the first time I have works of this years Nobel Prize winner in my Bookshelf.” @chrispbone added: “Bob Dylan, imma let you finish, but Geri Halliwell wrote some of the best songs of all time.” @sabrinajeria wrote: “Nothing against Dylan but it’s a shame so many incredibly deserving novelists were overlooked.” The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and British Indian author Salman Rushdie had been among a shortlist of rumored frontrunners for the prize.

We’ll have to wait and see how the Academy’s honor of a non-traditional literary life will impact the tastes of acquiring editors at the publishing houses, but with venues for consuming literature changing by the minute–see Wally Lamb’s plans to release his upcoming sixth novel via an app, Beyonce’s collaboration with Warsan Shire on her album Lemonade which led to a sales spike and widespread recognition for the Somali poet, and Aziah King‘s viral twitter tale of a stripper’s wild weekend in Florida–our collective understanding of what literature is will continue to expand. Not to mention the fact that telecommunications companies are expressing interest in adding literature to the content they serve up to subscribers.

These developments open up the possibilities for how literature can be experienced and expand what readers will expect from their literary content. This expansion will eventually reflect in the work editors publish.

It’s already evident in the literary prize landscape. The Goldsmiths Prize was founded in 2013 specifically to “encourage more risk-taking among novelists, editors and agents alike,” with Goldsmiths creative writing professor Blake Morrison observing, “There’s an idea that innovative and genre-busting books are bound to be inaccessible. We don’t believe that’s the case.”

Writers like Eleanor Catton, Teju Cole , and Zadie Smith have also been interrogating traditional forms and experimenting with new ways to tell compelling stories for some time now. Catton won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries which was in excess of 800 pages and chronologically structured around zodiac signs. Likewise, Cole has been lauded for his literary use of Twitter (I love his seven short stories about drones), as well as the stream of consciousness style of his 2011 novel Open City.

The Guardian‘s review of Smith’s 2012 novel NW noted “The whole of the first section is defined by its resistance to genre…” The Washington Post review further explained:

Each of the four sections of “NW” demonstrates a different form. There’s no second-person narrator or anything as weird as a PowerPoint presentation, but the longest part of “NW” is divided into 185 short, numbered sections, ranging from straightforward narrative to menu items, quiz answers, IM chats and even stage directions. I sympathize if you have no patience for this sort of experimentation, which can seem so graspingly avant-garde, but Smith uses the swirl of these disparate elements to illustrate the complexity of modern life.

Additionally, though “alt lit” has been declared “dead,” the genre also signals a hunger among writers and readers for alternative narrative expressions.

As writers, whether we choose to be more experimental with our work or double down in our obeisance to more classically literary forms, the box-breaking genre defiance that’s happening in and around literature doesn’t have to be scary if we are prepared for it. But prepare we must. Like it or not, “the times, they are a’ changin’.” (I had to.)

National Book Awards 2016

UPDATE: The 2016 National Book Award Winners are:

FICTION
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

NON-FICTION
Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

POETRY
Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell’s March: Book Three

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Arlie Russell Hochschild

The National Book Awards, set for November 16th, has named the 20 authors who earned a spot on their 2016 shortlist. Among them, 2002 MacArthur Fellow Colson Whitehead, former Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Mellon Fellow Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Jacqueline Woodson whose book Brown Girl Dreaming earned the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

FICTION
Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special
Paulette Jiles’ News of the World
Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn

NON-FICTION
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

POETRY
Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human
Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974 – 2004
Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics
Jay Hopler’s The Abridged History of Rainfall
Solmaz Sharif’s Look

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Kate DiCamillo’s Raymie Nightingale
John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell’s March: Book Three
Grace Lin’s When the Sea Turned to Silver
Jason Reynolds’ Ghost
Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star

On Validation

I co-lead a monthly writers group as part of the Center for Faith and Work, and before we break off into small groups to workshop our pieces, one of the members leads us in a discussion on a topic centered around the writing life. Last month, Brooke Obie, author of Book of Addis: Cradled Embers (Vol 1), led a talk on validation, a subject that has been coming up for me from a few different directions as I wait for word from my agent on a new manuscript, my birthday approaches, and I take a procrastination break from a new piece I’m working on to write this post.

A few weeks ago, during a Saturday cable watching marathon I stumbled on the movie 5 to 7. The film, about a young writer’s affair with a married French woman nine years his senior, ended with a comment I’ve been pondering since: “Your favorite story, whatever it might be, was written for one reader.” The writer’s reader was his now former lover, and the point he was making was that whoever the writer’s reader is, it is her or his validation that matters most.

As I noted in a previous post about this quote, my reader often changes. Sometimes it’s a client, a boss, an editor, an agent, social media followers. Sometimes my reader is me. And for the purposes of the piece I am pushing out into the world for this reader, their validation is everything.

Brooke directed us to unpack validation itself and how it shapes what and why we write. Here are the questions she invited us to ask ourselves:

• What role does validation play in your writing?
• Who are you seeking validation from?
• How has/does rejection impact(ed) your feelings of validity as a writer?
• How do you determine which criticism is valid?
• What are your goals as a writer? (What and who shaped these goals?)
• When do you feel most validated as a writer?
• Have you ever felt the presence of God when you’re writing, or felt that you’re “in the zone” when you’re writing? Does this feeling validate your writing/make you feel valid as a writer?
• What fears do you have that undermine your feelings of validation? How do you deal with these fears?
• What are your intentions for your writing? What do you hope to achieve? If you achieved it would you feel validated as a writer?

Is it possible to ever feel validated as a writer? Is validation-seeking in and of itself a trap–an indication of a hole that can’t be filled with the expected markers?

Both J.K. Rowling and Elizabeth Gilbert have remarked that validation in the form of bestselling status doesn’t quell the desire to write, or the hope for validation that’s stripped from the expectations, jealousy, and effusive praise that can come with success. And recently, the author of In Her Shoes and other bestselling books Jennifer Weiner bared her heart and admitted her jealousy in a now deleted Facebook post when another writer’s book  was chosen over hers for Oprah’s Book Club–a validation that has eluded her for now.

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, also a bestselling author, has written about finding validation in the work itself. In a poignant post on her blog, she expressed the importance of maintaining perspective on the accomplishment that completing a piece of writing is: “…I’d internalized so much shame about how my books had performed, that I’d completely forgotten to be proud of the fact that I’d written and published two books in the first place.”

Validation is such a personal quest, determined by ever-shifting internal and external factors, that even trying to unpack it feels bottomless. I think that’s why I appreciate having the above-noted questions handy–a way to spot-check when the insecurities rise, and a reminder to focus on why I write in the first place. I hope the questions are helpful to you too.