Crossing Over: The 2009 PEN Beyond Margins Celebration

The PEN Beyond Margins Awards honor outstanding books by writers of color published in the US, and the 2009 winners included a Nigerian priest, a Chicano poet, and a Vietnamese-American novelist/editor/should-have-been dentist (more on that later). Hosted by President of the National Book Critics Circle Jane Ciabattari, the three authors: Uwem Akpan, Juan Felipe Hererra, and Lily Hoang, gathered at Housing Works Bookstore & Café on December 2nd to read excerpts from their winning works and share the unlikely paths that led them to become writers.

“A story is not complete until you have told it to someone,” began Uwem Akpan, a recent Oprah Book Club pick and author of Say You’re One of Them. Akpan traces the origins of his love for storytelling back to his childhood in Southeastern Nigeria.“I was born after the war, and there was peace and a lot of freedom, especially as children,” he began. “I grew up hearing folk tales…you couldn’t go to primary school until you were six, so you would sit and listen to stories, play, and make your own stories.”

So how did Akpan go from making stories as a child to becoming a published author? Ten years ago, a Nigerian newspaper rejected his essay. Noting that the paper published short stories on Saturdays, Akpan made his first attempt at writing fiction. This time, his piece was accepted.

As is the story with any writer, his first rejection led to a series of nos before he finally got a yes: “The New Yorker rejected my stories twice before I knew The New Yorker was a big thing in America…so that was my good fortune, my ignorance,” he laughed.

They say the third time is a charm. After leaving Nigeria for writing school in the states and re-submitting his essay, “My Parents’ Bedroom” appeared in The New Yorker on June 12, 2006. After the story appeared, there was a New York auction with twelve—yes, twelve! —publishers in attendance.

Akpan said he took his time accepting an offer, waiting a year before committing to one publisher and expressing hesitance when offered a multi-book deal: “A book is like a child, it starts to grow, sometimes it punches you, sometimes it scratches you,” he laughed. Mr. Akpan seemed to be in no hurry for his child to grow up; he’s just basking in the hard-earned acclaim.

Despite his success in the States (Oprah recently called him at his parish to let him know his book was an “Oprah’s Book Club selection”), Akpan is not yet published at home in Nigeria. “I speak only one African language, but in my country there are over 250 languages,” he explains, though he has had many offers from friends wishing to translate his work.

It is easy to see why Father Akpan has so many friends. With his infectious, pealing laughter and bright smile, one can’t help but be won over by the rising literary star. Then there is his sense of humor: Akpan thanked PEN for letting him know he won the award before he came, joking, “some awards shows you go and sit and don’t win, and although you enjoy the wine and the crackers it’s just not the same,” he laughed.

Like Akpan, poet Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Half the World in Light, credits his discovery of writing with an exceptional childhood: “I was born in an improvised family, an illegal family, an illegitimate family, I had to make things up,” he claims.

His journey towards writing, Herrera explained, “is kind of like a floundering, only because I’ve never had a writing model.” The only child said: “I was born when my Dad was ’66, he was born in 1882, he did everything by hand– he was a hand man.” To elaborate on the latter point, he described how his father built their home on top of a car, a “World War II army green truck,” reasoning that he “put the house on top of the car so we could go places.”

Herrera’s slant towards creativity took a backward step when he got yelled at in school in the States for speaking Spanish. “I shut myself up,” the author said, though he  later found his voice as a performer in middle school, leading to the plays and political engagement that made his career in the 1960s.

Herrera’s theatrical background was strongly evident in his performance as his voice soared in both English and Spanish, elevating the spirits of the crowd. Despite his verbal skills, Herrera modestly exclaimed before reading that the real poem had already taken place—to him, it was the audience’s mere presence that was the true poem.

Lily Hoang, who was being honored for her novel, Changing, opened with a speech that resembled a stand-up act: “So I’m not supposed to be a writer, I’m supposed to be a doctor. My parents to this day call me and ask me if perhaps I would like to go to dentist school.” She explained that to Vietnamese families like her own, “The Americans dream is fully realized when your child goes to medical school.”

Growing up, Hoang said her siblings were spaced far apart, so she was left alone a lot: “I would gather all of the other little Vietnamese kids and tell stories and gossip,” she laughed, “eventually, people stopped talking around me!” She started writing in college, inspired by a college roommate who was a poet. Hoang’s master’s thesis, Parabola, became the first of many published books.

W.W. Norton Editor Brendan Curry, who, at first glance, didn’t seem to fit in with the evening’s theme of diversity, joined the authors on stage for a Q & A. He spoke openly of his discomfort at being asked to speak, wondering what he could contribute to the conversation. It was while contemplating this very task on the subway that he had a breakthrough, reading a “train of thought” message sponsored by the MTA: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

“It’s by that curmudgeon Schopenhauer,” Curry added with an ah-hah grin, “The stories we just heard defy that entire statement.”

While I admired Curry’s right-on use of Schopenhauer to prove a point (and the fact that he reads messages from the MTA), he went on to call publishing “a bunch of white folks curious about the world,” adding that reviewers, the people “who used to get paid to tell you what to read about are no longer getting paid to tell you what to read.”

His expression of publishing’s whiteness could either be construed as charmingly self-deprecating or providing a lack of credit to authorial talent and the autonomy of the reader, chalking up changing trends in publishing to a benevolent Caucasian elite expressing cultural fascination with ‘the Other.’ While I grant that a work does need to attract an editor’s approval to be published, and the industry is still largely a white one, the recipients of the 2009 PEN Beyond Margins Award proved that the talent and the storytelling had been there all along, for those who were willing to listen.

Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda, in southern Nigeria. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. Say You’re One of Them was a finalist for the Los Angeles?Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The collection was also nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and the Story Prize. It received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, African Region, and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as a 2009 selection for Oprah’s Book Club.

Juan Felipe Herrera is a Chicano poet born in Fowler, California. In addition to his 24 previously published books, his recent books are Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press)—one of the New York Times Best Books of 2008 and winner of a 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and a 2009 Latino International Award in Poetry—and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments (City Lights), which won the 2008 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Poetry Award.

Lily Hoang’s first book Parabola won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest in 2006. She is also the author of the forthcoming novels The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press) and Invisible Women (StepSister Press, 2010). She is Associate Editor of Starcherone Books.

To watch the entire event, click here

To see photos from the event, click here

To listen to the authors reading from their work, click on the links below:

• Uwem Akpan reads from Say You’re One of Them (7:13)

• Juan Felipe Herrera reads from Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (7:23)

• Lily Hoang reads from Changing (8:41)

Tags: Juan Felipe Herrera, Lily Hoang, PEN Beyond Margins Awards, Uwem Akpan

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Literary Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.