Okay, so this week we're training on our new Web site. Yes, it's on its way.
Finally.
So that means my posts may be much, much smaller this week. But I do want to say that tonight is Nani Power's Book Launch at Bambule restaurant in Friendship Heights at 6 p.m. To learn more about that launch, click here.
I hope to see you there.
Showing posts with label Nani Power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nani Power. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Leesburg First Friday AND M.L Liebler & Cliff Bernier
Here's what literary readings we have coming up in the next two weeks:
This Friday, June 4, it's Leesburg First Friday with guest Ronald Culberson.
Want to "find the funny" in your stories to engage readers and keep them turning pages? Join FUNsulting founder and Funnier Speeches head writer Ron Culberson who will talk about ways to add humor to your writing-and your life! Bring, paper, pen, and a piece of writing to play with.
Leesburg Town Hall
25 West Market Street
Leesburg, VA
Time: 7:30 to 9:30 PM
Lower Level Meeting Room
General Admission: $6
Admission for Writer’s Center members and Town of Leesburg residents: $4
Ronald S. Culberson, MSW, CSP, has been studying and teaching about the benefits of humor since 1984. A sought-after speaker by healthcare professionals-lecturing on Humor as a Path to Excellence-Ron is also a speechwriting consultant, humor columnist, and emcee. He is the author of the book Is Your Glass Laugh Full? Some Thoughts on Seeing the Humor in Life and contributing author to Humor Me and Chicken Soup for the Nurses Soul II. Visit him online at (http://www.FUNsulting.com and http://www.FunnierSpeeches.com)
Then on Sunday, June 6 (at 2:00 P.M) at our next Open Door Reading Series event:
The Writer's Center welcomes visiting poet and performance artist M.L. Liebler, author of Wide Awake on Someone Else's Dream. He is joined by Cliff Bernier, whose most recent chapbook is Earth Suite.
Cliff Bernier is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Dark Berries and Earth Suite. He has appeared on the NPR show “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” and is featured on a CD of poetry duets, Poetry in Black and White as well as on a jazzpoetry CD, Live at IOTA Club and Café. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award.
M. L. Liebler is a internationally known & widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer, and he is the author of 13 books including the Award winning Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream featuring poems written in and about Russia, Israel, Germany, Alaska and Detroit. Wide Awake won both The Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence and The American Indie Book Award for 2009. Liebler has taught Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980, and he is the founding director of both The National Writer's Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization.
This Friday, June 4, it's Leesburg First Friday with guest Ronald Culberson.
Want to "find the funny" in your stories to engage readers and keep them turning pages? Join FUNsulting founder and Funnier Speeches head writer Ron Culberson who will talk about ways to add humor to your writing-and your life! Bring, paper, pen, and a piece of writing to play with.
Leesburg Town Hall
25 West Market Street
Leesburg, VA
Time: 7:30 to 9:30 PM
Lower Level Meeting Room
General Admission: $6
Admission for Writer’s Center members and Town of Leesburg residents: $4
Ronald S. Culberson, MSW, CSP, has been studying and teaching about the benefits of humor since 1984. A sought-after speaker by healthcare professionals-lecturing on Humor as a Path to Excellence-Ron is also a speechwriting consultant, humor columnist, and emcee. He is the author of the book Is Your Glass Laugh Full? Some Thoughts on Seeing the Humor in Life and contributing author to Humor Me and Chicken Soup for the Nurses Soul II. Visit him online at (http://www.FUNsulting.com and http://www.FunnierSpeeches.com)
Then on Sunday, June 6 (at 2:00 P.M) at our next Open Door Reading Series event:
The Writer's Center welcomes visiting poet and performance artist M.L. Liebler, author of Wide Awake on Someone Else's Dream. He is joined by Cliff Bernier, whose most recent chapbook is Earth Suite.
Cliff Bernier is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Dark Berries and Earth Suite. He has appeared on the NPR show “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” and is featured on a CD of poetry duets, Poetry in Black and White as well as on a jazzpoetry CD, Live at IOTA Club and Café. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award.
M. L. Liebler is a internationally known & widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer, and he is the author of 13 books including the Award winning Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream featuring poems written in and about Russia, Israel, Germany, Alaska and Detroit. Wide Awake won both The Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence and The American Indie Book Award for 2009. Liebler has taught Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980, and he is the founding director of both The National Writer's Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Nani Power Book Launch: Ginger and Ganesh
***
The Writer's Center will be on hand selling books, the author will be there with her Sharpie to chat, answer questions and sign your copy, and the bartenders at Bambule will be serving up some tasty ginger martinis and other drinks at happy hour prices.
As a bonus, we’ll have some hors d’oeuvres on the house and a raffle give-away of an Indian cooking basket care of Nani.
Please spread the word to friends, foodies and book lovers. This will be a festive literary event.
Here’s a taste of Ginger and Ganesh:
Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well.
And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power’s journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways – woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds, and from them leanrs the skills they learned from their own mothers.
Thorough the senses of the kitchen, Power re-examines her own path as a woman. She takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine, and the female psyche, with recipes and stories from each chapter revealing the struggle of modern women, both American and of Indian descent, searching for identity. Along the way, she managers to fall in love when she least expects to.
The recipes shared in this collection are far from ordinary; they are treasured family recipes from vegetarian homes in India – from homemade cheese cubes in a rich cilantro and almond curry to coconut-stuffed okra and luscious potato-curry dumplings. Power’s recipes and stories pave the road to understanding a culture that is at the same time ancient and so very much part of our modern world.
***
Nani Power is the author of a memoir, Feed the Hungry, and three novels, including critically acclaimed Crawling at Night. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She lives in Virginia. You can read Art Taylor's 2008 First Person Plural interview with Nani (upon the publication of Feed the Hungry) right here.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Art Taylor Interviews Writer's Center Workshop Leader Nani Power
We'll have not one but two guests today, as Art Taylor, who drives a great blog over at Art and Literature, will be interviewing one of our instructors, Nani Power. This interview originally appeared over on his blog, but it's a great interview and it works well for our Wednesday instructor feature. Nani will be teaching the advanced fiction workshop this winter.
For those of you who're interested in translations, by the way, check out Art and Literature next Monday. Art will be interviewing yours truly on the craft of literary translation. Should be fun. Here is Art's interview with Nani:
Nani Power’s first novel, Crawling at Night, earned the kind of attention and honors that most debut novelists would surely envy: Named a New York Times Notable Book of The Year, it was also a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the British Orange Prize, and has ultimately been translated into seven languages. Her second novel, The Good Remains, was also a New York Times Notable Book of The Year as well as a finalist for The Virginia Library Award, and her third, The Sea of Tears, was praised by Publishers Weekly as “a fine yarn of the lost and lonely seeking intimacy and love.”
This fall saw Power shifting genres with the publication of Feed the Hungry: A Memoir With Recipes, a book which begins with her childhood in Virginia and follows her adventures — culinary, familial, romantic and more — around the world: to Mexico, Peru, Rio, and Japan, with Power both broadening her cultural horizons and delving deeper into an understanding of herself. By book’s end, Power is urging readers toward journeys similar to her own, not only “tasting” the world out there but also savoring our own histories: “Start remembering what you ate as a child,” she writes, “ask people what they ate. Their stories start to tumble out as quickly as the memories of food, because they are all intertwined, food and memory, love and taste, all piecemeal of this lovely, sensual world we live in.”
In the Washington Post review of Feed the Hungry, critic Carolyn See wrote: “In Feed the Hungry, Power gives us the story of her family, along with the misunderstandings, the tragedies, the resentments that dogged them for as long as she can remember. The metaphor for all this restless longing is… food: what it means to all of us, how we present it to each other, what we especially crave and value, how it becomes the ultimate symbol for who we are and what we want to be, as well as what we want, or love, to eat.”
Power recently took the time to answer some questions about the new book and her writing in general.
After three novels, what prompted you to write a memoir?
I actually came about this book as an attempt to write about food. I’ve always loved cookbooks. They seem to have a storytelling quality when I read them — jottings of good times, tastes, cultures. Then, I started thinking about my favorite family recipes and how they intertwined through the tales of my family. As that materialized, I realized I also wanted to try and understand the reasonings and flaws of my family. As I wrote, I understood more of their fragility and the ephemerality of our lives — and food personifies this. A moment of a taste, a sensation, and then, gone. Recipes attempt to capture those moments.
The book avoids strict linearity — a straightforward “this happened and then this happened” narrative. Individual chapters don’t necessarily proceed chronologically (Chapter 7 is Peru 2003, for example, while Chapter 8 is New York 1990), and even within chapters you often flashforward and flashback, mixing together stories from different parts of your life. Can you comment on your use of these time shifts?
I guess you have really clued in to what really interests me stylistically in writing. And I suppose I shouldn’t say style because that implies a superficial mechanics, perhaps. What I strive to do — what interests me — is exactly the shifting and transformative nature of memory. Memory, at least as I can percieve it, because it is so subjective, appears to be the essence of fiction, an inaccurate and impressionistic blanket surrounding our minds. What makes one memory take precedence over another? And how they are woven in our daily consciousness, jumping to the surface with various markers — smell, déjà vu, sounds, and of course, back again, food. Eat something you ate as a child and the sensation is forcibly retrospective.
I find that what happens in real life distinctly breaks many of the “rules” of writing craft that we are taught, and I’d like to find a way to create a more of a sensual expression of this experience called life for the reader — merging time and place, shifting point-of-view, even bringing in major themes or characters late in the story. Playing with these ideas interests me a lot.
One of the book’s richest and most persistent themes is about how various cultures meet and mesh or clash: different worldviews from generation to generation, different nationalities or ethnicities meeting and greeting, even that scene where you compare your house to your childhood friend Nono’s, with its “refrigerator crammed with soft drinks and Cheez Whiz.” Is this a theme you explicitly set out to explore, or a pattern that emerged in the writing?
Oh, this is something that fascinates me endlessly — the merging and intertwining of ancient cultures and American modernity. I love the suburbs actually — strange, isn’t it? I grew up in the country and the suburbs were frowned upon as artificial and plastic. And yes they are, in a delightful way. To me, the suburbs reappropriates life and repackages it in a rough yet poetic sense. Restaurants that are theme parks of various cultures. Small ethnic food stalls amidst strip malls with mainstream Dollar shops and grocers. Immigrants in Costco buying burlap bags of Basmati rice and giant frozen boxes of pigs in a blanket. It is in the suburbs that we see the meshing and evolution of new cultural terroir.
To a great degree, your experiences make you who you are. Is it your experiences that give you the best knowledge and perspective (of self, of world)? Or your writing about those experiences that offers the greater wisdom?
Writing offers a sense of completion. One can explore the family as a separate whole, and thus gain a compassionate new view of the workings. A writer must view a character in all their dimensions, and as you do this to your own family — I mean take the time to remove the reputation, the biases — and see the person as a human, you gain an immense sense of understanding. I think everyone should write a memoir in their life, even if it is never shown to anyone. The main word to remember in memoir, that I tell my students, is “witness.” To tell the truth as you knew it. Whether you wish to share it with the world is your choice. The benefit in the end is very personal.
About Art Taylor:
Art Taylor is a fiction writer, book critic, and assistant professor of English at George Mason University.
His short stories have been published in several national magazines (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Lifeboat, and North American Review, for example) and in various regional journals/newspapers — among them Cities and Roads, The Lone Wolf Review, Wellspring, and the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer’s “Sunday Reader” section (the latter twice).
Since 2001, he has been a contributing editor to Metro Magazine in Raleigh, N.C., writing a monthly literary column. Since 2005, he has been a semi-regular reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, with a focus on mysteries and thrillers. Other literary essays/reviews have appeared in publications including The Armchair Detective, Mississippi Quarterly, Mystery Scene, North Carolina Literary Review, Spectator, The Independent, and The Oxford American.
For those of you who're interested in translations, by the way, check out Art and Literature next Monday. Art will be interviewing yours truly on the craft of literary translation. Should be fun. Here is Art's interview with Nani:
Nani Power’s first novel, Crawling at Night, earned the kind of attention and honors that most debut novelists would surely envy: Named a New York Times Notable Book of The Year, it was also a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the British Orange Prize, and has ultimately been translated into seven languages. Her second novel, The Good Remains, was also a New York Times Notable Book of The Year as well as a finalist for The Virginia Library Award, and her third, The Sea of Tears, was praised by Publishers Weekly as “a fine yarn of the lost and lonely seeking intimacy and love.”
This fall saw Power shifting genres with the publication of Feed the Hungry: A Memoir With Recipes, a book which begins with her childhood in Virginia and follows her adventures — culinary, familial, romantic and more — around the world: to Mexico, Peru, Rio, and Japan, with Power both broadening her cultural horizons and delving deeper into an understanding of herself. By book’s end, Power is urging readers toward journeys similar to her own, not only “tasting” the world out there but also savoring our own histories: “Start remembering what you ate as a child,” she writes, “ask people what they ate. Their stories start to tumble out as quickly as the memories of food, because they are all intertwined, food and memory, love and taste, all piecemeal of this lovely, sensual world we live in.”
In the Washington Post review of Feed the Hungry, critic Carolyn See wrote: “In Feed the Hungry, Power gives us the story of her family, along with the misunderstandings, the tragedies, the resentments that dogged them for as long as she can remember. The metaphor for all this restless longing is… food: what it means to all of us, how we present it to each other, what we especially crave and value, how it becomes the ultimate symbol for who we are and what we want to be, as well as what we want, or love, to eat.”
Power recently took the time to answer some questions about the new book and her writing in general.
After three novels, what prompted you to write a memoir?
I actually came about this book as an attempt to write about food. I’ve always loved cookbooks. They seem to have a storytelling quality when I read them — jottings of good times, tastes, cultures. Then, I started thinking about my favorite family recipes and how they intertwined through the tales of my family. As that materialized, I realized I also wanted to try and understand the reasonings and flaws of my family. As I wrote, I understood more of their fragility and the ephemerality of our lives — and food personifies this. A moment of a taste, a sensation, and then, gone. Recipes attempt to capture those moments.
The book avoids strict linearity — a straightforward “this happened and then this happened” narrative. Individual chapters don’t necessarily proceed chronologically (Chapter 7 is Peru 2003, for example, while Chapter 8 is New York 1990), and even within chapters you often flashforward and flashback, mixing together stories from different parts of your life. Can you comment on your use of these time shifts?
I guess you have really clued in to what really interests me stylistically in writing. And I suppose I shouldn’t say style because that implies a superficial mechanics, perhaps. What I strive to do — what interests me — is exactly the shifting and transformative nature of memory. Memory, at least as I can percieve it, because it is so subjective, appears to be the essence of fiction, an inaccurate and impressionistic blanket surrounding our minds. What makes one memory take precedence over another? And how they are woven in our daily consciousness, jumping to the surface with various markers — smell, déjà vu, sounds, and of course, back again, food. Eat something you ate as a child and the sensation is forcibly retrospective.
I find that what happens in real life distinctly breaks many of the “rules” of writing craft that we are taught, and I’d like to find a way to create a more of a sensual expression of this experience called life for the reader — merging time and place, shifting point-of-view, even bringing in major themes or characters late in the story. Playing with these ideas interests me a lot.
One of the book’s richest and most persistent themes is about how various cultures meet and mesh or clash: different worldviews from generation to generation, different nationalities or ethnicities meeting and greeting, even that scene where you compare your house to your childhood friend Nono’s, with its “refrigerator crammed with soft drinks and Cheez Whiz.” Is this a theme you explicitly set out to explore, or a pattern that emerged in the writing?
Oh, this is something that fascinates me endlessly — the merging and intertwining of ancient cultures and American modernity. I love the suburbs actually — strange, isn’t it? I grew up in the country and the suburbs were frowned upon as artificial and plastic. And yes they are, in a delightful way. To me, the suburbs reappropriates life and repackages it in a rough yet poetic sense. Restaurants that are theme parks of various cultures. Small ethnic food stalls amidst strip malls with mainstream Dollar shops and grocers. Immigrants in Costco buying burlap bags of Basmati rice and giant frozen boxes of pigs in a blanket. It is in the suburbs that we see the meshing and evolution of new cultural terroir.
To a great degree, your experiences make you who you are. Is it your experiences that give you the best knowledge and perspective (of self, of world)? Or your writing about those experiences that offers the greater wisdom?
Writing offers a sense of completion. One can explore the family as a separate whole, and thus gain a compassionate new view of the workings. A writer must view a character in all their dimensions, and as you do this to your own family — I mean take the time to remove the reputation, the biases — and see the person as a human, you gain an immense sense of understanding. I think everyone should write a memoir in their life, even if it is never shown to anyone. The main word to remember in memoir, that I tell my students, is “witness.” To tell the truth as you knew it. Whether you wish to share it with the world is your choice. The benefit in the end is very personal.
About Art Taylor:
Art Taylor is a fiction writer, book critic, and assistant professor of English at George Mason University.
His short stories have been published in several national magazines (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Lifeboat, and North American Review, for example) and in various regional journals/newspapers — among them Cities and Roads, The Lone Wolf Review, Wellspring, and the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer’s “Sunday Reader” section (the latter twice).
Since 2001, he has been a contributing editor to Metro Magazine in Raleigh, N.C., writing a monthly literary column. Since 2005, he has been a semi-regular reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, with a focus on mysteries and thrillers. Other literary essays/reviews have appeared in publications including The Armchair Detective, Mississippi Quarterly, Mystery Scene, North Carolina Literary Review, Spectator, The Independent, and The Oxford American.
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