Authors Electric

2020 has been a capricious year in so many ways, for all of us. I have continued to teach, hectoring students to keep writing, to find some catharsis in words, but I find myself derailed whenever I try to cultivate any sense of normalcy. Living in the United States at this particular point of time feels so dystopian that I have no words for the parallel universe of my fiction. So when I received a residency from Write On, at Door County, Wisconsin to work on my novel-in-progress, I grabbed the opportunity to travel somewhere, anywhere.   For two weeks, I am the lone writer  in nearly 39 acres of woods, orchards, and meadows. I am a short distance away from the waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan. Every evening offers a spectacular sunset over waters that calm the soul; there is also the occasional deer, lots of chattering birds and humming wasps and bees, and one harmless garter snake I startled during an evening walk. There are no people.    This feels like parad...

Torschlusspanik is one of those wonderful German coinages that envisions an entire universe in a single word. The South African artist William Kentridge defines it as: The panic of closing doors. The fear of opening one door rather than another, and hearing it slam behind you, once you have made your decision; but maybe that decision is the wrong one, so you would rather stand paralysed in front of three doors to avoid making it. Torschlusspanik. William Kentridge in interview with Peter Asden, "The art of war" for The Financial Times, 7/8 July 2018. Sandy Horvath-Dori from Grand Junction, CO, USA [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] Germans associate Torschlusspanik with the passage of time: a midlife crisis, a biological clock ticking, career stagnation. We've all felt that fear, even when we were still young. No one wants to be left behind. We all want to be invited to the cool kids' party. Yet the thought of having to make a cho...

Latinx Chicago poet, author, professor Sánchez It's not easy being an American metropolis, forever hassled, baited and struggling to live up to the sometimes conflicting ideals of opportunity, freedom, enterprise, and cosmopolitanism. Urban dwellers like myself like to dream of their hometown being a center of creative arts, education, science, architecture, and enterprise. On days when the sunlight glistens off the lake and the splendid downtown towers, when festivals and budding trees announce early spring, and when the trains run on time, we glimpse the shining promise of our urban work-in-progress. Just as often we watch it fail miserably. We note its corruption, squalor, and violence on sorrowful, embarrassing display. Then, with little fanfare, we've also watched it rise - with little credit given - stubbornly from all manner of adversity, storm, strife, blunders, chicanery, and disease. In so doing we confound the naysayers who fear and loathe our urban ways as...

It is the season for families and feasting; and for some of us, the season to catch up on books we've wanted to read through the year but never did. Which is how I -- FINALLY -- read Olive Kitteridge by the fabulous Elizabeth Strout .  This is a book that won the Pulitzer Prize and is now an HBO miniseries. It interlinks short stories around the central character of Olive Kitteridge, a female curmudgeon whom the reader meets at various stages of her life, as seen through different eyes. Olive is wonderfully nuanced as a character, as are the rest of the cast.  This is also a season of forced jollity and family tensions and this book, by making us empathise with a misanthrope, is a master class on how to love the people in our lives, warts and all.  My favourite story was "Security", and as Olive grapples with parenting mistakes and a grown-up son, the story is excruciatingly painful and heartwarming at the same time.  The message driven home by this b...

UT ponders process at AWM Six years in Chicago and I no longer feel like a tourist. Still, I like it when visitors come and give me an excuse to rubberneck the Windy City's attractions. I doubt this will wear off. I lived in San Francisco for 30 years and never tired of taking friends and family around, always discovering something new. I was ready for another round this July when my eldest daughter, Alicia and her husband Brian paid my inamorata Eleanor and I a visit, as they do from time to time. They were on their way home to Mexico City, where they run American and English literature programs at an international school, having done that sort of thing on four continents. They had just spent fortnight in Ireland visiting Brian's mother. Right off, Brian, an author and musician as well, announced in his lyrical Irish brogue: "I must see your Writers' Museum." "Writers' museum?" I hesitated. "I didn't know we had one." In fac...

Sunsets behind the El Gabar  I didn’t quite know what to expect from a Joya residency; the description sounded so different from the usual residencies that I applied for an adventure. Joya: AiR is an artist run not-for-profit arts organisation and--most importantly--an off-grid residency in rural Andalucía, Spain. “Off-grid, eh?” said my son, the only member of the family who had been to Andalusia. “If it's all solar panels and water harvesting, they’ll hand you a lota and tell you to go about your business in the fields. Water harvesting sounds like unwashed people to me, and we didn’t shower for days when we camped in Malaga.” I quickly checked that the email said individual rooms had attached bathrooms, and reassured myself that young men camping at seventeen were not the best ambassadors for personal hygiene, whether in Malaga or elsewhere. Almonds within easy reach Getting to off-grid Cortijada Los Gázquez looked challenging through the dirt roads line...