(Stuart Dybek, Aleksandar Hemon, Nami Mun, Noreen Tomassi) The session will involve readings and discussion with three leading authors who will illuminate how immigrant writings have influenced American literature and culture over the last fifty years.

Published Date: June 28, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 2nd, 2012. The recording features Noreen Tomassi, Aleksandar Hemon , Stuart Dybek, and Nami Mun. You'll now hear Malcolm O'Hagan from the American Writers Museum provide introductions.

Malcolm O'Hagan:

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Malcolm O'Hagan. I'm President of the American Writers Museum Foundation and our mission is to create the first national museum that will celebrate our great American writers.

Long overdue, don't you think? Well, it's coming to a neighborhood near you. Kidding. It's coming to Chicago and I'm not going to take time from the panel, but I would ask all of you to check us out at our website. Just Google American Writers Museum.

As you probably know, world leaders are coming to Chicago this spring and we thought this would be a nice time to engage them in a discussion about the impact of literature. We will be mounting a virtual online exhibition May 1 in which we will ask foreign leaders to tell us which American authors and works have influenced them, which books they would recommend to fellow leaders, and tell us a little bit about their reading habits. We've already uncovered some very interesting information. We've asked a number of American authors to tell us their recommendations for books that foreign leaders ought to read, and also what foreign leaders or foreign authors have influenced their work. We're asking all of you the same question. If you had a chance to recommend a book or two or any work to foreign leaders, what would you recommend?

We have a survey form which some of you have received. If you didn't get one, there's one next to the water cooler on the way out. We'd love if you pick one up, fill it out or fill it out online when you get home. We're more interested in the second part of the question. If you recommend a work, we would like to know why. I guarantee you this is going to lead to some interesting discussions and debates. So far, the responses we're getting are all over the map, which is the way we'd love it to be.

Anyway, welcome. We're delighted you're here. Keep following us at our website and I'm delighted to have this panel that we're sponsoring. We're extraordinarily fortunate to have such distinguished panelists This afternoon. I'm just going to introduce the moderator, Noreen Tomassi. Noreen is an author and currently Director of the Center for Fiction in Manhattan, and I'm very honored and delighted that Noreen has agreed to be the moderator. Noreen is a member of our National Advisory Council. Noreen, I'll hand it over to you.

Noreen Tomassi:

Hello everyone. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming. I hope it wasn't too difficult to wind your way through the Hilton Chicago and find us here. For those of you who don't know the Center for Fiction, I hope you'll visit our booth on the exhibition floor and learn more about us. We're based in New York City, but we have programs that reach writers across the country, so please come and visit when you can.

The title of this panel today is Finding Home: Immigrant Voices in American Literature, and we're very lucky to have three writers based here in Chicago with us today. Here's how this will go. The writers will read for seven or eight minutes from their work and then we'll have a discussion. Then we'll open it to the floor for some questions. The reading order will be as follows. Nami Mun will read first, then Aleksandar Hemon and then Stuart Dybek. Before they begin, I'd just like to tell you a little bit about them, although I'm sure you know a great deal about them already and have read all their books and are rushing out to buy all of the books that you haven't read by them immediately following this.

Nami Mun is the author of the novel Miles from Nowhere, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize for new writers and the Asian American Literary Award, selected as an editor's choice in top ten first novels by Book List, as best fiction of 2009 by Amazon and as an Indie Next pick. Chicago Magazine named her best new novelist of 2009. Her stories have been published in Granta, The Iowa Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere. She's the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award. She teaches at Columbia College here in Chicago and she grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. As I introduce each of the writers, I'll be telling you a little bit about where they were born and where they live now.

Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction. I Sailed With Magellan, The Coast of Chicago and Childhood And Other Neighborhoods. He has also published two poetry collections. Among his honors are the Lannan and Whiting Awards and NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2007, Stuart was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and one day later was awarded the 2007 Rea Award for a short story, an annual prize that's given for originality and influence on that genre. He currently teaches at Northwestern after more than 30 years teaching at Western Michigan University. He is Chicago born. His father immigrated to the United States from Poland.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles and The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His stories, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review and elsewhere. He teaches at Northwestern and has received a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was then Yugoslavia. He has lived in the United States since 1992 when he was stranded here at the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. Please join me in welcoming our panelists and Nami will read first. Thank you.

Nami Mun:

Can you guys hear me okay back there in the back row? Okay. I'm just going to read you a very short excerpt from my novel Miles From Nowhere. All you need to know is that it takes place in 1980s New York, and we follow June. She's a Korean American teen runaway and at this point in the novel, she has been living on the streets for about five years or so and is in a relationship. I would call it an unhealthy relationship, but you guys decide.

"I want to see your insides." Benny had said. We were high on dust and he wanted to cut me open. We decided to quit shooting up, so we test drove every drug we could find and found dust. When he said he wanted to cut me, this seemed reasonable. That's what happens when you smoke. You put that stem to your lips and the world shrinks to a postcard. You see everything all at once. You understand the connections. The moon's a slice of salami, your mother's a ship, light bulbs and baby heads, honeydew and ladybugs, knives and scabs and love. Everything made sense. Benny made sense.

"I want to cut you open." He said. "I said yes already." "Yeah, but I really want to." "You want me to get the blade?" I asked. "No, I think that should be my job. I don't want to be lazy about this." He rushed to the table by the window and rifled through our pile of pennies, cotton swabs, cans of chili, forks and knives and packets of oyster crackers. He came back to bed with a razor blade. "Okay, get on your back." He said, sitting up on his knees. "You want to cut my stomach?" "No, I'm sorry. Get on your stomach. I'll practice on your back first and when I get better, then we can open up your front."

When I turned over, I thought I might throw up. We had drunk almost a half a gallon of milk each to protect our stomach lining from the dust. I hated the taste of milk, so Benny mixed it with beer, and now I wanted to puke all over, but then he cut me quickly without warning, just below the right shoulder blade. "Did you feel that?" He asked. His voice steady. I told him I didn't, but really I wasn't sure. "How about this?" He made a second slice, slowly this time along the left shoulder blade. I thought I could feel something hiss out of me.

"Am I bleeding?" "Yeah." He stopped a trickle from sliding down my side. "You taste like raisins." "Can you see anything?" I asked. He got close, his breath warming the cuts. "I think you have wings." "Doesn't everybody?" I said. "Fuck." He said, like a sigh. "Jesus fucking Christ. I love you so much." He laughed and kissed the back of my head. "Okay. Okay." He said, "I need to focus." He splayed the cuts with his fingers and examined them, making little sounds of discovery. I asked him what he saw now. "I think I see a bone." "Okay." I said. "I think I see a bone." He said again, as if saying it for the first time. He got up, almost tripped while stumbling to our table and came back with a spoon. He jimmied the handle of the spoon into a cut until he found something he could tap.

"You hear that?" He asked. I told him I did. "What does it feel like?" "Like you're tapping a bone in my body." "I'm so glad this doesn't hurt. I don't want to hurt you." "It doesn't hurt." "Maybe this is your superhero power." He said, "Maybe you can't feel pain." The mattress felt damp under my breasts. I wanted to turn over, but I didn't think I should. I felt dizzy. "I don't feel good." I said. "That's impossible. We just agreed that you didn't feel pain." "You think I need a doctor?" "I am a doctor." He said, almost sounding hurt. "No, I need a real one. Someone with a stethoscope." "Hold on. Wait here. I think I saw one in the trash can outside." Benny got up, got dressed and said he'd be right back. Weeks later, after stitches and bandages and scabs, Benny told this story to some people but ended it by saying it was his idea to get me to the hospital, not for my sake, it's so he could steal the stethoscope. He never got the laugh he wanted. I'll stop there. Thank you.

Aleksandar Hemon:

I'm going to stand up if you don't mind. It helps my circulation. I'll read from the Lazarus project from the very beginning of one of two story lines. You don't need to know anything except that the world is a horrible place, but you probably know that already.

I'm a reasonably loyal citizen of a couple of countries. In America, that somber land, I waste my vote, paid taxes grudgingly, share my life with a native wife and try hard not to wish painful death to the idiot president. This is written during the happy days of the Bush administration. But I also have a Bosnian passport I seldom use. I go to Bosnia for heartbreaking vacations and funerals and on or around March 1st with other Chicago Bosnians, I proudly and dutifully celebrate our Independence Day with an appropriately ceremonious dinner. It was yesterday, in fact, the Bosnian Independence Day.

Strictly speaking, the Independence Day is February 29th. A typically Bosnian convolution. I suppose it would be too weird and unsovereignly to celebrate it every leap year, so it is an annual chaotic affair taking place at some suburban hotel. Bosnians come in droves and early, parking their cars. They might run into a fight over a parking space for the disabled. A couple of men swing their crutches at each other trying to determine who might be more impaired, the one whose leg was blown off by a landmine or the one whose spine was damaged by a beating of the Serbian [foreign language 00:14:33].

While waiting on the vestibule for no discernible reason to enter the preposterously named dining hall, Westchester or Windsor or Lake Tahoe, my fellow double citizen smoke as numerous signs informed them that smoking is strictly prohibited. Once the door was open, they rush toward the white clothed tables with an excess of glasses and utensils driven by a poor people's affliction, the timeless feeling that plenty never means enough for all. They spread the napkins in their laps, they hang them on their chests. They have a hard time explaining to the wait staff that they would like to eat their salad with the main dish, not before it. They make disparaging remarks about the food which then turn into contemptuous contemplation of American obesity.

Pretty soon, whatever meager Americanness has been accrued in the past decade or so entirely evaporates for the night. Everybody, myself included, is solidly Bosnian. Everybody has an instructive story about cultural differences between us and them. Of these things I sometimes wrote. Americans, we are bound to agree, go out after they wash their hair with their hair still wet even in the winter. We concede that no sane Bosnian mother would ever allow her child to do that, as everybody knows that going out with your hair wet commonly results in lethal brain inflammation.

At this point, I usually attest that my American wife, even though she's a neurosurgeon, a brain doctor, mind you, does the same thing. Everybody around the table shakes their heads concerned not only about her health and welfare, but about the dubious prospects of my intercultural marriage as well. Someone is likely to mention the baffling absence of draft in the United States. Americans keep all of their windows open and they don't care if they're exposed to draft, although it is well known that being exposed to severe airflow might cause brain inflammation. In my country, we are suspicious of free flowing air.

Inevitably over the dessert, the war is discussed first in terms of battles or massacres, unintelligible to someone like me who has not experienced the horror. Eventually, the conversation turns to funny ways of not dying. Everyone is roaring with laughter and our guests who do not speak Bosnian would never know that the amusing stories say about the many dishes based on nettles. Nettle pie, nettle pudding, nettle steak, or about a certain Selco who survived a mob of murderous [foreign language 00:17:08] by playing dead and now he's dancing over there and someone points him out. The skinny, sinewy survivor soaking his shirt with the sweat of lucky resurrection.

In the official part of the evening, cultural diversity, ethnic tolerance, and Allah are praised, and there is always a series of prideful speeches followed by a program celebrating the brain inflammation free arts and culture of the Bosnian Herzegovinan people. A choir of kids of uneven height and width, which always reminds me of the Chicago skyline, struggles with a traditional Bosnian song, their hearing and accent forever altered by American teenagehood. They dance too, the kids, under the approving gaze of a mustached dance coach. The girls are wearing headscarves, silky ballooning trousers and short vests, foregrounding their nascent bosoms. The boys wear fez' and felt pants.

No one in the audience has ever worn such clothes in their lives. The costumed fantasies are enacted to recall a dignified past divested of evil and poverty. I participate in that self-deception. In fact, I like to help with it for at least once a year. I am a Bosnian patriot. Just like everybody else, I enjoy the inert ability of belonging to one nation and not another. I like deciding who can join us, who is out and who is to be welcome when visiting. The dance performance is also supposed to impress our potential American benefactors who are far more likely to forecall their charitable money in support of the Association of Bosnian Americans if convinced that our culture is nothing like theirs so that they can exhibit their tolerance and help our unintelligible customs now that we have reached these shores and are never going back to be preserved forever like a fly in resin. Thank you.

Stuart Dybek:

Story set about 11 blocks further south and several blocks further west in a neighborhood called Pilsen. The situation is that a boy living with a mother who's a widow, that family has now been joined by their grandfather who's been a wastrel Polish immigrant and a mystery to the boy, he's basically moved in with a mother probably to die. His feet are frozen. He soaks them every night in a bucket. His name's Jaja, that's grandfather in Polish.

I sat at one under the kitchen table copying down words that would be on the spelling test the next day and Jaja just sat on the other mumbling incessantly as if finally free to talk about the jumble of past he'd never mentioned. Wars, revolutions, strikes, journeys to strange places all run together and the music, especially Chopin "Chopin." He'd whisper hoarsely, pointing to the ceiling.

I failed to tell you one thing. Then also having returned to this four story building in Pilsen was the landlady's daughter, Marcy, that the boy in the story who's our narrator, fell madly in love with, even though he is just a little boy. She's back from Julliard, pregnant father unknown, and she's upstairs playing Chopin all the time.

It sounded different to me, some muffled thumping and rumbling we'd been hearing ever since Marcy returned home. I could hear the intensity of the crescendos that made the silverware clash, but it never occurred to me to care what she was playing. What mattered was that I could hear her play each night, could feel her playing just a floor above, almost as if she were in our apartment, she seemed that close. "Each night Chopin. It's all she thinks about." I shrugged. "You don't know?" Jaja asked as if I were lying, as if he were humoring me. "How should I know? And I suppose you don't know the grand Valse Brillante when you hear it either. How could you know Chopin was 21 when he composed it, about the same age as the girl upstairs. He composed it in Vienna before he went to Paris. Don't they teach you that in school? What are you studying?" "Spelling." "Can you spell dummkopf?"

I scribbled this all up now I can't follow my scribble. At some point Jaja says to him, "This was Paderewski's favorite waltz. She plays it like an angel." "Who's Paderewski?" I asked, thinking it might be one of Jaja's old friends from Alaska. "Do you know who's George Washington, who's DiMaggio, who's Walt Disney?" "Sure." "I thought so. Paderewski was like them except he played Chopin. Understand? See, deep down inside, Lefty, you know more than you think."

Each night, Jaja would tell me more about Chopin, describing the preludes or ballads or the mazurkas so that even if I hadn't heard them, I could imagine them especially Jaja's favorites the nocturnals, shimmering like black pools. "She's playing her way through the waltzes." He said, speaking in his low raspy voice. "She's young, but already knows Chopin's secret. A waltz can tell more about the soul than the hymn."

One night Jaja and Marcy played so that I expected at any moment the table would break and the ceiling collapse. The bulbs began to flicker and the overhead fixture then went out. The entire flat went dark. "Are the lights out in there too?" Mom yelled from the parlor. "Don't worry, it must be a fuse." I lit the burners on the stove, their shadows hovered dark and the blue crowns of flame flickering Jaja across the walls. His head pitched, his arms flew up as he struck the notes, playing the table as if it were a grand piano. I imagined plastered dust wafting down coating the kitchen, a fine network of cracks spreading through the dishes.

"Michael." My mother called. "I'm sharpening my pencil." I stood by the sharpener, grinding it as hard as I could, then sat back down and went on writing. The table rocked under my point, but the letters formed perfectly. I spelled new words, words I'd never heard before. Yet as soon as I wrote their meanings, they were clear. They were in another language, one in which words were understood by their sounds, like music. After the lights came back on, I couldn't remember what they meant and threw them away.

Jaja slumped back in his chair. He was flushed and mopped his forehead with a paper napkin. "So you liked that one?" He said. "Which one was it?" He always asked me that and little by little I had begun recognizing their melodies. "A polonaise." I guessed, "In A flat major." "Ah." Shook his head. "You think everything with a little spirit is a polonaise. The revolutionary etude was a waltz." "How could that be a waltz?" "A posthumous waltz. You know what posthumous means?" "What?" "It means music after a person's dead, the kind of waltz that has to carry back from the other side. Chopin wrote it to a young woman he loved. He kept his feelings for her secret, but never forgot her. Sooner or later, feelings come bursting out. The dead are as sentimental as anyone else. You know what happened when Chopin died?" "No."

"They rang bells all over Europe. It was winter. The Prussians heard them, they jumped on their horses. They had cavalry there, no tanks, horses. They rode until they came to the house where Chopin lay dead on his bed. His arms were crossed over his chest. There was plaster drying on his hands and face. The Prussians rode right up the stairs, barged into the room, slashing with sabers, their horses stamping, kicking up their front hooves. They hacked the piano, stabbed the music, winded the music in the piano, spilled kerosene from the lamp, set it on fire. They rolled Chopin's piano to the window. It was those French windows. The piano wouldn't fit, so they rammed it through taking out part of the wall. It crashed three stories into the street and when it hit, it made a sound that shook the city. Piano lay smoking and the Prussians galloped over it and left. And later, some of Chopin's friends came, snuck back, removed his heart, and sent it in a little jeweled box to be buried in Warsaw."

Noreen Tomassi:

Thanks everyone. Those were wonderful readings. Can you all hear me all right? We're sharing a microphone here. I just want to point out how President Malcolm O'Hagan was in assembling this panel of writers to talk about Finding Home: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature. Because as you probably noticed from they're reading, they're each placed differently on that continuum of immigration from the more immediate immigration of Sasha to the distant immigration of Stuart's family. I think that we can all acknowledge in the room that immigration is a constant in the stream of American literature and has been for a very long time.

As I was putting together some thoughts for the panel, just a random list of names that include Sabello and Nabokov and Jamaica Kincaid and Frank McCourt and Bharati Mukherjee and Salman Rushdie and Ha Jin. The list just goes on and on and on, and it's almost a constant influence. You can't speak about American literature without speaking about the influence of the world on America and on writing here. I'd like to begin by asking each of the panelists, since this is an American Writers Museum panel, about their thoughts of the writers who have immigrated to the United States who they feel have had a profound effect on their own literature. I thought maybe we might start with Stuart and work our way down.

Stuart Dybek:

Well, the first writers that I really remember loving were the twenties generation of Americans. The reason I bring that up is that when I discovered a whole different set of writers, it was kind of in counterpoint. Reading Bernard Malamud in relationship to Sherwood Anderson or Ernest Hemingway was in some ways really different than reading Bernard Malamud by himself.

I have to say that the writers that influenced me the most were the actual European writers, so the Russians and Babel and a lot of the Spanish. I think what it was that I loved in those writers was what I loved in Malamud was I could feel the fairytale, I could feel the folk tale. You don't read in a sequestered. At that same time, I was listening to a lot of music that was in the exact same thing. That whole generation of composers like Bartok and Kodály and Janá?ek, who were bringing the folk music into European art music. That combination was very rich and heady for me.

Aleksandar Hemon:

I relish the fact that the greatest American novel of the 20th century was written by Russian immigrants, which is of course Lolita by Nabokov. It's not only the greatest novel, but in some ways it's essential for understanding the 20th century America, both the passion that it might inspire and the madness of it all.

I mean, I live here so I don't have to find anything interesting here, but I find a lot of things interesting. What I find interesting in American literature is the openness of the language that of course it afforded me a space to do stuff with the language. I like the story, which I often tell it, that William Carlos Williams was asked in an interview by someone about a particular strange idiom that he had used in one of his poems, an interviewer asked him where he heard that idiom or where he found it, where he got it from. William Carlos William said, "From our polish mothers." To me that meant and means that traces of immigration and other people's experiences are left in the language already. There was no need to import it as it were. It was there already. It is there already. I can just put another layer on top of it.

I used to teach English as a second language and it would start with the map of the world and all the words in English that came from the countries of the world marked on the territories of those countries so that sushi would be covering Japan. Of course, it's a complicated country in many ways, and xenophobia has just as long tradition as its openness. In fact, they're mutually enforcing as it were.

I like a lot of American writers who are not Anglo-Saxon, but there's also a difference between those who write about assimilation and those who write about whatever the opposite of assimilation is. I love Malamud too, but Malamud writes about the generation as it were before the assimilation where someone like Roth or Bellow, they're all about assimilation, the next generation.

I also find remarkable that American literature as it is now, it cannot be ethnically divided. In some ways, the notion of immigrant literature in America is nonsensical because there are American writers who write about immigration and there are immigrant writers who write about Americans, and there are those who write about the interaction of Americans and immigrants, which it's hard to imagine how it would be possible to write about an American life that includes no encounters with immigrants. The borders between immigrant and non-immigrant literature, or American and non-American literature, whatever it is, are non-existent. This is not to disparage this panel of course, because that's precisely why it is interesting to talk about it because it is becoming increasingly more difficult to talk about it in simple terms, which is why we need to talk.

Nami Mun:

Like Stuart, I mean, I went to the UC, Berkeley, and that's where I did my undergrad as an English lit major. Then I went to University of Michigan afterwards. I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, but I grew up here in the States and of course I was educated here and I read the canonical works of European writers and such. I wasn't really exposed to Asian American writers too much in the classroom anyway. I mean, I spent a year studying Chekhov and Hemingway and really the book that really influenced me the most is a book that would probably never be taught in UC, Berkeley, but it's called Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. To me, that book, to me, it's a very much an American novel that's a kind of America that most people like to ignore, but it sort of spoke to me because it's sort covering the submerged population, I guess, of American society.

Those were my influences as a writer. That said, there were many Asian American writers who have paved the way for me so that I can publish a book where the theme isn't necessarily Asian American. I am an Asian American as a person, but at this point my book doesn't necessarily have to be Asian American. I don't feel that pressure anymore to write ethnic literature, I guess, for lack of a better phrase.

Some of those people like Younghill Kang, I don't know if you guys know him, his first book, The Grass Roof was published in 1931, and it was actually Thomas Wolfe had read the first four chapters of his book and suggested for his editor Ed Scribner to publish it. He was the first Korean American writer to get published in the States, and the first book was about assimilation, and it got really well reviewed because the book itself was sort of disdainful of Korea and its practices at the time, and sort of a very nationalistic spirit of the time.

Then the second book, which was published I believe in 1937, Younghill had been living in the states for a while and he wasn't able to progress. The American Dream was sort of dissipating very quickly for him, and he ended up actually identifying more and more with the African-American community, and actually most of the second book was about Harlem. That book got published and it was very disdainful of American society. Of course, that got horribly reviewed and not well received. There's this sort of, I guess quandary for Asian American writers I feel like. If you write a book about assimilation, you have a tendency to get good publicity and there's room for you in the marketplace. If you try to get out of that pigeonhole and you want to actually write a book that's not about the immigrant experience, then you sort of get penalized in some ways.

Anyway, so my answer is a little bit convoluted. I'm sorry. I was talking about my influences are mostly European writers and American writers and not so much Asian American writers. Like I said, these are authors, I have to put in Maxine Hong Kingston, who really put Asian American female writers on the map for us. She was to me, the first person who was critically well-received. Then Amy Tan in some ways sort changed it even more, proving that Asian American writers could be bestselling authors at the same time as well. That's a weird way of answering the question, but I hope I answered it. Yeah.

Noreen Tomassi:

One thing I note is that the idea of immigration has changed so radically. I remember when Salman Rushdie's book, Satanic Verses came out, the key idea that was buried in all of the controversy, one of the key ideas was that this notion of a person moving from one country assimilating, losing that country in that culture, was not the idea that he felt was the idea of the future. The idea of the future was different kind of ways that would come from the places in between, the people who were astride two cultures or moving.

It seems to me that that is the model that is more apparent in literature now everywhere, not just in the United States. Also, that increasingly you find writers not only in America, but writers who are not writing in their native language, but writing in a second language as well. I wonder what you feel about that, the whole nature in a way of assimilation and siloing of writers is changed, I think somewhat, maybe I'm more optimistic, but do you feel that as well?

Aleksandar Hemon:

I think I'd like to respond to that. I think that rashly the notions outdated already. The notion of being in between is outdated, that now writers and I'd like to claim that for myself, operate in the overlapping space and the overlapping spaces are available. Available technologically and logistically, but also culturally. It's possible to write not only in your non-native language, but in two languages. It's possible to publish in two countries simultaneously or several languages simultaneously. It's possible to circulate in two cultures or three cultures simultaneously.

Two, how would I put it? Close to the writer cultures, nevermind a worldwide translation, which is what Rushdie had with the Satanic Verses. There are readers who could also be multicultural finding something and not operating the same overlapping cultures as Rushdie. I think that Rushdie, and I mean he was a visionary in that regard, I agree, but I think it's already different now. Not only among writers, but I play soccer with people who guys goes to Nigeria in the winter for obvious reasons because he lives in Chicago, or Chile. He has a business that he can do in Nigeria and in Chicago and goes back and forth. He speaks English and he speaks, I don't know which of the Nigerian languages is native language. It's possible to operate in those two spaces.

What is remarkable to me is how slow the mainstream culture in this country is in recognizing that. Nevermind the GOP clowns who cannot recognize their own faces in the mirror, but just people who actually think within what we call culture to recognize that even Rushdie, who is great and admirable is already a little obsolescent. I mean the notion, not he, but the notion you propose.

Noreen Tomassi:

Stuart, I'm curious as to what, over the arc of your writing career, what you think that notion of.

Stuart Dybek:

Well, you can argue that it started way earlier and nobody noticed it because it was being done by the Irish and that a lot of the cultures that you're seeing, Rushdie for instance, have been cultures that were victims of imperialism or colonialism in one way or another. Like the Irish, they master the language and it was one way to gain power over the minority culture. There's any number of perspectives you can turn the question around and look at it from that angle in it. That political one is certainly one.

Noreen Tomassi:

Yeah.

Aleksandar Hemon:

I think I would agree. At the same time, the Irish were more easily assimilated in that English was the available language to write the literature, and also then they could melt into the pot. Now, I think that at this time, you can kiss the melting pot goodbye. It's gone. I think that fact has neutral values of now. There's some good things about it, some bad, and I don't think that melting is good itself, but the friction that it causes in the way that the integration in society happens has changed in some good ways and some bad ways.

Noreen Tomassi:

Increasingly, we're also seeing books. There's always been some, even the great modernist novels uses of other languages in books, but we see increasingly in novels the use of say Spanish and English and street Spanish and idiom all mixed up together without any attempt really to modulate it for the English-speaking reader, which also seems to me a difference and an important one. I agree, Sasha, I don't know that all this has penetrated mainstream culture, but Junot Diaz's book did win the Pulitzer, and so that's pretty mainstream. I wonder if you, for example, or if other writers feel freer about how you move across those boundaries, not only of language, but just of culture in the work you're doing. If you feel freer then than me.

Aleksandar Hemon:

I operate in fields of freedom. Junot's book is interesting. It's groundbreaking so many ways. It's a great book of course, but also it's a precedent now and it's clearly written. I know Junot, we talked about it. It is essentially written for a bilingual reader, the reader of the future. Not just the future of the many readers in the present, but it counts on that overlapping space. That's the ideal reader. It is not condescending. It just takes it as a fact that it is becoming increasingly rare to have a monocultural living experience. Increasingly difficult, rather than rare, to exclude yourself from interaction with however you define the otherness or the other culture. To the point that if you live in a city like New York or Chicago, some large cities, it becomes entirely meaningless. To me, living in Chicago is the American experience, but I do not find myself ever hanging out with people who would exclusively be called American in whatever [inaudible 00:44:46] imagines American is.

In other words, I operate in a bilingual world, not only what I do is constantly continuously bilingual, but most of the people I meet are some level bilingual or bicultural at least. That's pretty much becoming a norm, at least in some parts of Chicago. Junot simply didn't even have to prove anything or try hard to build something out of it. He just wrote in it and wrote out of it, and that is remarkable. I don't know, however, since Junot won that I would be hard-pressed to remember a Pulitzer Prize winner that was not full of various Midwestern epiphanies.

Noreen Tomassi:

Nami, if you want to respond to that.

Nami Mun:

Sure. When you were asking that question, the first book that came into mind was there's an author named Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She came out with this book called Dictee, and that book actually is written in, I believe it has either four or five different languages, and there's no explanation. There's French, Korean, Chinese, Latin, and I can't remember the fifth one right now. The work doesn't defend itself, doesn't feel like it has to defend itself in any way. That came out in the eighties. I'm not sure if that's the norm or I'm not sure if that book would be widely read. I taught it in my class, but my students hated me while I was teaching it. I think it's becoming more and more common and it seems more accepted by the readers. Doesn't seem as-

Aleksandar Hemon:

Well, I mean, because it interests me. You can find stories in The New Yorker that are bilingual without the other language being translated. I mean, I've done it and it's not particularly remarkable in itself. The New Yorker is mainstream. It's not equally of course represented, or the language are not equally represented for obvious reasons, but it's there.

Noreen Tomassi:

Stuart, do you have any comment on that?

Stuart Dybek:

Only that no matter what generation of writers is writing, the freshest voices are trying to redefine the world, and this is one version of that happening. What happens is that the following voices make mannerisms and cliches out of what seems fresh, and then another generation comes along and creates something else that we'd be having a panel about.

Noreen Tomassi:

I also want to ask you, it seems a wasted opportunity not to ask three Chicago writers of the influence of living in a city like Chicago, which is, like New York, a microcosm of the world in a way, on your writing and on the kind of writers you meet and the kind of literary community you have here. I wonder if you wanted to begin, Nami, with thoughts about that.

Nami Mun:

Oh, I have noticed that I've been writing a lot of winter scenes. Everyone's really cold and I'm getting really good at describing all the different kinds of snow. That's the one thing that I've been noticing. I mean, please don't hurt me. I haven't been here long enough to be considered, I don't think, a Chicago writer. I've only been here three and a half years or so. In all honesty, I've moved around so many times in my life that I don't necessarily consider myself belonging to any particular region I've lived in. I grew up in Seoul, I grew up in New York, I grew up in San Francisco, I grew up in Michigan. I'm still growing up.

Living in an urban environment with writers, I mean, come on. I have Stuart Dybek right next to me. This is crazy. I have Sasha here. I'm sandwiched by two geniuses. By the way, I would like some credit for agreeing to be on this panel. I think it takes a lot of nuts to do so. Thank you. I mean, that's the great thing about Chicago is that the writers are really much more accessible, I think, and more fun to hang out with than New York. I think New York is, it's a little bit intimidating in some ways. They're just so much more, I don't know. Now all New Yorkers are going to hate me, but a lot more of the business talk maybe than in Chicago. I feel like Chicago I can just talk to you about stories if I want to.

Noreen Tomassi:

Stuart?

Stuart Dybek:

What's the question?

Nami Mun:

How do you feel about being a Chicago writer?

Stuart Dybek:

How we feel about being a Chicago writer?

Noreen Tomassi:

Basically it is.

Stuart Dybek:

Well, I mean, I love the city. It's just part of living here.

Noreen Tomassi:

Well, I guess the question has to do with not only Chicago as a city with beautiful architecture and really cold weather, but the idea of Chicago as like New York, a city with waves of immigration that move and change the city constantly.

Stuart Dybek:

I mean, that's certainly what stirred in me about it. I used to bring my friends home to meet my Busha, and it was a really big deal for me to grow up with her. I think what happened to me was the love of ethnicity, that at first was a personal familial relationship, grew into a love of ethnicity in general. It's sometimes called pan-ethnic. I admit it, if it's ethnic, I'm probably going to like it. If it's McDonald's, I'm going to hate it. That gets reflected in your writing and your friendships all through your life in every respect. It's just a huge pleasure to be sitting here with these two writers.

Aleksandar Hemon:

Well, this is my adopted hometown, and the adoption was a process that I chose to undertake at some point because for whatever reason, I need to have a place where I can attach myself to. Sorry. I speak with a soft voice but I carry a big stick.

Chicago's my adopted hometown, and the adoption process took about 20 years. It's 20 years this march that I've come to Chicago because I need a hometown to operate in the most basic levels. The hometown means you know your way around, you know people. You have your barber, as you can tell, and a steady soccer group. You have friends, you have histories. You can sit around and talk to people about what we used to do 15 years ago, what the winters were like 15 years ago, and so on. A common past to me is essential as a human being and therefore as a writer. I sort of decided in some ways, even before I loved Chicago, to love Chicago, and then I grew attached to it. In that sense, I'm committed to the city. I, in fact, am in New York now for a few months teaching at the NYU and I have hated every moment. I came back for this yesterday and I was free again. I came back home, quite simply, and went immediately to have my head shaved by my barber, and then we're watching The Godfather together. It was sublime.

Noreen Tomassi:

I think we have a few minutes to take some questions from the audience if there are any questions. Yes, over here.

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:53:20]. I think we increasingly go to the same barber. I want to ask how the sort of overlap of the evolved, so [inaudible 00:53:31] and [inaudible 00:53:31].

Aleksandar Hemon:

The question is whether I address different audiences in writing in for Bosnian audience, American audience, or both. I do write in Bosnian some things, less so these days than just a couple of years ago. I do not write for different audience. I do not write fiction for different audiences in terms of addressing different issues for different audience. Obviously English language, I write fiction in English, so it'll take a while before the fiction reaches Bosnian audiences, including my parents.

I used to write a column in Bosnian twice a month, and that was the nature of technology and the media. It was instantly available on the online, and then I could instantly communicate with people who have read it via email or whatever, with friends over the phone. The strange thing is that I'm aware that different modes of writing will reach different audiences, but I do not imagine or count on that audience.

To me, writing fiction, in fact, to be more precise, you sort of start from scratch. Someone is going to maybe look at this book, but whether they're going to read it all the way through, understand what I want to say, you can never know that. I can never know it. If I counted on that, then I think I would become lazy or maybe books would start selling better. It's a different thing. I like to think that I start from scratch in that regard. That some things will not be understood by people who understood the previous thing, if they did.

Noreen Tomassi:

Other questions? This here.

Speaker 8:

When you think about your relationship language in terms of writing how characters might not necessarily be speaking English.

Aleksandar Hemon:

The question was, as I understood, the ways in which we would write about characters whose native language is not English and how they would operate in the work of fiction.

Stuart Dybek:

I didn't quite understand that that was the question, so I had another answer.

I grew up in what's called a port of entry neighborhood, and I actually grew up when one ethnic group was going out, Slavs, and another one was coming in, Hispanic. I think it somehow deeply affected my sense of language, but I'd be reluctant to exactly try to articulate any too clearly how I think that was. Something like experiencing the Day of the Dead in a neighborhood that's just turning Mexican when you're not Mexican. It just sensitizes you to such a level of imagery and myth that you carry around the rest of your life. There's some way that you not only want to internalize it because it's so exciting, but that I think you can't help but internalize it.

For me, it was really only after I saw Mexican culture in my neighborhood and started eating that really good food that I began kind of understanding Slavic culture, which in some ways I took more for granted. That melting pot, that mixing stuff, whether it's melted or mixed or whatever, I think helps you reflect on what culture you've managed to preserve in a country that eats them up.

Nami Mun:

I mean, the only thing I would add, I think you're asking about how do we handle characters who speak their native language, how do we handle treating their language in the text and how that might affect the narrative language in some ways. The only thing I can sort of think about is in Korean in a sentence, you very rarely have a subject. It's just verb and object. Sometimes it's just a verb and sort of shorter sentences in many ways. The Korean people though, they're not really known for being the most expressive people in the world. They have a tendency to keep things contained, and so I can't help but wonder if that is in my writing.

There's something I think I try to write very cleanly and very compressed and keeping emotions intact a little bit. When I'm treating a character who's speaking Korean, but I have to write it in English, I basically copy Hemingway and try to make the sentences just slightly awkward so that you know that they're speaking in their native tongue, but that you're reading the English version of it, if that makes sense. Does that make sense?

Aleksandar Hemon:

To me, the question is essentially about translation. Those various notions of Rushdie's in the previous one and whatever I was talking about earlier, the ways that people relate to two cultures are also questions of translation. When the notion that the cultures are divided by a gap and that you can either assimilate or just stay outside, that was the only choice, that implies the impossibility of translation. Then there was the notion, the Rushdie notion that you are in between nowhere really, but just in between. That require different kind of translation. Rather operating in one language almost surreptitiously.

To me, I believe that things, not that everything can be translated perfectly. Robert Frost famously said that poetry is what is lost in translation. Then of course Joseph Brodsky said, poetry is what happens in translation. I think both of them are right, that this negotiation between the two spaces, two languages, two cultures, whatever the two things are, it is inherently creative. It forces you as a writer, it forces me into positions where I have to find solutions for problems that might have not been attended to before. Similarly, with characters, to your question, how do you have someone who's native language is not English, speak in English without sounding like a caricature?

One of the things is syntax. Slavic syntax is different. Also, it's an inflection language, so you don't have to have a subject or object for that matter. I can adjust the English syntax according to the Slavic syntax rules. Sometimes it's funny, my sister and I still do it for fun, translate Bosnian sentence into English. Malamud did that perfectly. I mean, the syntax of the language of his characters is obviously Yiddish, and it sounds like poetry very often. It's not just plausible, it's transformative.

Noreen Tomassi:

We have time for one more question, and I see up there.

Speaker 9:

[inaudible 01:01:17] myself [inaudible 01:01:17]. I wanted to know if you ever experienced anything like that when you're going in English-

Aleksandar Hemon:

The question is about translation, and the woman who asked writes in English, but it's of Polish background. When she tried to translate into Polish the stories she wrote in English, there were difficulties. That complies with my experience. I once translated my stories into Bosnian from English, and they were not good translations because the mind works beyond languages at some level. The same thoughts operate and so I could not really, in some ways I did need different words in the other language.

Syntax, for instance, would be English in my Bosnian translation. Very awkwardly and bizarrely. I don't know if this will help you, but the way I treat my work in Bosnian now is someone else translates it and then I edit it. I supervise it, and because I can take out whole paragraphs and chunks. Because some things, it's not that they don't make sense in Bosnian. They're redundant and obvious and just sound dumb. Then I just edit it like... I'm sorry.

Speaker 9:

Does it change your story?

Aleksandar Hemon:

No, my story's my slate.

Noreen Tomassi:

I want to take this opportunity to thank the panelists, but before I do, I'd like you all to stay tuned, stay attentive to the American Writers Museum and its landing here in Chicago. It's a very exciting thing, I think for literature in America. They have a website. I hope you visit American Writers Museum website and learn more about that venture. Please join me in thanking our panelists. They were great.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.