UMass Amherst campus

The 2010 lineup of faculty and writers in residence: James Tate, Joy Williams, Mark Doty, Charles D’Ambrosio, Dara Wier, Stephen Graham Jones, Noy Holland, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Paul Lisicky, Lisa Olstein, Matthew Zapruder, Michael Kimball, Leni Zumas, Alex Phillips, and Heather Christle.

Our scholarship deadline is fast approaching (April 1) and workshops tend to fill quickly, so if you know any students or writer-friends who might be interested, please pass the word! Application forms are available on the website.

I don’t believe that literature is so important for society. On the contrary, I think that literature has always only been important for a minority, for a handful of people. And I think, when it comes to literature, that people should be free to read what they please. Lots of my fellow writers like to proclaim loudly that literature has to have an obligatory character, that young people should be made to read it. I don’t like that. Everything in our society is starting to feel obligatory – we should let people decide for themselves whether they want to engage with literature or not. People should read if they want to. It will give them many joyous moments in their lives, but people who don’t read can also be very happy. It has become very fashionable to encourage people to read, there are even foundations for it. I suspect that the people who are paid good money to work there, never read. We, the real readers, are moving away from propagating reading. Perhaps because we have learned that it is the freest activity that one can possibly engage in.

An interesting interview with Aira in BOMB is here. Courtesy of signandsight.com.

Marie NDiaye, author of the prize-winning novel Trois femmes puissantes

French-Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye today won France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, becoming the first black woman to do so. I find the news bolstering after hearing that the recent Publishers Weekly list of the Top 10 Books of 2009 contained exactly zero female authors.

Letters to Poets, a remarkable anthology of correspondence by 28 writers, gives us both sides of the conversation. These letters between emerging and established poets are non-hierarchical exchanges, debates, ruminations on all kinds of topics—fear, love, ambition, jazz, feminist poetics, writer’s block, academia, the Bush administration.

Editors Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax have gathered smart, revealing letters from a wide-ranging crew of poet-pairs, including Judith Goldman & Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Coultas & Victor Hernández Cruz, Anselm Berrigan & John Yau, Truong Tran & Wanda Coleman, and Karen Weiser & Anne Waldman.

The resulting volume is a richly tangled map of the interior—a rare chance to climb inside writers’ heads and listen.

Other writers’ deathbed requests & their upshots…

Virgil:  Burn the Aeneid. (Emperor Augustus refused.)
Charles Dickens:  Remember me by my work alone; no statues or monuments. (Not the humblest cove in Britain.)
Emily Dickinson:  Burn all my papers. (Her sister, Vinnie, destroyed her letters but not her poems.)
Franz Kafka:  Burn all my unpublished works. (His friend Max Brod did not comply.)
Hunter S. Thompson:  Fire my ashes from a giant cannon. (Johnny Depp lit the match.)