It must be spring: the writers are aswarm.
The PEN World Voices festival runs April 24-29, with topics close to OPP's heart. Wednesday's program:
Writers explore what binds us to home and what holds us apart from it, and why home, or the idea of it, is or isn’t worth dying and killing for. How do we find home, and, when we lose it, how do we make a new one? Why do we leave home and why do we long to return? We’ll visit the domestic, the exiled, the global, and the imagined in search of a place we can call our own.Which is what OPP has been trying to explore himself, see.
Not to be outdone by the non-print set, PEN (last bastion of that thing called book) has gone interactive this year:
-- In Home & Away, laypeople like you and me can give our 2 cents on the topic.
-- In the postcard series, you can, well, send a postcard.
Note that of the 166 participant writers listed in "World Voices," only 9 hail from South America, with half of these currently living in the US (*) :
Daniel Alarcon* (Peru)
Mariela Dreyfus* (Peru)
Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico)
Carlos Maria Dominguez (Argentina/Uruguay)
Jorge Franco (Colombia)
Laura Restrepo (Colombia)
Jaime Manrique* (Colombia)
Cecilia Vicuna* (Chile)
Patricia Melo (Brazil)
Same strange idea of "world" (as in baseball's "world" series) when it comes to Asia: sole non-Chinese, non-Indian Asian Tinling Choon of Malaysia, currently at Yale, must stand in for the rest.
There might be something to be learned from former imperial power U.K., which lists only one bona fide 100% U.K. participant, Jo Tatchell, who... oops! ... writes on Middle Eastern culture. The other 9 U.K. participants are slash-U.K. participants, as in "Zanzibar/U.K.", "China/U.K." and even "U.S./U.K.", in that order. Well, what's home, but a place we can call our own, eh?
