April 2012
8 posts
We Want it To Be True: My Interview with Elif...
Elif Batuman was kind enough to let me interview her on the Rumpus. We talked about Mike Daisey’s narrative transgressions, his public treatment, and Tolstoy’s background research for War and Peace.
The five people who read this blog will know that these are issues I can’t stop thinking about — well, except for the part about War and Peace, that was news to me. Mike Daisey...
A Memoir Writing Tip from Darin Strauss
Last night, in exchange for a modest contribution to a cause I love, I got to stand in author Susan Shreve’s living room and listen to Darin Strauss talk about his memoir, Half a Life.
Strauss’ memoir is about the life-long secret he kept about the girl who darted in front of his car on her bicycle when she was 18, killing herself and leaving Strauss to face a lifetime of grief and...
How Steve Saved Civilization
I wrote this story for Steve Souryal on the third anniversary of his reading series, the lowercase, at the Big Bear Coffee House in Washington’s Bloomington neighborhood.
How Steve Saved Civilization. Or a Small Piece of it, Anyway. By Sean Carman In late December of 1993, a dying Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of skid row, was using the last of his strength to finish the manuscript...
A Biography for Steve Souryal
Wednesday was the third anniversary of the lowercase, a reading series at the Big Bear Cafe featuring the work of 826DC volunteers.
For some time now, Steve Souryal, the series founder and host, has been introducing his readers with fictional reader bios.
For the series’ third anniversary, DC writer William Bert arranged to have regular lowercase readers offer fake biographies of...
A Note on Kayden Kross
But that got me out of bed and onto the Spanish tile of the floor, slow and barefoot, cold soaking through to the bone. It felt like home back when home was my grandma’s. I washed my face in cold water and dried off with what smelled like a line-dried towel, like it was scented by the same fruit tree that hangs above my grandma’s with the sun bleached wooden clothes pins and the sagging rope....
Roadside Assistance
I had to call my insurance company to arrange to have my car towed, because it wouldn’t start. Here is a partial transcript of the conversation:
Insurance Representative: Emergency roadside assistance. Are you in your car and are you safe?
Me: I’m not in my car. I’m calling from my office.
Insurance Representative: But are you safe?
Me: I think so.
The Edge of Heaven
Fatih Akin’s 2007 film is a masterpiece. On the surface, it is a complicated story about a Turkish prostitute working in Hamburg, whose murder prompts her killler’s son to locate and help her daughter, a Kurdish political activist in love with a Hamburg student. On a deeper level, it is about blindness, and the peace that comes from seeing others with compassion.
The movie circles...
More on Mike Daisey
On Tuesday of last week, Mike Daisey appeared at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theater, ostensibly as part of a forum to discuss the theater’s decision to bring Daisey’s show back for a limited run this summer, but in fact it wasn’t clear what Daisey was trying to do. He offered an apology but didn’t explain what, exactly, he thought he had done wrong, beyond a vague...
