Even as the news treads the thin line between inanity and vanity, it is incredibly boring. And I, for one, am thankful for the morning biscuits that add an extra sparkle to my breakfast meal.

Take a look for yourself, and you can see what I mean.

On any given day, a couple of headlines explain how the Indian chariot of progress is kicking up a dust storm that will leave the Chinese coughing in its wake.

Yet another story will cheer an Indian or an Indian creation for a foreign award, be it the Oscars, Wimbledon, or even the first prize for the Snodsbury Grammar examination in a little (and fictitious) English village.

And how can one forget the quote from an unknown American senator praising some aspect of Indian society -- no matter if it is of any relevance to any issue at hand at all.

In fact, all politicians who have trouble getting noticed in their homeland can say things like, 'The daffodils in India are prettier than those in Holland.' They can then rest assured that at the very least, hundreds of Indian newspapers will lap up their words, even as filmmaker Yash Chopra pays a visit to the Dutch consulate to renew his visa.

This state of affairs is as tragic as is deplorable.

India is too great, too vast and too complex a land to have all of its news neatly ordered within two or three categories.

One can see why this is happening. For years, India had to lean on the twin pillars of exoticism and spirituality to gain any form of recognition from the external world. Now all of that is now changing as Indians are setting the pace in the worlds of science and commerce.

Even as the world changes, Indians find themselves at the forefront of this transformation. And India is demanding its fair share of respect from a planet that had studiedly ignored it for so many years.

For all of humanity, these are times that carry with them the sweet fruits of immense possibility. For Indians, these are also times that bring with them a great responsibility.

We have a destiny to choose, and it is important we make the right choice.

Sure, we can be a superpower of the modern age like America. But there are two Americas, and we have to make a conscious effort to be more like one than the other at every step of this journey.

One America is George W Bush's America. It is an America that is closed, arrogant, inward looking and suspicious. It is not based on any universal principles that will stand the test of time. On the contrary, it is a nation driven by reactionary policies that -- at the best of times -- can be described as opportunistic.

It is a nation that shakes hands with dictators on one hand, and bombs democracy on another. It is a nation where the flag has come to stand not for a people, but for a ruthlessly efficient mechanism of power, a rabid army of elephants that see the world in one colour – green -- and are unable to tell the villagers from the grass underneath their feet. A nation where all other countries are nothing but passive receptacles for its opinions, thoughts and actions.

The other America is a country of ideas that represent the best of the best thoughts from around the world. It is an America that nations have turned to for refuge, for hope, for innovation and for a moral voice, when it seemed that the darkest voices in the deepest woods had come out of hiding to take over the world.

When Woody Guthrie sang: This land is your land, This land is my land, From California, To the New York Island, the route he transcribed passed not through just one continental landmass, but the other way, across Hawaii, Japan, China, India and indeed the entire world with its oceans and deserts and mountains and cities.

This hunger to include is what makes America a great country today.

And who can relate to this identity better than India -- a country that through the ages welcomed people of multiple faiths, great voyagers and even marauding armies from the farthest continents?

A country that absorbed the developments in other civilisations and enriched them a hundredfold, be it in the fields of trigonometry, astronomy or even, in the courts of Ashoka and Akbar, the development of public discourse mechanisms that are the foundation of all modern democracies.

India should know the value of having this universal perspective. After all, we are one of the few countries that have experienced the greatness that resulted from it. Can we not cast aside the shackles of this narrow-minded nationalism and be great once again?

It is this India that India should aspire to be. And our media can drive this change by being the voice of the many rather than the perspectives of the few.

Domestically, our newspapers can turn their eyes to the hundreds of ripples and waves caused by millions of striving oars, rather than focus their attention on the sail that is as lazy, as is vain, puffing up with pride at the exertions of an alien wind.

On a global level, we can celebrate the world's achievements as our own.

Our news doesn't have to be organised in the least. It is at its most exciting when it is a collage of multiple images, a giant kaleidoscope, where a million pieces come together to convey the message of a universal truth.

It is this India that can be a leader of the modern world. It is this India that Rabindranath Tagore had spoken of when he wrote:

Where the mind is without fear
And the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out of the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary sands of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom,
My Father,
Let my country awake.

It's time to choose exactly what sort of country we want to be.

Arun Krishnan is a writer based in New York City. His writings can be found at Cutting Chai.

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This post is for those with media aspirations and it centres around a topic that has come up a few times in discussion with Asian and black journalist-friends. When starting a career in the media, be it print or radio journalism, creative writing or painting, getting an initial foothold can be one of the biggest challenges.

There are multiple points of entry one can choose from – some easier than others. The ethnic press (which really shouldn’t be referred to as one entity) has employed many of the country’s leading lights at early stages of their careers.

Publications like Eastern Eye or programmes like the late Network East not only provide a source of information for their respective communities, but they are frequently stepping stones into the world at large.

Great. But things don’t often work like that. Stay involved with an ‘ethnic’ production for too long and your mainstream marketability falls. I was recently speaking to a friend who has worked for an Asian publication for a few years and loved it. But they are moving on to a less well-known publication as they did not wish to be “stereotyped” or “stuck in the Asian press.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by many aspiring artists – I’ve heard musicians and actors say the exact same thing. Small time Asian films and plays pay the bills, but they get nervous about taking one too many Asian gigs as they feel they need to make more mainstream contacts.

Manish recently linked to a ToI piece which interviewed Ranjit Bolt, a very successful UK playwright and dramatic translator, soon after Kiran Desai picked up her Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss. He feels that “wearing the ethnic hat” can bring more success than deserved – or at least bring it more easily.

“There is a tradition of brown people writing and writing well and winning awards. Publishers are sheep…and we’ve got to accept that today, people with a touch of the tar brush are more likely to win the Booker”

Bolt’s has only thrice been involved with ‘ethnic projects’, the latest of which was in conjunction with Tara Arts – a prolific British Asian stage production company. It was a transposition of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro from France to the last days of the Mughal Empire. Ironically, it garnered him personally more press coverage than many of his other works.

“Being half-Indian has had no relevance to my work, when you’re translating classical European theatre, when you’re translating Molière, being pink or blue or green doesn’t make any difference.”

The project was widely applauded by critics and audiences alike, but Bolt does not wish to take on anything similar in the near future, for fears of being stereotyped, even aged 47:

“He admits he was conscious from the time of his very first collaboration with Varma that he was running the risk of relegation to the “ethnic brown box”.”

Asking if success is easier when brown is impossible to answer. Certainly many of the first-time novelists who have won plaudits very early in their careers have been Asian. Gautam Malkani and Kaavya Viswanathan both garnered massive contracts on the back of one book. Monica Ali and Hari Kunzru have been rewarded with great success. It seems the latest hot young Asian writer is always in demand.

But by the same token, does that mean success that comes via being ethnic is more fickle? Brown faces will be less en vogue and many of the people who have enjoyed their current position of resident cool Asian dude with spiky hair will, once again, be a struggling presenter or columnist.

It’s not just the media world. In fact positive discrimination is far more obvious and formal in the business world, with quotas operating quite openly.

Huge multinationals operate ‘ethnic’ programmes to encourage all walks of life to enter their ranks. Are these still needed? Take any of the Big Four auditors, like PricewaterhouseCoopers. A friend of mine has sailed up the corporate ladder – and she is a superb employee. But she landed the job via an ethnic work experience scheme and since joining she has participated in a multitude of projects, every single one of them with ‘Asian’ or ‘ethnic’ in the title.

This might be admirable if PwC was a stuffy old white company, but looking around any of the offices reveals that Asian faces (South and East) are far from under-represented. Yet her willingness to be labelled as an Asian employee has made her an ‘ethnic ambassador’.

When applying for their first jobs after university, most take the conventional path, but some choose to deliberately exploit the ethnic route. These are people who are normally privy to exactly the same education and opportunities as anyone else, they’re not poor kids from the ‘hood who need a helping hand.

Perhaps it’s the thought of being pigeon-holed that irks me. Or perhaps I’m bitter because I haven’t got any preferential treatment. In fact the one place I would expect it, the Indian restaurant, has denied me any special service as they just laugh at my Bengali pronunciation.

Originally published in Pickled Politics. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾

In the pursuit of knowledge, everyday something is added. In the practice of the Tao, everyday something is dropped.
—Tao Te Ching

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.
—Rabindranath Tagore

Whoever has parted from his source
Longs to return to that state of union.
—Rumi

⁽⁰⁾

This of course is not necessarily unusual, the novella as a genre has often been the vehicle for big ideas: think the like of Melville’s “Billy Budd,” Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

The length of a work need not inhibit an author’s ambition, but it must inevitably have an effect on the way he presents his ideas. Space may not limit what an author explores, but it must limit the way he explores it. This is the challenge of all of the short literary forms: how, to paraphrase Keats, pack every rift with ore. Moreover there is always the danger of biting off a bit more than you can chew. Dreamers, a May/December love story, manages the mastication if not always the packing.

December is Thomas Young-Felo, a middle-aged owner of a used book store in Wellington, new Zealand. As a young man (a young fellow–there is a thread of symbolic punning in the names Turner gives his characters–a wise old Jewish shopkeeper is Solly, a cryptic ice cream vendor is Clotho) he had studied at Oxford on a scholarship, made a bad marriage to a bar maid he’d gotten pregnant, and eventually abandoned his wife and young daughter and returned to New Zealand. His life since has been stained by feelings of guilt over his actions and regret for what might have been.

May is Katherine de Bris (debris and all that name might suggest), a young English teacher and amateur actress who hasn’t been able to form any lasting relationships with members of the opposite sex. “All her life it was just one man after another, and they always wanted just one thing. All men. And when they’d had that they were off and away to find their true love on some other shore.” Indeed, her latest lover, recently gone, is but the latest example. Perhaps it is this kind of experience with men her own age that makes her ripe for an older man. Presumably the older man is less interested in that just one thing, and if not less interested, perhaps less capable–both presumptions open to argument.

May and December meet when Katherine comes into Thomas’ bookstore to buy a book to prop up a table leg on the set of the school play she is helping to produce. Now while this may seem a bet far fetched–one has to wonder why an English teacher might not find it in her heart to wander into a book shop to browse or even to buy a book to read, it does serve as a device to get these two unlikely people together. It turns out that the book she buys is a dusty volume of letters from Thomas Carlyle to his sister, and some banter about dry as dust Victorians gets the ball moving, surely a first for creator of Diogenes Teufelsdreck . As one would expect, one thing leads to another, and December begins to have dreams about May, and May is suddenly having thoughts about older men. There would have been a time when with a plot that began like this, there would have been a coming together, and then a falling apart, and then a coming together again, and they would have lived happily ever after, as for example in Jane Austen’s “Emma.”

And in a sense, that’s almost how it happens in Dreamers, almost but not quite. That kind of scenario might work well enough in a simpler time and place, in a time before the novelist had begun to consider the ontological nature of his work, the relationship between illusion and reality, between authors and their characters, the creator and his creations. One might read John Fowles’ “Mantissa” or Andrew Greeley’s “God Game” to see how far such things can be carried. Turner takes the theme in a different direction. Fowles and Greeley are more concerned with characters going off on their own out of the author’s control; Turner is more interested in the idea that human beings may well be analogous to characters in a novel, thinking they have free will but in reality bound to the whims of an Author. While Turner never goes quite so far as to deny his authorial control over his characters, he does suggest that there is perhaps not that much to distinguish between characters in the hands of an author and readers in the hands of an divinity.

“Did you ever stop to wonder what you were? I suppose everybody does at some time in their life. It is a profound thought isn’t it, the meaning of life and all that? We like to think we are in charge of our own destiny, but are we? We might be puppets like Pinocchio, controlled by the strings of The Almighty’s thought. Or we might be characters in a book or a play under the control of the skein of the author’s imagination. It was Thackeray in Vanity Fair that talked about characters as puppets; Turner (or his narrator at any rate) suggests that it may well be that both he and his readers are no less puppets in the hands of an Almighty novelist, than his characters are puppets in his hands. In this sense, like the out of control characters in Fowles and Greeley, might well be said to have at least as much free will to act, to come together, to fall apart, as any of us subject to threads of fate beyond our understanding. There are possibilities before us. How they will work out is anybody’s guess.

The simple love story is further complicated by the author’s concern with the character’s dreams and illusions in relation to the realities in which they live. Thomas first appears in a second-hand designer suit, a suit intended to create an image, an appearance certainly at odds with what he really is. Katherine is first presented in a home made sweater graced with two parrots adorning her breasts and one in the back, a sweater her seemingly conventional supervisor finds inappropriate, and which also seems to suggest an attempt to create an image of herself as she wishes to be seen. “The jersey was one that Kate had knitted herself. One day she had said to herself, no, she wasn’t just a flighty intellectual, no, she could actually do something mundane and practical such as knitting a jersey. Well it had to be bright colours of course in order to express her personality.” But does it express her reality, or is it in fact an expression of what she would like people to think her personality to be: “. . . due to her inexperience at knitting, the jersey didn’t cling to her figure at all.” Before their first date, Katherine dreams of Thomas as a genteel sophisticate, only to find him rather shabbily dressed, and even worse, serving an undrinkable white wine. Thomas dreams of Kate as a woman to whom he can tell of his past, a woman who would see beneath his surface and understand his soul, only to find their early meetings confined to pedantic discussions of Carlyle.

Their dreams and illusions are the stuff of the popular romance. Dreamers’ back cover refers to the book as a “rearrangement of Mills and Boon reality. (I must confess my own ignorance of Mills and Boon. I thought they were perhaps some academic metaphysicians from the reference to reality. But thank god for Google.) What we have then is the contrast between the expectations raised by the kind of romance where the hero is dark and dashing, and sweeps his beautiful lady off her cliche feet and into his king sized bed, with the shy and dowdy book worm who can’t bring himself to kiss his lady love, let alone cajole her into the bedroom. Romantic illusions create expectations and expectations create trouble–think Emma Bovary.

Yet is it really that simple? Not for Turner. Not quite.

“Gentle travelers on the common road to our final destiny, we live in a world which is made up of blocks and stones and where all objects of the senses are separated one from the other. Certain philosophers will say we are dreamers and that what we see and touch in our waking state is merely an illusion, a dream in the mind of a sleeping god. When we allow ourselves to rest in the arms of sleep we would expect to pass from this sad world into the world of dreams, a place where phantom images, which are pale shadows of the blocks and stones, intrude. And from the world of dreams we might even progress further into the realm of deep sleep where the sleeper dreams no dreams and does not desire the objects of desire, where experience is unified and thought dissolved, where one is full of peace, truly enjoying peace and finding the path to knowledge. It has been suggested that beyond the world of sleep lies a realm where a reality which transcends life exists. A place where on might become united with the great-soul of the effulgent Lord of Light. A realm of perfect union that is the goal of all our striving.”

It would seem then that there are dreams and there are dreams. There are the sentimental dreams of the popular romance. There are the mystical visions that lead to the perfected union with the ideal. Dreamers predicates the need to destroy the one in order to achieve the other.

About the Reviewer: Jack Goodstein is a professor emeritus at California University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught English for more than thirty years. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Critique, Theatre Journal and College English and in literary magazines such as The Maine Review, The Small Pond Magazine of Literature and The Jewish Digest. In 1990 at age 51, he tried his hand at acting, and while he has always loved the theatre from the audience, discovered an unexpected addiction to the stage as a performer. Since then he has appeared in more than sixty plays throughout Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania. He has also done film and commercial work. This ultimately led to his attempts at writing for the stage. His one act, Pinochle was given a staged reading at the ATHE conference in Toronto in July of 1999 and was published by the University of Charleston Press. In April 2000, his one act, Poker, was produced by the Pulse Ensemble Theatre in Manhattan as part of their OPAL series. Bride of the Father(2000) and Creative Daydreaming (2001) were produced by the Gallery Players of Park Slope in Brooklyn. Other one acts have had readings or been staged at Far Off Broadway and Northern LightsTheatre in Canada, and New York University and the Cafe Sha Sha in New York.

Dreamers
By Brian E. Turner
June 2006, Paperback,
1-86942-054-3
NZ $25.00

Originally published on The Compulsive Reader. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾

Dion’s predecessor, Paul Martin, was famous for slaying Canada’s fiscal deficit. But on the environment, Mr. Martin lost his edge, even while polls showed public concern over environmental problems were reaching record levels.

Now, with Mr. Dion as leader, the Liberal party has been given another chance. Mr. Dion has made the environment a key part of his political platform – correctly identifying that protecting the planet’s ability to provide for us by stabilizing our climate and absorbing our wastes is one of the key issues of the 21st Century.

Sceptics may immediately cry foul. After all, didn’t Mr. Dion already have his opportunity as environment minister under the Martin administration?

Well, yes and no. Mr. Dion may have had the best of intentions as environment minister, but the fact is, the current structure of the federal government renders the position virtually impotent and prevents real change from taking place.

This isn’t to say that great things haven’t been accomplished by the environment ministry. They have, even though the ministry itself is a relatively new phenomenon. It didn’t actually exist until the 1970s, arising as a result of mounting public concern over pollution.

But we’ve gone as far as we can go with this narrow approach. It isn’t working for us anymore. It’s far too easy for short-term economics to trump the environment at the Cabinet table. By their very nature, environmental problems tend to be longer term and are too easily ignored by administrations that focus on immediate economic returns in hopes of getting re-elected. Meanwhile, mounting environmental problems like pollution and global warming are costing Canadians billions, hurting our quality of life, and reducing our future capacity to compete in a rapidly changing global marketplace.

Canada isn’t the only country facing environmental problems. But we have been slow to change. Other countries, such as Sweden, the UK and Japan, have recognized that moving towards sustainability requires a broader strategic approach.

The environment ministry simply cannot solve big environmental challenges like global warming on its own. Instead we need to develop a system that recognizes that conserving environmental health is, like economic health, a fundamental bottom line. In short, we need a national sustainability strategy – the holy grail of true environmental leadership. This is to the environment what a balanced budget is to the economy.

Under such a national strategy, the health of Canadians and the environment would be a central consideration for how the government plans its agenda and makes policy. Profligate waste, like profligate spending, would no longer be tolerated. The machinery of government would be imbued with an unshakable sustainability ethos that would infiltrate all levels of government decision-making.

A number of steps could be taken to further this end, from creating a Cabinet Committee on sustainable development, to appointing a special advisor to monitor Canada’s progress, to establishing a Sustainable Development Advisory Council comprised of the environment minister and representatives from the provinces, territories, First Nations, NGOs, business and labour.

The key to all of this lies with prime minister. The prime minister must own the environmental bottom line as he or she does the fiscal bottom line. It’s the only way to move forward.

Canadians have had an earful of environmental rhetoric over the past several years. What they need now is action. Slaying the fiscal deficit required a revolution in government thinking and operation. Nothing less will be needed to tackle Canada’s environmental deficit. Our environment is not something that can be tacked onto existing programs and policies. Rather, it must be hard-wired into the process so that environmental sustainability objectives are part of the fundamental bottom line.

Nothing less will slay this dragon.

Originally published on December 15, 2006

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

⁽⁰⁾

Philip Deaver's book Silent Retreats was the 13th winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. His work, which can be found mostly in the literary magazines, has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize anthology. Many of his current stories are set in a fictionalized version of his hometown, Tuscola, Illinois. He has edited an anthology of creative nonfiction baseball essays, Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball, due out in spring 2007. Next spring he also has an essay to be published in Creative Nonfiction's baseball issue. Deaver also writes poetry. His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Reaper, Poetry Miscellany, and the Florida Review, and are collected in a new volume, How Men Pray, just out from Anhinga Press. Philip Deaver is Associate Professor of English and permanent Writer-in-Residence at Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, and teaches in the Spalding University limited residency MFA program.

Nancy Zafris : Your story “Lowell and the Rolling Thunder” appears in this issue [Summer 2006] of The Kenyon Review.

Philip F. Deaver : I'm happy about it.

NZ: So are we. It’s a great story and it has a lot of layers. Lowell is a very complex character; like fine wine, he has an aged quality. Is this a character you’ve worked with over the years? Does he appear in other work?

PD: Lowell has been in stories of mine since 1990, before I began the Forty Martyrs Suite project that this story is part of. This project is a suite of seven interconnected stories that somehow combine to create a novel. “Forty Martyrs” is the real name of the Catholic church in my hometown. I know. For a lot of bigger towns, one martyr’s enough. Anyway, I like to use recurring characters. And I like to repeatedly use my little hometown of Tuscola, Illinois, too. To make it work, I had to graft a small state university to the southwest corner of town.

NZ: Interconnected stories, hmm. Is that harder or easier than a stand-alone story? It would seem you would always be needing to “explain” yourself or add back story.

PD: I don’t think much about what’s harder or easier. I’ve found I can avoid a need for back story and constant explanations by employing the power of varying points of view and by making the stories complementary instead of purely sequential. Like petals on a tulip – which one’s first? But of course every novel-in-stories needs a good psychologist trying to get by in a rough, rough world. And a priest. And a compelling woman. And an attempted murder and a fire and a secret back-staircase. And a compelling woman.

NZ: I was just about to ask you about Forty Martyrs Suite since you mentioned it in your first response. So is Lowell the main character in all the stories—or just in some, playing a subordinate role in others?

PD: This is the only story in the suite in which Lowell is the main character and point of view. Other characters in “Lowell and the Rolling Thunder” – Wally, Carol, Vasco – get their turn with their own stories in the set. The intent is that each story is in a different point of view and stands alone and that, also, when all are mysteriously combined, they have the arc, or should I say "dome," of a novel. There’s a gossamer line that separates the two classifications, collection of interconnected stories, novel-in-stories. Forty Martyrs Suite is very near that line, on the novel side in my opinion. Lowell plays roles of varying importance in all seven of the stories, as do several of the other characters. No character is the main character and/or point-of-view character in more than one of the stories, but most of the characters recur in all the stories. You with me?

NZ: You seem to like to recur your themes, as well.

PD: Yes, I do seem to.

NZ: Some of my favorite short stories happen to be in your collection, Silent Retreats, which won the Flannery O’Connor award in 1986 and was published in 1988. The title story as well as “Fiona’s Rooms” and “Arcola Girls” —these are great narratives that reveal themselves slowly and truly, with each sharp and poetic sentence melting into the overall pacing rather than announcing itself. Have you moved on from the pained men in these stories, or are you still working on them, causing them more pain?

PD: First of all, thanks so much for these good words. The themes I landed on back then are still what I like to write about today. As I’ve grown up (insofar as I have grown up) these regular old life stories and common dilemmas have only gotten more interesting to me. Of course, most of my characters, the men anyway, are some version of me, and they all go through things that are some version of what I’ve been through.

NZ: Like what, for instance?

PD: For instance, I’ve lived a really chaotic and trashy life. Kidding. For instance, many of the men I write about got themselves (note I avoided the passive voice – my shrink will love this) caught in the grinder as things changed between men and women a few years back. I’ll never forget “International Year of the Woman,” a great celebration for everyone who was interested in women’s rights. I was one of those interested, still am. Little did I know I’d be cannon fodder for the women’s movement – the enemy! Even if I was sympathetic! While it was a relatively gentle revolution, it turned out not to be as gentle as we thought it would be. The sucky life-suckingness of a lot of lives, including a lot of the terrible jobs we have to do, got suckier, and it wasn’t just the men anymore who were sucked in, terribly unhappy, and dying of heart disease fifteen years too early. Suddenly we were making twice as much money (two incomes), but the slope was slippery and it still wasn’t enough. Happiness, even if you were rich, proved elusive, and so the love generation became the divorce generation, a storm of empty consumption, a paranoid fear of being cheated out of life, wanting, blind aspiration, a blizzard of jealousy, a loss of a sense of direction let alone spirit. Downsizing was a growth industry; families got mulched. Later, after a twenty-year storm of confusion, we look back and say, “Well, it was tough, but it came out all right.” We just say that because we’re still able to stand up and go to yoga. And after all, it was just downstate Illinois, not Fallujah, so nobody really had a right to gripe. Lowell and Veronica, in my story, they’re down in the middle of it all, trying to have a life and give one to their daughter. They’re good people, I think. Lowell’s a psychologist, hoping to be a true professional, but he spends a lot of time at Home Depot and AA meetings. He and his wife are in a struggle to survive as a couple, and the forces operating on them, many of which they sense but can’t actually name, destroy over half our nation’s families. I love how Bush and Congress are raving about gay marriage being an assault on the family. Baaaaahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa. Talk about selective perception. That’s not an elephant in the room, it’s a deficit, a war, and an ozone hole the size of Montana.

NZ: Ever the optimist, Phil. I thought writers were supposed to be purveyors of gloom and doom. But seriously, do you mean that the women’s movement was the real assault on the family?

PD: No, I think really the “nuclear” family, as it is called with the built-in post-WW II bias in the very term, never had a chance. Because, with the rise of certain existential ways of thinking, expectations either got very high or bottomed in despair, and work for most people was just awful and deadend-ish. Competition among the aspiring got treacherous, among the despairing down at the survival level got violent and deadly. And then with what we’re calling the women’s movement, women were sucked into this vortex. Women, too, got to be powerful like Willy Loman! That meant the vortex had us all. The only way out was, as they do in chess, to castle – that is to receive Jesus Christ as your personal savior and put the dodge on the whole stampede – or to get rich and buy out, and even being rich wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (but, as they say, it’s way ahead of whatever’s in second place). That whole discussion is a rat-hole, I admit it. That’s why showing is better than telling. But in a world that was at least approximately like that, down in the middle of the middle, I started writing about men. It has been for a number of years now both a challenge and a little out of style to be a male. I’ve been told that this serves us right, for all the bad shit we did when we held all the cards.

NZ: Well, I see that the women’s movement changed your life quite a bit. How about the Flannery O’Connor Award? Did that change your life – for the better, I hope?

PD: I’d written in isolation from other writers and from any readers for (number deleted) years before the Award. I have the writer Ken Smith (“Meat,” Atlantic Monthly, June, ’88), currently of UT-Chattanooga, to thank for kicking me into gear. The stories were written in the middle of the night in the dark … not many expectations except to keep writing them. I was in the thrall of John Gardner, Ann Beattie, Ray Carver, Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, John Fowles, John Updike. And I was fiddling around with how to put my own enemies and trouble into fiction. Suddenly I’d won this award, and I was doing a reading at the Harvard Club in New York. I was awful happy, Nancy. Silent Retreats was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and the Sunday Book Review section of the Chicago Tribune (which serves my home region), all in one day (June 12, 1988, but who’s counting). I thought that’s the way it would go from then on.

NZ: Yes, I remember the New York Times review. That’s how I initially came to your work. I read the review and thought, I’ve got to read this collection. And I loved your stories. I sank deep into them in the way I used to sink into long 19th -century novels. In that way, your stories have always seemed “long” to me. Are they actually long? Do you tend to write long?

PD: Long compared to what? You know, I love writing stories, and I love reading them, but we’re in a short-story recession. Maybe I should start writing stories that are thirty-seven words long, the new perfect length! Tailored to the size of a cell phone screen, minimum scroll-down, and perfect for the amount of oxygen in the new atmosphere. Like how dinosaurs became birds, and redwoods, bonsai.

I do keep in mind that literary magazines are my likely market, and that story length is always a consideration there. I hope the stories aren’t fat. Do you think that? With a couple of exceptions the stories in Silent Retreats were 18 to 22 pages in manuscript. The average length of my post-Silent Retreats stories, in my collection Dreams of Her and Other Stories and Forty Martyrs Suite, 24 pages. You got me worried so I just did the calculation.

NZ: Oh no, I love long stories. I’m in an interview in the 2007 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market where I emphasize that The Kenyon Review supports long stories – partly for one of the reasons you mention: that our attention span has become bit-sized. Do you still have the attention span and endurance you used to have?

PD: The truth is I love writing and reading. I try to give readers the same kinds of great moments I’ve loved in the work of other writers. I handwrite first drafts in a notebook, always have, and the eleven stories in Silent Retreats were handwritten and then transcribed (as we know, it’s never that simple) onto a portable computer called the “Osborne 1” in the spring of ’82. WordStar! James Fallows, writing monthly about technology in the Atlantic back then, led us into the world of that term we hated so much at first, “word processing.” Yuck! Anyway, it’s often said that computers “cause” stories to “fatten up,” but I see it differently. The computer makes longer stories into a manageable task. More readers of fiction read novels than short stories, according to how the profit motive and the publishing industry are behaving. So, for real readers, long shouldn’t be a problem with anything we could call a short story…within reason. My icons write longer, too, I think. Robert Stone’s hard, tough, fairly long story “Helping.” Madison Bell in his “Customs of the Country.” Annie Proulx in “Brokeback Mountain.” Richard Bausch in “Design.” Dan Choan. Peter Taylor. OK, maybe I go long sometimes. Look how long this answer is.

NZ: Who are some other models for you?

PD: I prefer to answer this with specific stories instead of specific authors, and specific moments inside the works rather than the works as a whole. Have you ever read John Updike’s “A Constellation of Events,” a little story buried down in his Trust Me collection? The last lines kill me. Then there’s the Morrisons' accident in Dan Choan’s “Among the Missing”? And Ann Beattie’s second swing past her mother’s house in “Find and Replace,” and her delicious little story “Waiting,” when the dog lazily comes out onto the front porch. Alice Dark’s “In the Gloaming” – those who’ve read it will remember the father saying to the mother, “Tell me about my son.” Tobias Wolff’s “Powder,” Richard Ford’s “Reunion,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Carver’s “Cathedral” and “Errand.” I like these stories for the amazing moments they gave me. There are hundreds of others, of course.

NZ: You’ve made me, and any reader of this interview I’m sure, want to go out and revisit these stories. Thanks. I’m the same way; in general, I’m a fan of certain stories and novels rather than certain authors. Let’s switch gears a bit. In person, you are upbeat and sociable, but your stories often have a somber, even sad edge, evident even in the leisurely pacing. Is there another identity at work in your writing?

PD: Leisurely pacing! Oh my. Well. I’ve unfortunately developed a goonie, galumphing, smiling presence in social situations, especially when I just meet someone. It’s the “people-pleaser” disease we see in adult children of alcoholics. Guilty! I’m sorry you spotted it. I’ve been battling it for decades. I’m not pathologically dark, but I’m Irish and in real life I’m a helluva lot darker than your description of me, and battle, also, an equally self-defeating downer nature. "Another identity at work" in my writing? No. I think in thirty years of fiction, and a book of poems spanning thirty-five years, the real me is bleeding through. That obsequious smiler is the identity I hate most, and why I have a tendency to disappoint myself in public and, as a result, a near limitless zest for being alone.

NZ: You not only write short stories and novels, but, as you’ve said, you also write poetry. Which of these three do you consider your true métier?

PD: Short stories and novels are my natural forms. Since I was a young kid, I’ve gone into fiction easily and with great pleasure. I can suspend my disbelief like nobody’s business. I’m not saying it’s easy. It is true, good, pure work.

My poetry, narrative and loose, is a way of venting off certain torments and mulling memories. I don’t write poems unless, sorry to put it this way, I have to, and I have to a lot. Much of the poetry is personal, but in every poem I try to spring it free of the merely me. Begin local and plunge upward into the wild blue.

Anyway, I frequently find I am writing in all three of these forms. I approach writing stories and novels about the same, edit them the same way (which is obsessively). Novels of mine usually but not always begin with a short story and then bloom. I’ve written five novels, and have published none despite the years I put into them. I don’t care, he lied. I love to write them anyway, and always do so with high hopes. The stories continue to be published, one off, and that keeps me going.

NZ: Which form is the most difficult for you?

PD: I don’t think of it that way, Nancy. First of all, it is almost always difficult for me, which is part of why I am so fully engaged in it all these years. Understanding that, there are times when everything is just plain off —my mood, the timing—and no writing is possible for me, no matter the form. When things are going right, the form suggests itself. Most of the time I’m writing prose, but I’m almost always percolating a poem. In poetry, my touchstone is William Matthews (Search Party), good, bad (in the good bad way), funny. But the quiet, centered, fourteen liners of Russ Kesler (A Small Fire) are always in the back of my mind.

NZ: What are you working on now?

PD: I have a memoir in progress about my marriage, which ended a number of years ago. I have an obsession about the past, mine that is. Not a drive to try to bend it into a better shape. Rather, a love of contemplating good memories and obsessing over the bad ones for no good reason and, I’ve noticed, to no good end. Basically, with that book, I’m trying to heal us, my family. The true story of the marriage would be healing, it really would, if I can just calm myself and get it written. I think it would be a great gift to the kids.

And I’m looking at galleys this week for a book of baseball creative nonfiction I’ve edited, due out in time for Spring Training (Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball, University of Nebraska Press). This project was handed to me by story writer and anthologist John McNally (Bottom of the Ninth, SIU Press, ’03), and it’s been a wonderful adventure. I owe him, that’s for sure.

I’m marketing Forty Martyrs Suite that houses “Lowell and the Rolling Thunder.” And my most recent novel, Past Tense. Past Tense was a seven-year project and is the final word on my trusty old recurring character, Skidmore – who was all over my book Silent Retreats, and continued to carry on and torment everybody in sight in subsequent stories over the years. With Past Tense, he’s got his novel, and I hope he’s satisfied. He was a lot of fun, but now he’s done. Then there’s this new novel.

NZ: Tell.

PD: There's a character in it named Bill Clinton.

NZ: Can you say more?

PD: No.

NZ: Yes, you can.

PD: Oh OK. I’ve said I’ve spent a lot of time writing in the small frame, interactions and tensions among men and women, men and men, women and women, men and dogs, contemporary USA. Our struggles are not trivial, and the damage from our failures is everywhere. I continue to believe the material is important and do not apologize for it, and won’t stop working that territory. But then you look at Iraq, Darfur, the Congo, Washington, D. C., and all the many other disaster areas on the planet, and you wonder why you’re writing about Lowell saving his dissertation from the fire. The theory of relativity kicks in. Bob Shacochis spoke about this at AWP in Vancouver, and I started the novel in the hotel that week. It is high time to take off the gloves, politically, in our fiction — or at least high time for me.

NZ: You sound inspired. I love your passion, both for the individual living in Tuscola, Illinois, as well as for urgent global struggles. Needless to say, I look forward to reading your latest. Phil, thanks so much for your forthright and thoughtful answers.

PD: And here’s a big thanks, Nancy, to David, KR, and especially to you.

PHILIP F. DEAVER is the thirteenth winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is the author of the short story collection Silent Retreats. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and Bread Loaf. His fiction has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. His poems are collected in a volume entitled How Men Pray. Deaver is associate professor of English and permanent writer-in-residence at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

NANCY ZAFRIS is the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review. Her third novel, Lucky Strike, was published in the spring of 2005.

This interview is from a series of discussions between authors and editors whose works appear in the Kenyon Review. It is reprinted here with permission from the Kenyon Review. Other interviews can be found online at http://www.kenyonreview.org/interviews/interviews.php.

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