FOER’S MENTOR, JOYCE CAROL OATES, IS AN INSPIRATION IN HIS TEACHING. IN P R creative writing P H

Wunderkind in O T O © A D A I M B E R R the Classroom Y N NOVELIST JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER DISCUSSES FICTION—AND HOW TO TEACH IT

by Catherine Fata / CAS ’09

onathan Safran Foer With a second novel under his who is now 32 and, dressed in went from recep - belt ( Extremely Loud and Incredibly jeans and sporting a close-cropped T tionist to best-sell - Close , Mariner Books) and a work haircut, can easily pass for one of J ing and critically of nonfiction due out next year, his students. acclaimed author Foer has joined the faculty at NYU with the 2002 publication of his as a professor in the Graduate Cre - AS A TEACHER YOU MUST BE debut novel, Everything Is Illumi - ative Writing Program. And it REMINDED OF HOW MUCH nated (Harper Perennial), when he turns out that his pedagogical phi - EFFECT ONE OF YOUR was just 25 years old. Praised by losophy is as unorthodox as his TEACHERS—JOYCE CAROL the likes of Francine Prose and literary style. David Grumblatt, an OATES, WHOSE CLASS YOU John Updike and winner of the MFA candidate, recalls assign - TOOK AS AN UNDERGRAD AT Guardian First Book Award, the ments as varied as oral storytelling, PRINCETON—HAD ON YOU. National Jewish Book Award, and euology writing, and singing I would not have become a writer the New York Public karaoke. “[Foer’s class] was much if I hadn’t met her. She encour - Library Young Lions more focused on the process of aged me when there was very Fiction Award, the nov - writing, rather than the creation little to encourage. Really. I el announced the arrival of a finished piece,” Grumblatt didn’t know I wanted to be a of a brazen new talent says. “We were encouraged to ex - writer. I didn’t think that I was to be reckoned with. periment, to be playful, and to particularly talented. I wasn’t pro - The responses from crit - question how we approached our ducing work that was great. But ics were polarizing— own writing.” she felt like she saw something everything from hailing During his first semester on that was worth, you know, foster - him as a genius to call - campus last fall, NYU Alumni ing. And one lesson she helped ing his work gimmicky. Magazine caught up with Foer, me learn is that at that age, most people are very impressionable. back. And sometimes things have biblio file A few kind words or a few unkind to fall apart in order to come back words can really send somebody together in a way that’s good. But PET FOOD POLITICS: THE In her latest book, nutritionist Mar - into a different orbit. And she did it’s hard. And not only does each CHIHUAHUA IN THE COAL MINE ion Nestle chronicles how what that for me. writer face these problems differ - (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA started with a few telephone calls ently, but each project presents PRESS) about sick cats snowballed into the HO W CAN WRITIN G BE TAUGHT? different problems. MARION NESTLE largest food recall in American his - What people are born with, more PAULETTE GODDARD tory. Using official U.S. govern - than any talent, is stories: where DOES WHAT YOU READ INFLU - PROFESSOR OF NUTRITION, ment documents, interviews with their families come from, how ENCE WHAT YOU WRITE? FOOD STUDIES, AND doctors and researchers, and In - they talked around the dinner Everything influences what PUBLIC HEALTH ternet blog chatter, the best-sell - table, or didn’t talk, the conflict of one writes—everything interest - STEINHARDT ing author tracks contaminated their childhoods, things like that. ing does. I’m rereading a book, ingredients from China to Cana - In terms of my approach, it’s not which is maybe my favorite da’s Menu Foods company pet to perfect pieces of writing but of all books. It’s called Life? or food—and eventually into barnyard rather to encourage students to Theater? by a woman named feed and the human food chain. think about writing in ways they Charlotte Salomon. I only know Though investigations by the FDA might not have before.… There’s about it because I happened to and USDA eventually uncovered a plenty of time to perfect your walk into a museum in Amster - lapse in oversight, the episode is a craft, whereas when you’re a stu - dam where I saw it. It’s halfway cautionary tale about the food- dent, it’s a good time to have your between paintings and a book— safety hazards of globalization. As basic notions of writing changed. just a total work of art. Every Nestle notes, “Even our most skep - So a lot of my assignments test the time I open it, it inspires me tical colleagues could see that pet boundaries of fiction. but also totally debilitates me be - foods were the proverbial canary— cause it’s so good. in this instance, the Chihuahua—in WHAT’S YOUR WRITING the coal mine.” REGIMEN? BOTH OF YOUR NOVELS ARE —Kevin Fallon That’s like saying, “What’s your STORIES FROM DIFFERENT regimen for getting out of a burn - TIME PERIODS INTERTWINED ing building?” I mean, stop, drop, INTO ONE. IS THERE A and roll is generally a good idea. REASON YOU CHOSE TO D O OUT OF THE BLUE: A HISTORY Steve Marshburn Sr. sat at his Be close to the floor is generally a THEM THIS WAY? OF LIGHTNING: SCIENCE, bank-teller window clutching a good idea. Don’t breathe smoke. Sometimes there’s no reason for SUPERSTITION, AND AMAZING metal date stamp when a lightning Don’t catch fire. things in writing. That’s what’s STORIES OF SURVIVAL bolt suddenly zapped the bank’s Writing is a kind of emergency, nice about writing, nice about art. (DELACORTE PRESS) drive-up window microphone, it’s kind of a horrible thing to It’s not responsible to reason in JOHN S. FRIEDMAN which, by chance, was pointed at have to write. But I think ulti - the same way that everything else GSAS ’74 his spine. “It felt as if someone had mately each person finds his own in life is. hit me with a baseball bat,” Marsh - way or her own way out of it. My burn tells John S. Friedman in Out regimen has changed a lot since I YOUR BOOKS HAVE BEEN of the Blue . Tracing the history of started. And I don’t really even HIGHLY PRAISED, BUT ALSO lightning through Greek mytholo - have one now. I like trying to HARSHLY CRITICIZED. WHAT IS gy, scientific study, and even the start in the morning, and I like THAT LIKE? Harry Potter series, Friedman, a trying to spend three or four hours It was just, like, a matter of fact. contributor to The Nation and an a day doing it, but it doesn’t al - It didn’t hurt my feelings or any - Oscar-winning documentary film - ways happen like that. thing like that. I’d rather people maker, unearths some of the mys - like what I do than dislike what tery surrounding this natural AND WHEN IT’S A STRUGGLE? I do. But as long as people are phenomenon. Most gripping are It’s really always a struggle. And I having very strong reactions, the stories of survivors, such as don’t say that flippantly. It really then I’m happy. Because what I Marshburn and a mountaineer is always a struggle. And how do don’t want someone to say is, group struck while climbing the I work through it? Sometimes I “It was a nice book.” I want some - Tetons in 2003, which underline just work through it. Sometimes I one to say that I really connected the fragility of human life and how— just put it down and go away and with it or I really hated it. And I out of the blue—it can be ripped come back. Sometimes I have to would prefer the former, but I from our grasp. put it down for a really long time, would take the latter over a luke - —Jackie Risser like weeks or months, and come warm response.

NYU / SPRING 2009 / 29 fiction WHA T CAME BEFORE FOLLOWING AN ACCLAIMED MEMOIR AND FILM ADAPTATION, JAMES MCBRIDE PENS A HARRIET TUBMAN – INSPIRED SLAVE NARRATIVE

by Adelle Waldman

or James McBride, his childhood in Brooklyn as an old-fashioned one of 12 black siblings raised aesthetic is no mere by his white, widowed, Jewish F decoration. The mother. He followed that up vintage typewriter with the 2001 novel Miracle that sits on his desk could well at St. Anna (Riverhead), made into be the one on which Ralph Elli - last fall’s film by Spike Lee (TSOA son toiled away in a Harlem base - ’82, HON ’98). The story, which ment in the early 1950s, but it’s the author himself adapted as a where McBride works, often after screenplay, follows a small group penning a first draft in longhand. of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s The typewriter—like the man all-black division during World himself, who is often dressed in War II who are stranded behind suit, tie, and fedora—may seem enemy lines in a remote Italian vil - anachronistic in the sleek, new of - lage and become objects of fasci - “The minute you start to judge people as a creative writer, you are dead creatively.”

fice at 20 Cooper Square, where nation to the townspeople. With McBride is a distinguished writer prose that gains force in in residence at NYU’s Arthur L. large part because of its restraint, Carter Journalism Institute. But a the author rarely comments overt - classical elegance is appropriate ly on the potent injustice that for a man who keeps turning his underlies his story. eye to the past. McBride stepped even further easiness as whites, aware of the miles.” McBride also depicts a so - McBride, who is also a profes - into the past for his most recent tenuousness—both morally and ciety riddled with tensions be - sional jazz saxophonist and award- novel, Song Yet Sung (Riverhead). pragmatically—of their dominant tween not just white and black but winning composer, first gained Released in paperback in January, position, live in fear that their slaves also wealthy plantation owners and literary fame with his best-selling it tells the story of slaves living on will revolt, or escape to freedom in struggling oystermen, and he cap - 1996 memoir, The Color of Water Maryland’s Eastern shore in the neighboring Pennsylvania. “How tures the lawlessness of life in this (Riverhead). Published in more 1850s. The haunting and complex close it all seemed,” one widowed remote, swampy, and superstitious than 16 languages, it chronicled portrait teems with a sense of un - slave owner thinks. “Just eighty region, a peninsula isolated from

30 / SPRING 2009 / NYU JAMES M CBRIDE HAS WORN THE But on the drive to Washing - biblio file HATS OF MEMOIRIST, NOVELIST, ton, D.C., something came over JAZZ SAXOPHONIST, COMPOSER, AND SCREENWRITER. him. “I just went to the left,” he HEAVY METAL ISLAM: ROCK, In Heavy Metal Islam , says. “I was trolling for ideas.” RESISTANCE, AND THE Mark LeVine canvass -

IP N He knew that Harriet Tubman STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL es much of the Muslim was born on the Eastern shore, OF ISLAM world, from Morocco R

but when he got there he was (THREE RIVERS PRESS) to Pakistan, to exam - I N struck by the palpable history of MARK L EVINE ine a burgeoning—and

the region. “You can smell it, GSAS ’99 potentially democra - T you can feel it when you are tizing—movement of down there,” he says. “You young metalheads. learn silence. You learn to listen Here metal, as well as hip-hop, to the land.” punk, and reggae, is used not so The story that emerged was much as an anthem of teenage loosely inspired by Tubman her - angst but to protest authoritarian - self. McBride’s protagonist, Liz ism (as in the case of an Iranian Spocott, is a beautiful slave who rocker) and to celebrate Islam (one escapes from the plantation Turkish band recorded the Muslim owner who has been raping her testament of faith over a “driving since she was a teenager. Liz, hard-rock groove”). In detailing like Tubman, suffered a head this subculture, LeVine, a guitarist injury, and it leads her to have and professor of modern Middle prophetic dreams, one of which Eastern history at the University enables her to free 14 slaves of California–Irvine, paints a pic - trapped in an attic. Their escape ture rarely seen by outsiders: a sets off a chain of events that en - generation impassioned by their danger all the blacks in the area, love of both Islam and the secular including those vital to the op - music of the West. eration of the “gospel train,” as —Rhett Bixler the Underground Railroad is called. What follows is both a suspenseful chase and a medita - ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK From college kids sloshing through tion on what it means to be a YOUR HEART raw sewage at Woodstock ’99 to a good person in a society riddled (THE NEW PRESS) company charged with demolish - with moral contradictions. DAVID SAMUELS ing a landmark Las Vegas casino, McBride says that he is inter - ADJUNCT ASSISTANT David Samuels’ collection of sto - ested in bringing out the hu - PROFESSOR ries paints brief portraits of the manity in all of his characters, ARTHUR L. CARTER relatively unexamined lives of a even the ones whose livelihood JOURNALISM INSTITUTE wide-ranging cast of Americans. is derived from chasing down The essays, each previously pub - “human chattel.” “The minute lished in magazines such as Harp - you start to judge people as a er ’s and The New Yorker , combine creative writer, you are dead animated reporting, personal re - creatively,” he says. “Judgments flection, and social analysis, P

H harkening back to New Journalism O are the cork stops of ideas, and if T O

© you are a person who lives by greats such as Joan Didion. Al - S A R

A his wits, then you’d be foolish to though individual characters—from H L

E environmentalists celebrating the E put a cork stop in the bottle.” N And for McBride, his bottle destruction at the Seattle WTO the rest of the East Coast by the of ideas is full of the past: neg - protests to workers at a Nevada Chesapeake Bay. lected corners of history rife nuclear test site—get limited page It was the place itself that orig - with human drama on both the time, Samuels writes with a com - inally attracted McBride. Feeling internal and societal levels. It’s passion that gives readers just stuck in his writing, he set off one no wonder, then, that the man enough information to care about day from his home in Bucks Coun - himself—with his typewriter them, if only for a moment. ty, Pennsylvania, to visit Ford’s and fedora—pays homage in his —Padraic Wheeler Theatre, where Lincoln was shot. person to what came before.

NYU / SPRING 2009 / 31 poetry travel writing Diagnosis AMERICANS by Sharon Olds Erich Maria Remarque Professor at NYU ABROAD

IN DAPHNE BEAL’S DEBUT NOVEL, AN ADVENTUROUS YOUNG WOMAN COMES OF AGE IN NEPAL

By the time I was six months old, she knew something by Eryn Loeb / GSAS ’07 was wrong with me. I got looks on my face n 1989, eager for a break her time there and to untangle she had not seen on any child from her theory-obsessed, some of her thoughts from that hyperpolitical college cam - early trip, as well as subsequent vis - in the family, or the extended family, I pus, Daphne Beal (GSAS its to the region. The result ap - or the neighborhood. My mother took me in ’98) spent a year living in peared last summer: In the Land of Nepal and quickly fell under its No Right Angles (Anchor), Beal’s to the pediatrician with the kind hands, spell. Ending up there, she says, gorgeous, stirring first novel. was “a bit of dumb luck,” but At its center is Alex, a 20-year- a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel: as she studied and trekked through old Midwestern woman traveling the mountainous country, its beau - through Nepal on leave from Hub Long. My mom did not tell him tiful landscape and suffused college, and the prickly, intense what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed. sense of spirituality began to friendships she forms with a ease her restlessness. “And I really young Nepali woman named Maya It was just these strange looks on my face— loved that it had a stronger and with Will, an older expat oral tradition than a literary American on an endless quest for he held me, and conversed with me, tradition,” Beal remembers. “Even enlightenment—which he seeks then I knew that I wanted to be a mostly through a parade of young, chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother writer.” attractive women. The three con - said, She’s doing it now! Look! After she returned to the Unit - spire, dream, and drift apart over a ed States and graduated from period of eight years, culminating She’s doing it now! and the doctor said, Brown University, the experience in a fraught reunion in Bombay. kept a tight hold on her. Over the Throughout the book, Alex What your daughter has years, as Beal pursued a journalistic wrestles with what it means to career, she thought about it all the be an outsider in the place that’s is called a sense of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me “There’s a great kind of narcissism back to the house where that sense would be tested to being 20 that’s fun—and also and found to be incurable. fun to grow out of.”

time. “It was almost like being ob - captured her heart. It’s a struggle sessed with someone you’d once that Beal based largely on feelings been in love with,” she says. While of her own. “I never would have some of her journalism work fo - written the story from the point of cused on the region, Beal felt she view of Maya,” she says, conjec - could engage more deeply with turing that Alex is about Excerpted from One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds. Copyright © 2008 her own understanding of it “40 percent me and 60 percent by Sharon Olds. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of through fiction. Writing a story everyone I ever met there.” Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt based in Nepal seemed a good ex - Nepal’s landscape is a character may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing cuse to dwell on the memory of in itself, and as Alex, Maya, and from the publisher.

32 / SPRING 2009 / NYU P H O T O biblio file © K E V I N UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS: Social critic Katie S T U

R SEVEN PORTRAITS OF MARRIED Roiphe casts an eye M A IP N N LIFE IN LONDON LITERARY on seven “marriages

CIRCLES 1910–1939 à la mode,” the uncon - R (DIAL PRESS) ventional, fashionably I

KATIE ROIPHE experimental rela - N ASSISTANT PROFESSOR tionships that prolif - T OF JOURNALISM erated among some ARTHUR L. CARTER British literati and JOURNALISM INSTITUTE artists from 1910 to WWII, and which helped to redefine the rules of mat - rimony. Using memoirs, letters, and personal accounts from a pantheon of writers, including a biting Vir - ginia Woolf, Roiphe dissects the less-than-holy unions of, among others, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, and Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. Though many of the partnerships could seem outré even today—open mar - riages and love triangles abound— they wrestle with the perennial tug of an idealized equality between the sexes and stiff traditional roles. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it “provocative, dishy, substantive, and fun.” —Christiana Molina

THE GOOD THIEF In her fanciful debut novel, Hannah

DAPHNE BEAL CREATES RICH CHARACTERS WHILE CRITIQUING THE EX-PAT EXPERIENCE. (DIAL PRESS) Tinti follows the fate of Ren, a one- HANNAH TINTI handed orphan and natural pick - Will climb mountains, bike ous red-light district, provided GSAS ’97 pocket in 19th-century New around Kathmandu, and hike plenty of fodder for her novel. England, after his greatest wish—to through pouring rain, Beal ren - “I’m happy, in my late thirties, to be adopted—comes true. But his ders it vividly, detailing the intox - figure out that what makes a good idylloffamilyblissisquicklydashed icating sensations of exploring a story in a fictional narrative also by his new father (a charming con) faraway place. “There’s a great makes a good story as a nonfic - and a growing circle of misfit kind of narcissism to being 20 tional narrative,” she says. “I don’t friends, from a drunken onetime that’s fun—and also fun to grow really think of myself as either a teacher to a chimney-climbing out of,” Beal reflects, describing novelist or a journalist; I think of dwarf. As their adventures careen both her characters and the spate myself as a writer. It’s all much from fraud to grave-robbing and of Western students who come of more melded than I once imag - worse, Ren’s sense of morality— age in foreign settings. ined it was.” beaten into him over 12 years in a In the mid-1990s Beal worked As for her next book? She’s still Catholic orphanage—is tested and at The New Yorker , an experience circling around the exact story, amended, even as the mystery she credits with honing her atten - but it will be set in the Midwest, mounts over his true identity. tion to detail. Her journalistic where she—like Alex—is origi - Though the premise recalls Dick - work proved an easy complement nally from. “The setting of rural ens, Tinti’s yarn, at times violent to writing fiction—an essay she northern Wisconsin is something and bizarre, is thoroughly original. reported for McSweeney’s about that I think about when I’m day - —Nicole Pezold Falkland Road, Bombay’s notori - dreaming,” she says.

NYU / SPRING 2009 / 33