LAFFAIRE literary

POST script 3
DECEMBER 25, 2011

SEVEN SISTERS

NEW PRINTS
THE COSMIC VOICE
Pradip Saikia Bibekananda Choudhury (trans) Sabhyata, 2011 `150, 144 pages Paperback/ Poetry ompilation of poems in translation that deal with different emotions and the poets observations of life

Literary festivals and a writers isolation

Can the isolation necessary for a writers creativity coexist with the melee of literary events, asks Dhruba Hazarika
Literary festivals, by the very virtue of their definition, are just that: festivals. And do festivals generate thoughts, experiences that will produce a short story or a novel or a poem? Given the fact that any experience is experience, certainly, then, such festivals can lead to creative bouts; but not in the fashion that isolation would allow a writer to garner her thoughts. For as long as I can remember Axom Xahitya Xabha has encouraged such festivals during their annual meets where the turn-out, at times, has been almost a lakh. The love for the written word spills over to a celebration that centres on reading and meet-the-author sessions, seminars, workshops and competitions. In my long association with writers from Bengal I have found their literary gatherings as effusive and interesting as a

ANUBHABAR PRATIDHWANI
Mayur Bora Aak-Baak, 2012 `100, 160 pages Hardcover/Non-Fiction

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collection of articles that deal with current and historical themes

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SHOOTING REPORT
Arunlochan Das Shishu-Shashi Prakashan, 2011 `130, 159 pages Hardcover/Non-fiction

compilation of first-hand shooting reports by one of the foremost film journalists of Assam

HAVE always held that creative writing is done best in isolation. Having gathered all that the writer wants to gather, either through experience or through reading or even through that toughest exercise of all, dreaming, imagining, the author must now look for a place, where, to paraphrase Barthes, she must die. Like elephants looking for their graveyard the writer finds an uncanny, timeless and immeasurable comfort in isolation. Not for her the hurly-burly world of petty fights over property, payment of telephone bills or the legitimacy or otherwise of the local gossip wagging her salacious tongue. All that the writer now craves, during

her period of gestation, is to be alone with her baby, as she struggles for a safe and proper delivery. And yet before she embarked on this lonely journey that a mother alone can ever know she had been inextricably involved in the daily grist of life, gathering her fodder through all the joy and the bitterness that would go to create her baby, her child, her book. Given this surreal background of two worlds straddling each other, those of the writers isolation, and, at the same time, a dependence on the sheer rough- and- tumble that life offers, are we comfortable with the role that literary festivals seek to establish?

A literary festival is sometimes a blessing, especially in the sea of loneliness and isolation that is otherwise a creative writers destiny
football match at The Maidan. On the one hand, we have a game that deals with ideas, thoughts and the craft of wriggling out words on plain paper; and on the other, 22 players working out their own intricate pattern on hard turf.

The passions are the same. Only the vehicles differ: with poets it is the hand, with footballers it has to do with legs. In both situations it is a festival of sorts. I would like to think that there have always been literary festivals, ever since the first man held his own little audience inside a cave as he narrated his first hunt. It is only of late that, sponsored by large corporate houses or by hefty government grants to those who have the aptitude to garner these, literary festivals have found a certain glamour that was otherwise absent in previous such gatherings. The Jaipur Literature Festival or the Hay Festival command much more attention and space in our local and national tabloids than even the Nobel Academy in its annual prize-giving ceremony at Stockholm on 10 December. It is almost as if authorship has been given a commercial-star value akin to our film personalities. In a way, this is as it should be, for, those who sweat hard with their thoughts, paper and ink ought to be given their due. The only trouble that I see is that the author often becomes susceptible enough to believe that her identity as an accepted and recognised writer depends mostly on an invitation to such festivals. Most writers, given their immense naivety, would not stop from succumbing to such superficial adulation. But what kind of twisted naivety is it when we come across a class of writers grovelling to receive an invitation, about as sickening as a writer who prostrates herself in front of a wellknown book reviewer? Time,

thus, stops being the final arbiter of quality: all that is required is to be on a panel in a literary festival. I have been associated with the North East Writers Forum (NEWF) for more than 15 years now. Each year the Forum holds a seminar or a workshop in any one of the seven states. It is a low-profile organisation thriving on the interaction among the seventy-plus members who write in English and also translate our regional literature into English so as to reach a wider audience in the country or even abroad. In December 2010, NEWF organised the first-ever International Literary Festival in the Northeast. Writers from Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and several others from our country participated. We did not seek any government funds or any private sponsorship, save two minor ones that arrived voluntarily. Each member contributed his or her own bit. In the process we were personally and emotionally involved in the entire process. It was a festival that allowed one writer to seek out another in sheer fellow-feeling, in the belief that we write from (as Orhan Pamuk said in his Nobel Prize speech) the secret wounds we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them....to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing. In such a situation a literary festival is sometimes a blessing, especially in the sea of loneliness and isolation that is otherwise a creative writers destiny. T

Workshops: Making Better Makers

Workshops are wrenching exercises that aim not so much at reinventing writing as the writer himself, recalls Anil Menon

Literary art and the craft of writing

Writing is a history to be cautiously entered rather than a task to be efficiently performed, says Anjum Hasan

The writer at a workshop in IIT Kanpur

N June, I attended Clarion West, a six-week, inresidence, speculative-fiction workshop held annually in Seattle. We were put up at a sorority house. The hazaar wall photographs showed grinning women, their heads crammed together in sisterly circles, fingers forked in Vs, devil horns and up-yoursbro. Six weeks of these photographs, seventeen other participants, peer-critiquing, listening to instructors, swapping and-thats-why-I-killedgrandma stories, and squeezing out a two-thousand to five-thousand word story every damn week. I was a software guy really. I wasnt sure why Id thought the workshop a good idea. Workshops arent common in the sciences but are very popular in the humanities. Until quite recently, there were really only two ways to learn something. You could learn it like Eklavya: indirectly and by yourself. Or you could learn it like Arjun: through apprenticeship with an expert. Either method works when what we are learning is a genuine craft. An expert is better at the craft than a newbie and everyone can usually agree on what is meant by better. Some things, however, arent crafts. Falling in love isnt a craft. So is being a physicist. As Feynman said

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THE writing workshop cant really teach you how to make a better story. It can however, help you become better at revealing you to yourself
in his inimitable way, To do physics, you gotta have style. Things that need style usually arent crafts. Anything that involves an aesthetic -- a sense of beauty-or more accurately, an attitude, usually isnt a craft. Writing may be a craft, but writing fiction (mostly) isnt. Much of what passes for craft in writing is mostly just lore. So how does one learn something that isnt a craft? The key is that its not about the thing at all. Its about you. The writing workshop cant really teach you how to make a better story. It can however, help you become better at revealing you to yourself. A writing workshop is only partly about better writing. It is about the writer. Workshops provide a lot of useful craft-knowledge: how to write better sentences, handle point of view, where to send your stories. But all those things could also be learned from books or lectures or the Net. For example, Ursula K Le Guin has a lovely and must-read book on writing called Steering the Craft. But craft-knowledge cant do anything about the fact that writers are often their own biggest hurdles. That is why there is such a thing as writers block, but not say, an accountants block. So workshops have to provide an emotional experience. Writing workshops achieve this by gathering a diverse group of people under one roof. The workload is heavy. You look to your instructor for guidance but what you get is a style, an attitude, an aesthetic. It can be demoralising. Here you are, grunting and heaving in creativitys pot, while some of your peers are effortlessly producing knock-out stories week after week. You awaken and grow even as parts of you wither and die. You die because some of the experience is about taking away an old skill. Most writers are avid readers. When we become fluent readers in a language, we stop thinking about its al-

phabet. Similarly, avid readers read text without thinking about how the text works. A good writing workshop will break this spell. Workshops can fail. Its not clear why some groups dont cohere. Workshops can also succeed too well. If literature is possessed by a particular mania, then workshops can help spread that mania. Adjectives are now out, for example. So are adverbs and the word suddenly. Its still okay to use verbs, but get a grip on your participle fetish, brah. Jokes aside, in the education business, heavy criticism is kinda sorta good news. Take schools. In places where there are few schools, like Afghanistan, schools are praised. But in places where there are lots of schools, like the US or India, people are much less enthusiastic about imprisoning children for six hours a day. There are few long-duration writing workshops in India. I hope well have the luxury of excoriating them one day. What I learned at C West was about the power of workshops. I learned a few tricks, made lifelong friends, picked up the biz, drank a lot of bad beer. I hung out with writers. I wrote stories. I stopped saying I was a software engineer. T

Corrigendum: Shalim M Hussains poem Dighalipukhuri (Postscript 18 December 2011) should be read as ending with the line He will return to blow the nights last mists. Recollections on a wintry evening ends at Falling as soft as teardrops.

O write is to operate on the basis of an image of what writing is and what it does. So what ideas about writing underlie the work of urban Englishwallahs such as ourselves? As a writer of novels, poems and stories, I create on the basis of my ideas but Im also writing out an image of myself. I see myself as not just distinct from my work but different from it. Id like to think that if my work reveals something about me as a person it does so only in an elliptical way. At the same time, I believe that my art expresses much more of me than anything I could directly say about my ordinary, middle-class selfin the form of a curriculum vitae, however detailed, or, say, a listing of my background, beliefs, likes and dislikes. Writers are the fount of their creation and yet this creation is not reducible to the facts about who they are. This idea of the writer as someone from whose own personality and deepest feelings works of fiction and poetry emerge is at least as old as the European Romantic literary movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The European Modernists of the early 20th century turned even deeper inward. But the power and the centrality of the self was now in questionwas Man, the capitalised creaturestill at hand? Or were there just alienated and lonely individuals and the larger conflicted world around them? Im starting to feel that many middle-class Indian writers are bypassing this journey into and then outwards from the self. Were giving short shrift to the imagination and its showing up in the poverty of our work. Let me offer an example: campus novels. The writers of such novels employ fiction as a vehicle not of self-exploration but of shared recognition. These authors recreate a remembered community experience; the appeal for readers lies in how this recreation validates them. But this does not mean that self-understanding is in any way expanded or challenged. What does this mean for the culture of writing and reading? Despite the fact that the Indian novel has been around for some 150 years, for many of us it is still a rare and difficult thing. But about a decade ago, people with expertise in other fields engineers, diplomats, marketing executives, financial analysts started turning to fiction writing. In the short history of the Indian novel, those from other fields have now and then turned writers Upamanyu Chatterjee and Ashok Banker are brilliant examples but in their books

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IM starting to feel that many of us middle-class Indian writers are bypassing this journey into and then outwards from the self
the professional self and its universe is either ruthlessly satirised and/or creates the ground for a profound sense of alienation. These new writers from the past decade, however, write about their worlds not as a way to escape or subvert them but simply, and I think dangerously, to reaffirm them. If one of the most compelling themes of modern fiction has been the outsider, this new fiction were producing in India today is about the insiders. What follows from this new culture of writing is that nothing singles out the person who writes the novel. Conversely, the authors success rests precisely on the fact that they come across just like the people represented in their work, and that their readers can expect to approach them and encounter personalities like their own. The crowd no longer wants to consume its representation; the spectator wants, now, to be the artist. In the plenty of globalisation, this transposition is not just possible; its logical, writes Amit Chaudhuri in his essay Notes on the Novel after Globalization. Can the huge aspirations created for some kind of proximity to literature be made to turn inwards? The still unpublished writers Ive encountered in the creative writing workshops Ive taught seem to me ripe to go either way. There are two commonplaces I take away from these workshops. One, that a persons mental furniture could consist solely of scraps from Robert Ludlum and Danielle Steel and yet she could still, after a day of reading, respond with complete originality to a contemporary poem written in ironic mode. The other commonplace is the degree to which even the well-read aspiring writers either unconsciously suppress the possibilities inherent in their own imaginations, or dismiss such possibilities as banal. How do we deal with these powerful and contradictory twin forces? Perhaps best would be to cut short all talk about writing and instead start a conversation about literature. We should try replacing the idea that writing is a task to be efficiently performed with the recognition that it is a history to be cautiously entered. T