I was twenty, and it was somewhere round three o'clock in the morning. I sat at a battered desk in the corner of the bedroom in my basement apartment in Montreal. The floor was warped from one of the unending water leaks in the ancient plumbing and the desk wobbled. Charlie Mingus's music played from a small radio. The shelf above the desk was stuffed with books and paper, pens, a empty glass, an overflowing ashtray, and a plate covered in toast crumbs. The air smelled of damp and cigarettes, and ever so slightly of drains. I...
Anderson Tepper introduced Ben Okri; Ben Okri introduced the empty chair. The empty chair takes on more power, the more PEN events one attends. Okri's introduction was so beautifully felt and spoken that it resonated as the best I've heard so far.
Okri was a surprise to this reader of the dazzling novel THE FAMISHED ROAD. He is more professorial than I had expected, and several of his poems were lists of rules. However, I tried to follow his credo of approaching things with an open mind. Why should I have expected him to be any way at all?
Most interesting to me were his words about the sources of his own writing. His mother a storyteller, and his Nigerian life imbued his...
