Thank you for asking for our participation. It takes effort to listen and sift all the offerings that come in. May you find good things that help to strengthen this important organization.
A novel and an author whom I highly recommend is Neil Belton, a Brit, who was an editor at Granta and now works for Faber and Faber. The novel is called With Sharpened Knives. It is about Nobel prize winning physicist Schrodinger who is given political asylum in Ireland in 1941. The book is complex, and intellectually rich. It recreates textures and issues that stimulate a reader to grapple with different levels in reality, history and human hearts. The writing is so generously dense, it shows up, without meaning offense, how shallow and one-dimensional many novels that are successful are. Belton also wrote a non-fiction biography called The Good Listener, which puts forward some of the elements in Helen Brambert's life as a founder of Amnesty International. I propose both books as unusually satisfying for content and rigor. Belton, without over intellectualizing, makes us aware that unless we encounter in reading some complexity, and experience the discoveries in navigating it, we will really never be navigating in the real world--as most of the world knows it.
I finished a novel this year and it is with a US agent, Gail Hochman. It is a polyphonic novel constructed about contemporary Florence. I published poetry in Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Spoon River Poetry Review and Silk Road this year. I published an essay "Seeing Butterflies,"in Notre Dame Review that poet John Peck said is "why ( a writer) is put on earth." I am an American writer who has lived in Italy for 25 years. I have published a memoir with North Point, been in Best Spiritual Writing, anthologies, Granta, Kenyon Review, Agni, etc. I would love to see more discussion about real multiple points of view. Following the Iraq war from Italy, I can say that there is censorship that occurs in the American press. Reading about our society from abroad, one has many important perceptions that could be useful. But I have learned, since I do write and publish in English, that each country has a narrative and America is no exception. It would be important to open up a channel in US Pen, I think, to people who live in other societies and do not tell American stories the same way. America is an enormous country, and as such, has great variety, but it also has an insularity that leads it to reflect upon itself in a certain, often overly simplified kind of way. We feel we are the teachers of others, and it may well be a time to learn from them.
Your translation initiatives are important. Your world festival a superb initiative. I love receiving the Pen magazine and reading it cover to cover. With email, you are reaching out to us and opening up dialogue. More than promoting our work, we greatly benefit from your asking us to initiate things, to react and to do.
All the best, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
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