BAY AREA WRITERS CROWD DAIS
Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle, CA
Oct 26 2006
Whiting writing honors bestowed on three who couldn’t be more different
in background, approach
At the Morgan Library in New York City on Wednesday night, three Bay
Area writers — Yiyun Li, Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Nina Marie
Martinez — were among 10 authors to receive this year’s Whiting
Writers’ Award, which comes with a $40,000 cash prize.
Since 1985, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation has given the annual
awards to 10 emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama and
poetry. Past winners include August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Cristina
Garcia and William T. Vollmann.
This year’s lineup may indicate a growing interest in writing from
the West Coast. Or it could simply herald some of the best American
fiction writing being done today. Nonetheless, the work of Marcom,
Martinez and Li couldn’t be more different in form, style and subject.
Armenian Lebanese writer Micheline Aharonian Marcom, born in
Saudi Arabia and raised in Los Angeles, speaks of the necessity of
remembering and cites William Faulkner as a powerful influence.
Beijing native Yiyun Li lived through the Tiananmen Square massacre
and came to the States to study medicine before discovering her own
passion for storytelling and a soft spot for Irish literature.
Nina Marie Martinez, who grew up in San Jose, is a high school dropout,
former punk rocker and Marx-quoting single mom whose writing has been
compared to Tom Robbins’.
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Yiyun Li Born in 1972, Yiyun Li grew up during the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, knowing that criticism of the government could mean
imprisonment or death. As a young woman, she witnessed the 1989
massacre of students and other protesters at Tiananmen Square. During
her obligatory army service, her anger and disillusion grew. She left
China at age 31 with a scholarship to study medicine at the University
of Iowa, but the allure of that school’s much-vaunted creative
writing program proved irresistible. She earned her master’s degree
in immunology, then jumped ship to study with Pulitzer Prize-winning
authors James Alan McPherson and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa
writing program.
“For a long time I felt like I wasted half my adult life,” she says.
“Now, though, I actually think scientific training was very good for
me. I’m a very disciplined writer, and I think I got that from my
science training.”
Like Conrad and Nabokov before her, Li writes fiction in a language
she acquired as an adult. By 2004, her short stories in English were
being published in the New Yorker. That year, she also earned master’s
of fine arts degrees in creative writing and nonfiction.
“There’s a slight distance between me and English. I think it enables
me to come to the language with a little bit different angle from
native speakers,” Li said. “I think it’s really my advantage.”
In 2005, Random House published “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,”
her collection of stories set in China and the United States, to
spectacular reviews. The book won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award,
the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the California
Book Award for first fiction. The Washington Post described her
career trajectory as “so steep it gives her peers vertigo.” And her
pace has not slackened.
Li left Iowa for the Bay Area last summer for a teaching position
at Mills College in Oakland. An assistant professor of English,
she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in fiction writing
and creative nonfiction. The Whiting Award will give her time to write.
“It will allow me to take a half year off from teaching. I’m working
on a novel I can’t wait to finish,” she says. The story is set in
China in 1979, a time she calls “a transition point, post-Cultural
Revolution, the starting moment of a little bit of democracy.”
Her work has drawn comparisons to Chekhov’s tales for their
psychological and moral complexity. “I did read a lot of Russian
literature, in Chinese translation, starting in elementary school,”
she says.
But today, another literature is a more conscious influence. “I’m
pretending to be an Irish writer,” Li says, with a laugh. She considers
William Trevor, the award-winning Irish writer, to be one of her
mentors, though they’ve never met.
“I owe him a debt,” she says. “I still read him every day.” What she
admires most, she says, is Trevor’s elegant language and affection
for his characters. But there is another quality she holds dear,
one she attributes to certain Irish writers.
“They just tell the story,” she says, “from the beginning to the end.”
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Nina Marie Martinez Nina Marie Martinez was born in San
Jose, the daughter of a first-generation Mexican American
prune-picker-turned-building contractor and a German American
stay-at-home mother. A high school dropout, she was a single mom
at 20, supporting herself and her daughter by reselling flea-market
finds. Soon, she was a vintage-clothing maven and decided to go back
to school to study business.
“All I knew was that I needed money, and if you needed money, you
studied business,” she says. But taking general education classes
reminded her of one of her first loves, literature. (The other was
the Giants.)
So she went to UC Santa Cruz to study literature. That’s when she
started hearing voices.
“They weren’t trying to make me do bad things or anything,” she says,
laughing. “These women were having a conversation in my head, and
I started writing it down.” That conversation was the spark for her
debut novel, “Caramba!: A Tale Told in Turns of the Cards,” published
in 2004 by Knopf.
“When I wrote ‘Caramba!’ I felt like I was writing the great American
novel,” she says. “Not too long ago, this was Mexico. My ancestors
roamed these lands for hundreds of centuries.”
The book takes traditional Mexican Loteria cards as pivot points —
and illustrations — for the assemblage of a high-energy plot.
Publishers Weekly described the novel as “an effervescent, luminous
debut.”
She cites Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov as two of her literary
influences, particularly while writing “Caramba!” “The funny thing
is, my favorite writers are white males and most of them are dead,”
she says, noting that Latina authors are too often stereotyped. “They
think we’re all sitting in the corner reading ‘One Hundred Years of
Solitude.’ ”
Martinez lives near the Santa Cruz boardwalk with her 16-year-old
daughter and two Chihuahuas and says she will never forget the
professor who said that the most interesting fiction is written by
people who speak more than one language.
“My girlfriends and I have always switched back and forth from Spanish
to English,” Martinez says. “When these two languages intermingle,
they’re both changed. Language is pliant. It can move and shift
without breaking.”
Her next novel, coming out in 2008 from Knopf, is the story of a girl
who survives a difficult childhood and becomes the queen of the flea
market. “When you write a book, there are books that you hold close to
your heart,” she says. Just now, she is reading “Tropic of Cancer” by
Henry Miller and “Down and Out in Paris and London” by George Orwell.
“What does it mean to be down and out, but living artistically?” she
asks. “My new book is dedicated to the discarded, people who’ve been
thrown away. I am drawn to things and people whose peculiarness or
beauty goes unappreciated by the vast majority of society.”
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Mic heline Aharonian Marcom Not every girl in the San Fernando Valley
grew up hearing Arabic, French and Armenian. Micheline Aharonian
Marcom did and found the sound of these distant tongues, spoken by
family and friends, both fascinating and frustrating.
Because she spoke only English, Marcom recalls, “I felt locked out. I
wanted to know what people were saying.”
Born in Saudi Arabia in 1968, Marcom was raised in Los Angeles. At
17, she went to UC Berkeley, studying comparative literature before
moving to Madrid, where she earned a master’s degree in Spanish
literature. Through her study of languages and literature, she found
a key to her family’s story — and her own.
She has just completed her third novel, “Draining the Sea,” the last
of a chronological trilogy that mirrors the migration of her family
from Armenia to Lebanon to California. The first in the series,
“Three Apples Fell From Heaven” (Riverhead, 2001), was inspired by
the story of her grandmother, who survived the Armenian genocide of
1915 and was resettled in Lebanon.
Turkey has yet to acknowledge that as many as 600,0000 Armenians were
killed between 1915-16. “For Armenians, the fact that the genocide
is denied is another added wound,” she says.
As a child, she visited Beirut, her mother’s home and the “Paris
of the Middle East,” until Lebanon’s devastating civil war in the
1970s prevented further family trips. In 2001, Marcom and her mother
finally returned and were shocked by the destruction they saw. “My
grandparents’ home was gone,” Marcom says. The neighborhood, in west
Beirut, had been entirely razed.
That visit informed the second book in the trilogy, “The Daydreaming
Boy” (Riverhead, 2004), set in Beirut on the eve of the civil war.
The novel was named one of the best books of the year by The Chronicle
and the Los Angeles Times.
Marcom turns to America in the new book — “Draining the Sea”
(Riverhead, 2007) — which she calls “a contemplation of American
history.” Set in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the story follows an
Armenian American man in his obsession with an indigenous Guatemalan
woman who suffered torture during that country’s protracted and bloody
civil war.
America is “a place of non-remembering,” Marcom says.
“There’s a weird feeling that we’re not grounded. We don’t have
a culture of remembering or worshiping the dead, but we come from
cultures that do.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress