Ru Freeman's Blog

I’m over at LitHub today, with the opening essay to a new feature in the Virginia Quarterly Review. The print issue, on Citizenship, is well worth a read – and VQR in general is one of the best journals out there. Here’s an excerpt (below). You can read the complete essay here.

Love for a country must surely carry with it love for its many parts. To claim love for this country and yet care not a whit for the public education of other people’s children, or the fate of young people too poor to have any other choice but to risk their lives at war, or the abandonment of people whose skin color marks them for a lifetime of injustice, is to exist in a vacuum where you possess but a superficial understanding of those two words: love, country.

Sunday, February 24th, 2019

7-9pm

KGB Reading Series

KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

85 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003

St. Petersburg Review with Katherine Vaz, Larissa Shmailo, Katherine Young (reading

Aylisli), Laura McCarty & Teresa Carmody.

About “Kraine Gallery Bar” aka KGB: In the years since it opened in 1993, KGB has become something of a New York literary institution. Writers hooked up in the publishing world read here with pleasure and without pay to an adoring public over drinks almost every Sunday evening (fiction), Monday evening (poetry), and most Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The crowd loves it. Admission is free, drinks are cheap and strong, and the level of excellence is such that KGB has been named best literary venue in New York City by New York Magazine, the Village Voice, and everyone else who bestows these awards of recognition.

Thursday, March 15th, 2019

5.30-7.30pm

SE1 7RL

Christian Aid

35 Lower Marsh

London

SE1 7RL

Indivisible: Book Launch

With Diana Francis, Scilla Ellsworthy, Andrei Gómez-Suárez, Joyce Ajlouny, & Kerri Kennedy

40 global leaders and activists reflect on the state of the world, and lasting peace and security in Indivisible – Global Leaders on Shared Security. This collection of essays articulates a persuasive and powerful argument in favour of a new way of looking at a world where we reframe security as a shared goal. This is an exceptional compilation of voices whose places of origin reflect the world of which they speak, and who, in chorus, become a testament to the fact that we can come together, no matter how far-flung we are or how solitary our endeavours may seem, to shape our common future.

Friday, March 15th, 2019

6.30-8pm

Friends House

173 Euston Road
London
NW1 2BJ
United Kingdom

For more information:  Jenny McCarthy Telephone: 0207 663 1030

Indivisible: Book Launch 

With co-editor, Kerri Kennedy

 

Sunday, March 17th, 2019

7-8pm

10th Annual From the Dark Tower Reading

Sunday Salon 

Von Bar at 3 Bleeker Street (take 6 to Bleeker)

I won’t be reading but I’ll be “reading” (think MC w/a little twist) these wonderful poets and writers who wrap up the first decade of this reading I’ve been asked to curate by Nita Novena. 

Shastri Akella earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). His story won the Bridging the Gap fiction contest at the Slice Writers’ Conference in 2018. His works appears in Guernica, Electric Literature, The Common, Rumpus, World Literature Today, LA Review of Books, Danse Macabre, and European Stages, among other places. He is currently seeking agents for his novel, The Elephant Songs, a queer novel set in 1980s India with an an interracial love story at its core. Zabe Bent is an engineer living in New York, while working as urban planner and pursuing an MFA at The New School. She is currently working on a novel about the impact of time travel on personal identity, along with a short story collection based on the mixed heritage of her Jamaican family. Zabe spends her free time pursuing creative interests, from silversmithing to cooking to illustration. Find her on social media using @zabebent across platforms.
 Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts among others.  A winner of the 2016 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry and a 2017 recipient of the Barbara Memorial Fund Award for Poetry;  Manick serves as East Coast Editor of the independent press Jamii Publishing and is Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue.  Her poem “Things I Carry Into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems, a organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month and WNET Reel 13 Shorts. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Muzzle Magazine, T and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
 Wayétu Moore is the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit publisher of culturally relevant children’s books. Her writing can be found in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Guernica, The Atlantic Magazine and other publications.  She’s a graduate of Howard University and the University of Southern California, and is currently a Margaret Mead Fellow at Columbia University Teachers College, where she’s
researching the impact of culturally relevant curriculum and learning aids in elementary classrooms of underrepresented groups. Moore is an Africana Studies lecturer at City University of New York’s John Jay
College, and founding faculty member of the Randolph College MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
  Jenny Xie is the author of EYE LEVEL (Graywolf Press, 2018), finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, and recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has been supported by fellowships from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Poets & Writers.

This is a story in two parts. And this picture has nothing to do with it, but it’s a cool photograph. Because even though I grew up in a place where a leather jacket would be truly odd to own and even odder to don, I think it’s kind of cool. 


 


1.


Four years ago, I met a man at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival. His name is Sumeet Shetty. We had good conversation and wrote briefly to each other after I left. Two days ago I got an email from Sumeet, and we re-connected to talk about books, about the possibility of my being a part of his book initiatives in Bangalore, and a mutual friend, Rick Simonson, whom he had seen again at JLF this year. Summit also sent along a link to a fairly recent video about his work.


 


2.


Sometimes our family’s idea of light easy Sunday brunch conversation is to run through unpronounceable words, declaiming the importance of knowing them, which leads to the importance of reading and, at least one mention of the New Yorker, (yes, I’m an Eagles fan), and also scrutinizing each others foibles. Mine, I’m told, is that I just can’t stop analyzing America. American media, in particular. Today it was about what passes for journalism when Otto Warmbier’s father is made part of the American delegation to the Olympics, and who is on national TV asking “what kind of country tortures people,” and Lester Holt does not have the cojones to say, “ours.”


 


It is true. I have a predilection to tell it straight. It is not because I hate America or Americans, but that circumstances have aligned my life and the lives of many people I love here and abroad (and that includes a lot of people who don’t vote the way I would), with what is done in this country. I consider it unconscionable (for me) to simply acquiesce to the status quo in this country, and to remain silent in the face of things, even if I frequently feel that it is hopeless to attempt to change anything. I chip away at what I can change, and the rest of the time I refuse to let my guard down, I refuse to shut up or, rather, stuff my mouth with enough white bread to cover up the fact that it is still a shit sandwich thereby setting up an alibi for my silence.


 


Off I went, mulling and reeling a little bit (yes, indeed, contrary to all appearances certain things do make me reel though they will never make me not rally and fight another day). I went and read email, that reliable antidote to ones own preoccupations. That’s when I came across this video that Sumeet sent me. I am not from Bangalore, but I am South Asian in every way. I am also, perhaps, Middle Eastern in my heart and mind. I could be mediterranean in my constitution. But I am a product of my culture and upbringing, which is South Asian, Sri Lankan in particular. That is what keeps my mind agile, and my heart compassionate and hopeful and looking for the fun of things.
 
In an article I wrote for Electric Literature, ‘Pineapple & Roasted Nuts,’ which later appeared in the UK Guardian, I spoke about the way I grew up, revering words and books, and that neither was considered the special prerogative of a select class or people, that some of the biggest champions of books in Sri Lanka were people associated with corporate life. Summit’s video took me right back to that essay. There’s a reason why we people raised in other places, who come to build America – because America is nothing if it isn’t what is being created of its constituent parts which includes the outcome of its atrocities, a point made beautifully by Elaine Castillo in an essay for LitHub – there’s a reason why we can’t claim to be able to kick butt while simultaneously shutting up and sitting down. We say things out loud because we were taught how. We talk because we learned to read, not because what was in a book was appearing on a test but because we understood the importance of inhabiting other realities, other lives, to value them as being as precious as our own.
 
Take the two minutes it will take to watch this  video. I think you might understand where I’m coming from.

 
Come to think of it, that picture has everything to do with this post. I wasn’t raised in a place where I would want to own or even wear such a jacket, but if I find myself in a place where it made sense to borrow one and put it on, I’m going to rock the look. #immigrants #wegetthejobdone #wokeuplikethis
 
 

Thursday, March 15th, 2018

7-8.30pm

Cannery Reading Series

705 South 50th Street

Philadelphia, PA 19143

215.726.2338

with Emma Copley Eisenberg and Marc Anthony Richardson

 

Wednesday, April 18th, 2017

Brown University

Tribute to Robert Coover

With Russell Banks, Marlon James, and Jorge Olivera Castillo

Details: TBA

Friday, October 27th, 2017

6.30 – 9 pm

University of Houston Victoria – Katy Campus

2002 West Grand Parkway North

3rd Floor

Katy, TX 77449

Reading & Conversation

I’m over at The Boston Globe reviewing the brilliant Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías. The full review is here.

Here is the opening:

If we deceive a beloved friend, lover, or country to love longer, is it betrayal? That question anchors a novel whose vision is fixed on Spain’s bloody civil war and its cultural history after the death of Francisco Franco whose brutal dictatorship lasted, aided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, for three decades. As one of the main characters, Eduardo Muriel, says early in the book, “Almost everything has to do with the War.’’