Tiphanie Yanique: The FPP Harlem Interview

FPP Harlem spoke with the spellbinding fiction writer Tiphanie Yanique (How to Escape from a Leper Colony) about “juicy, fatty” novels, when the POV has to be “we,” and enchantment as a family tradition.

What’s the best thing about reading to a live audience?

I love the immediate reaction you can get.  As a writer, most of my audience is people who I will never see.  It’s nice to see them.  I also love giving readings because I dig community. Reading to an audience feels like a community endeavor. To read the rest of the interview, go here.

Our Next Reading is on Monday, April 23 at 7pm

We are holding our second FPP Harlem Reading at Shrine next Monday night 4/23 at 7pm featuring playwright Bathsheba Doran; former editor of The Believer and novelist Ed Park; and short story writer Tiphanie Yanique.

Writers will read from their body of work and new pieces exploring the plural voice. Join us for this one-of-a-kind evening!  It’s FREE and there’s a cash bar.  You will find us at: Shrine World Music Venue, located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. Harlem, NY http://www.shrinenyc.com/

Ed Park: The FPP Harlem Interview

FPP Harlem spoke with our “first person corporate” author Ed Park (Personal Days) about walls of prose that resemble Chinese calligraphy, the opportunities afforded by the first person plural voice, and faded gyro posters from 1997.

Can you tell us a little about your current writing project?

What began as a modest collection of my short pieces (both fiction and nonfiction) has turned into something else. The working title is Two Laptops, which is also the title for several of the new pieces in the book. The new pieces (or ideas for new ones) are now bumping out many of the old ones (i.e., the initial premise/scaffolding). The working title is imposing some sort of new, more interesting order on the material. To read more of this interview, go here.

FPP Harlem on Fiction Writers Review

Celeste Ng at Fiction Writers Review, asks why the first person plural is used less frequently than other points of view in contemporary fiction: “But what about the first person plural?  Why haven’t we, as writers, embraced this viewpoint and its potential?  A few of us—Jeffrey Eugenides, Steven Millhauser—have tackled it, but most of us just shrug our shoulders and turn to our old tried-and-trues.”  To join in this discussion, visit FWR here.

Bathsheba Doran: The FPP Harlem Interview

FPP Harlem spoke with acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Bathsheba Doran (Kin, Parents’ Evening, and Living Room in Africa), about “we” vs “me,” the writer’s life in Harlem, and what current play we need to see right this minute.

Do you create characters that exist outside of your personal sense of we?

I create characters out of me not we.  If my characters don’t reflect a part of myself then I don’t understand them so they end up disappearing from drafts. I don’t always know at first what part of myself the character has accessed, but at some point I’ll realize they’re made up of a certain emotional makeup I experienced at some point in my past. And the dream is that other people will see themselves in my me, then it’s a we, and hopefully we’re all less lonely for a second.  For more of this interview, go here.

In The New Inquiry: Ed Park’s Personal Days, First Person Corporate?

Anton Steinpilz offers a thoughtful and in-depth analysis of characteristics the neoliberal novel in The New Inquiry.  He considers Ed Park’s Personal Days as part of that emerging project.  “Here Park manages to articulate a narrative point of view you might call first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to great effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. The resonances with Tretyakov’s biography of the object are obvious; but whereas Tretyakov points toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with 21st-century work life. Tretyakov imagines a novel without a hero. Park imagines one without a reader.”  For the entire essay, click here.

Check out this preview of Bathsheba Doran’s Kin in TimeOut NY

TimeOut New York’s preview of Bathsheba Doran’s Kin might help explain why we are so excited to have her read with FPP Harlem, if you don’t already know.  “Doran’s effortless dialogue and finely textured moods evoke the sweeter end of indie cinema, so there’s little wonder she has a parallel career scripting HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and adapting The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for film. Kin, though, is stubbornly theatrical. Doran has written an intimate story by telling its nonintimate details, peripheral moments (like after-the-kiss debriefs with family members) that nonetheless coalesce into something penetratingly romantic. Much as she did in Parents’ Evening, in which a fought-over child never appeared, Doran has actually written around her story. This forces audiences into becoming complicit in imagining the central relationship. Doran’s diffidence has made its way into the weft of her written material.”  For the entire preview, click here.

Tiphanie Yanique on BOMBLOG

Tiphanie Yanique was interviewed by Jack Palmer in the summer of 2010 for BOMBLOG.  When asked why her characters are so unsure about their own history, she says: “In real life I think people do obscure their own pasts.  I think we re-imagine our histories as our psyche permits, as our society permits, as our circumstance permits.  What is real seems frighteningly and excitingly subjective. There is a truth that happened and then there are the truths of the experience of what happened.   To appreciate this, all anyone has to do is ask a married couple about the beginning of their relationship.  Often there are glaring conflicts at vital points in their versions of the story.  It seems as though when it comes to our lives’ most important moments, we are bound to see them and re-see them via our particular vision.”  Check out the entire interview here.

Next Event Monday, April 23 at 7pm!

We are so excited about our next FPP Harlem event.  Join us Monday, April 23 at Shrine to hear the work of Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park and Tiphanie Yanique.  Admission is free!

Check back with us soon to learn more about our writers’ work.

And keep an eye out for our new posters on points in Harlem and elsewhere around the city.  The piece is designed by the amazing Natalie Molina of Pistola Designs.

Our Readers for 4/23: Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park, and Tiphanie Yanique

We are thrilled to announce the readers for our second FPP Harlem event: Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park, and Tiphanie Yanique.

Bathsheba Doran’s plays include KIN (Playwrights Horizons), Parents’ Evening (Flea Theater); Living Room in Africa (Off-Broadway for Edge Theater); Nest (commissioned and produced by Signature Theater DC); Until Morning (BBC Radio 4); adaptations of Dickens’ Great Expectations, The Blind and Peer Gynt; and her play for young audiences, Ben and The Magic Paintbrush (South Coast Rep). She is a recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, three Lecomte du Nouy Lincoln Center playwriting awards, a Cherry Lane Mentor Project Fellow as and a Susan Blackburn Award finalist. Her work has been developed by MTC, the O’Neill Theatre Center, Lincoln Center, Sundance Theater Lab, and Playwrights Horizons. Ms. Doran studied at Cambridge and Oxford universities before working as a television comedy writer with the BBC.  She is currently under commission from Atlantic Theater and Playwrights Horizons, and Schtanhaus in London. Her work is available from Samuel French and Playscripts Inc.  She has adapted The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency for HBO Films and wrote on Season Two of the acclaimed Martin Scorsese/HBO Series BOARDWALK EMPIRE, for which one of her episodes received a WGA nomination.

Ed Park is the author of the novel PERSONAL DAYS, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He is a former editor of The Believer and the Voice Literary Supplement and is currently the literary fiction editor for Amazon Publishing.  For more information on Ed Park, visit here.

 

Tiphanie Yanique’s story collection HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A LEPER COLONY was published by Graywolf Press in 2010.  She is a fiction writer, poet and essayist. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Kore Press Fiction Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in writing, the Boston Review Fiction Prize, and the Rona Jaffe Prize in Fiction. Her fiction, poetry or essays can be found in the Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, The London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, and other journals and anthologies. She has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers. Tiphanie is a professor of Creative Writing  at The New School University. She is from the Virgin Islands and lives most of the year in Brooklyn, New York.  For more information on Tiphanie Yanique, visit here.

Join us Monday, April 23, 2012 @ 7 pm

Venue:
Shrine World Music Venue
located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
Harlem, NY
http://www.shrinenyc.com/