FPP Harlem spoke with novelist and essayist Marie Myung-OK Lee (Somebody’s Daughter) about Korean birth mothers of adopted children, negotiating the “we” in New York City, and where to buy the best bacon in Harlem…
What does “community” mean to you?
I see community as two things: (1) the people around where you live; and (2) based on common interests. To read more of this interview, go here.
The next event in the First Person Plural Harlem reading series will be November 12th at Shrine. Authors Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Phillip Lopate, and dancer/choreographer Ashley Byler will be reading and performing work responding to the first person plural theme. We can’t wait to see what this exciting group of artists brings to the First Person Plural stage!
Jacqueline Jones LaMon is the author of two collections, Last Seen, a Felix Pollak Poetry Prize selection, and Gravity, U.S.A., recipient of the Quercus Review Press Poetry Series Book Award; and the novel, In the Arms of One Who Loves Me. A finalist for the 2012 NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature: Poetry, she lives in New York City and teaches at Adelphi University. www.jacquelinejoneslamon.com.
Photograph by Miriam Berkley
Marie Myung-OK Lee is one of the few Americans who have ever been allowed into North Korea; she was a guest of the DPRK Government in 2009. Lee is an alumnus of Brown University, where she taught creative writing until 2011, and now teaches at Columbia University. She has also been a Fulbright Fellow (the first recipient of a creative writing Fulbright to South Korea), a judge for the National Book Awards and the RFK Book and Journalism Awards. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, The Atlantic, Guernica, her fiction in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, FiveChapters, and many other publications. She has been awarded fellowship residencies to Yaddo, MacDowell, and Ledig House, and was the recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fiction Fellowship, and is currently one of the nominees for the United States Artists Fellowship, awarded for an “extraordinary vision.”
Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. He has written three personal essay collections—Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003). His most recent books are Two Marriages (novellas, Other Press, 2008), Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009), and At the End of the Day: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), and the forthcoming Essay Love (personal essays) and To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (both to be published by Simon & Schsuter, March 2013). www.philliplopate.com/
Ashley Byler was born in Rocket City, U.S.A. She received a BA in Music and Psychology from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been seen as part of Dance Theatre Workshop’s Studio Series, The Field’s Uptown/Downtown, Movement Research at the Judson Church and as commissioned by Ketchikan Theatre Ballet. She is an arts educator at The Eliza Frost School and dances with Sara Rudner. Her recent concerns as an artist hover around reclaiming the term pedestrian from the post-modern dance tradition, redefining it through popular social dance movement and applying rigorous compositional techniques associated with some heroes of the Judson Church in the 1960’s.
Venue:
Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 7pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/
FPP Harlem’s second season got off to a provocative start. Paul La Farge began the night with a story that takes on, among other things, the dangers of self-delusion. Lynne Tillman opened with a formidable “We,” reading the first lines of the Constitution. She then dug into her own American Genius: A Comedy reading passages that question the usefulness of history and its bearing on the present. 
Wrapping up the night, LoVid performed two sound pieces, both very much in the first person plural—the first an intense improvisation between partners Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, the second a piece incorporating their unborn child through a fetal heart-rate monitor. Thanks to our readers/performers, and thanks to our game, enthusiastic audience! Our next reading will be on November 12th at Shrine—check back for our exciting lineup! 
As many of you know, Harlem’s Hue-Man Bookstore closed it’s brick-and-mortar location this summer. While this has been sad news to those of us who loved this bookstore in the heart of Harlem, we are happy because the store closing does not spell the end of Hue-Man. Marva Allen and her team are continuing on as an online business, and they will continue to sell books at neighborhood events. They had a major event last night at MIST Harlem–Dwyane Wade was there to sign copies of his memoir. And they will be our bookseller on Monday, September 10. We’re very happy to continue with our partnership. We wish Hue-Man the best as they continue to adapt and evolve. We encourage our friends and supporters to support local and order your books through Hue-Man: http://www.huemanbookstore.com/.
Thank you to Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park, & Tiphanie Yanique for making the second reading of the FPP Harlem series a night to remember. Doran read from her play Nest, Park read his story The Gift (a story written especially for our event), and Yanique read from How to Escape From a Leper Colony. The pieces gave us different takes on the We, and the stories and the voices still stick with us, weeks later. So does the generosity of our readers, and the openness and enthusiasm of our audience. Thanks again, everyone. Our next reading will be held September 10. See you then!
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.
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.
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.
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/
On Monday, March 5 Margo Jefferson, Sam Lipsyte and Mendi Obadike read to a full house. Thanks to our readers for their inspired work and to our audience for their generous attention. Highlights of the evening included hearing excerpts from Margo Jefferson’s new book-in-progress; listening to Sam Lipsyte read a story he had never before shared with an audience; and getting quizzed by Mendi Obadike on topics related to the previous readers and the rest of the world. We enjoyed meeting so many of you who took the time to check us out. Our next event is scheduled for 4/23 at Shrine @ 7pm. Please plan to join us for what will be another one-of-a-kind evening. And tell your friends!