WEALTH OF IDEAS

Maureen Moore, in her review of my short story "Call Center", writes, "The call center, then, becomes a metaphor for power struggles in the 21st century. In Tari's mind, Mr. Johnston is a "stupid, ignorant moron." And the ambiguity of Tari's accent to Mr. Johnston is part of the problem, and the source for the struggle. This struggle for power can also be seen in the names assigned to each character: Tari, the [misunderstood] employee of the world (does he live in India, Zimbabwe or Stockton, CA?), is referred to informally by his first name. Mr. Johnston, the mainstream (i.e., "white") customer from Redding, CA is known by his formal name. The hierarchy of power is established by the formal and informal uses of their names." Read more on Maureen Moore's Pinnacles and the Pedestrian .

This list of best books of the first decade of this century was compiled by The Times (UK ). The list on their website has the books' synopses. 100 The Position by Meg Wolitzer (2005) 99 The Lost Leader by Mick Imlah (2008) 98 Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie(2007) 97 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007) 96 The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (2006) 95 The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo (2001) 87 The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (2007) 86 District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (2006) 85 Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 by Antony Beevor (2002) 84 Unless by Carol Shields (2002) 83 This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (2008) 94 Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (2005) 93 The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson (2008) 92 Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (2009) 91 My Father and other Working-Class Football H...

"Alice Munro won the Man Booker International, Raymond Carver's widow published a revised edition of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and fine collections appeared from old hands and debutantes. This year proved that reports of the short story's death have been greatly exaggerated..." writes Chris Power at the Guardian Book Blog. What's good to know is that 2010 already promises to be another year of the short story. By this--year of the short story--we mean many things, but one that's obvious is that there seems to be consent that, as Chris points out, the short story is alive (Some people thought it was dead).

Go read my story, " Sizinda Sunset ", on Saraba Magazine.

The Associated Press reports that South African poet and anti-apatheid activist Dennis Brutus has died. More details here. Brutus was an inspiring poet. I read some of his poems at the University of Zimbabwe, and chatted with the him briefly in 1994 at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. He contributed to the popularity of African poetry through his many interviews, and he wrote a dozen or so collections of poetry. Rest in peace.

African Writing (AW) issue number 8, a real holiday treat, is now out. It features my interview with Petina Gappah, my story "Cross Country", a great story by the talented Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, and a lot more interviews, reviews (with one by Memory Chirere)and more fiction, poetry! Here are a couple of excerpts: AW : While on the subject of labels, let’s talk about your identity as a writer. You have made it clear that you don’t consider yourself an African writer because “it comes with certain expectations of you”. First, do you think the question of your identification with Zimbabwe, Africa, Switzerland or the universe is relevant in what you do as a writer ? PG : I am a lawyer. When the government officials I work with come to the ACWL for assistance with their trade matters, they do not come to see an African lawyer. They come to see Petina Gappah, a lawyer with more than 10 years of experience in WTO law, just as they come to see my colleagues, also experienced lawyers, wh...

I am one of the editors of The Tule Review , a publication of the Sacramento Poetry Center, which welcomes submissions for the next issue — now 40-50 pages and perfect bound — with an anticipated publication date in June 2010. We consider poetry of all styles and forms (except Haiku). Submission Guidelines: • Considers poetry of all styles and forms (except Haiku). • Send up to six poems, maximum 96 lines per poem. • Submission deadline for the June 2010 issue is Feb. 27, 2010; submissions received after that date may be considered for a future issue. • Include name, street and e-mail addresses on each page of submission. • Provide a short bio, not to exceed five lines. • We prefer submission via email with poems attached in a single MSWord document (.doc or .docx format). • E-mail submissions to tulereview@sacramentopoetrycenter.org Please specify "Tule Submission" in the subject line. • Hard copy submissions are also accepted. Mail those to: Sacramento Poetry Center c...

I will not list my favorite books this year. I doubt that I have ever listed favorite books on this blog ever. It's often a hard decision, but I tend to be too busy when everyone is listing their favorite books. Shortly, however, I will talk about my reading adventures of 2009, dropping names excessively, because this has been a year of discovering many writers. Then I will probably share a list of the books I am scheduled to read by, let's say, January 14 Fiction books mostly, although there is a thick collection of essays on American architecture on the pile. I may blog about other people's favorite books though; a few of the ones I have seen are worth blogging about. I smile as I write this because I like it when people read, especially if they happen to have read what I read as well....

"Some people think Zimbabweans are on the cowardly side when they employ what I call survival strategies. Faced with extreme danger to their person, Zimbabweans use two major approaches: run away or fall silent. So, the diasporans took the first option, to escape "to live to fight another day", as Bob Marley says. It is pointless to be a dead hero. No Zimbabwean will engage in "suicide bombing", writes Chenjerai Hove in his new essay published in the Mail & Guardian of South Africa. Read the rest of the essay here.

Read the essay here.

There is general agreement, in my book circles, that 2009 is the year of the short story. Of course, this is not to say that we are not prepared to accept 2010 as a short story year if it becomes one. I asked the question somewhere, perhaps in one of my classes, about why it would make sense for 2009 to be a short story year, and the answers were practical: "Global warming", "shortening reading spans", and "a rediscovery of the short story". So perhaps the Melvillean big American novel may go out of fashion on the basis of green thinking. I like that reason. There is nothng wrong with being concise out of necessity. Then once in a while you hear that a 1200 page collection of J.G. Ballard's short stories has been published, then you say, "short stories!" "That's not all," you are told, "they just came out with another collection: Raymond Carver's stories in one volume." You start doubting whether the size of the bo...

I would like to congratulate Petina Gappah for winning the 2009 Guardian First Book Award with her hard-working short story collection, An Elegy for Easterly . Yes, hard-working, because this book has been very active since its publication in May; it has sent its author to an international book tour, has been on the short-list of the Flannery O'Connor Short Story Award (2009)and has touched the hearts of many readers worldwide. The £10,000 prize is well-deserved, and I get the feeling that this is just the beginning of many things to come. Here are the words of The Guardian's Mark Brown breaking the news December 2: "Geneva-based international trade lawyer whose poignant, humane and funny collection of stories about her home country, Zimbabwe, has impressed critics was tonight named winner of the Guardian First Book Award. Petina Gappah became only the second short story writer to win the award in its 10-year history, the first being Yiyun Li in 2006. Gappah's collect...

Title : "State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry" Publisher : Conversation Press (UK) Editors : Tinashe Mushakavanhu and David Nettleingham Reviewer : Memory Chirere When I received this book, ‘State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean poetry’, its very pointed title hinted that it is a project on Zimbabwe now as seen by its various poets. I know that the state of our beloved but beleaguered nation, Zimbabwe is now well known. Now a term ‘Zimbabwean crisis’ has even been spawned. Whatever way you look at it, the Zimbabwean crisis is characterized by serious food shortages, lack of jobs, rampant underpaying of civil servants, acute brain drain and the general collapse of public amenities. Definition(s) and causes of this crisis, in Zimbabwe, fall desperately and untidily too, between an oppositional view and the establishment/government view. A particular incident associated with the genesis of this crisis is the giving out of hefty gratuities to the liberation ...

Memory Chirere has opened a blog. Most know him as a short fiction writer from Zimbabwe, who sometimes travels to places like Oxford University to present papers on Dambudzo Marechera, or to Namibia to lecture on poetry. He is also a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Zimbabwe, and, in addition to what he calls his "occasional" short fiction writing, he is a poet, a critic (one of the best reviewers in Zimbabwean literature), and a voracious reader of world literature. He is, in short, a good friend of mine. I am happy that he now has a blog, a site that might turn out to be a place for many to hang out.... Check it out at KwaChirere and read the flash fiction piece he posted.

California's Capitol City Young Writers, a group whose operations are similar to the Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe, are meeting at Sacramento State University on December 5. The Discussion topic is on the art of non-fiction writing. The young writers will attend workshops by the following writers: JENNIFER BASYE SANDER Jennifer has been creating successful book products since 1983. She has worked in all aspects of the book publishing business, everything from book retailing to book publicity, from authoring New York Times bestselling books herself to acquiring them for a large trade publisher. She is also the author, co-author, or ghostwriter of more than a thirty books herself, including the recent gift book hits Wear More Cashmere and The Martini Diet. Along with the New York agent Sheree Bykofsky, Jennifer authored The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published, which is now in its 4th revised edition and has over 100,000 copies in print. A graduate of Mills C...

When you become serious with fiction writing, you begin to understand that there is a difference between you and your narrator, even in stories that you consider autobiographical. The writer just becomes the facilitator of what's told, but how its told may be completely dependent on the narrative POV you have selected. It is very important to let this narrator have an independent voice. I am reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence , whose narrator shocked me by "abandoning" the story and telling the reader that Orhan Pamuk himself will finish the story, and as you read along, you can see that the author agreed to do so. Here is a narrator so self-aware and independent that he knows his limits, knows where he can stop and authorize or trust the author to finish telling the story. Lately, I have been writing stories told by female narrators and this has become an example of writing what I don't know, to open new possibilities, and I have found myself worrying ...

This Thanksgiving I am thankful that I received my contributor copy of State of the Nation . It is a collection of thirty poets' works, edited by Tinashe Mushakavanhu and David Nettleingam. I haven't read all the poems, but I like how each poet was allowed to submit a short essay on craft or the process of writing. Mine, for instance, focused on my poetic journey, which, as you can imagine, tried to cover details about the many writing activities I was involved in growing up. It is an opportunity to get the writers to talk about their writing, something that most of us try to do in the wrong places...[like a friend just warned me against trying to talk about writing at the Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, and I will comply]. I am not going to review this book, since I am in it, but check this blog next week for a review from Memory Chirere. Featuring his review here will be an honor. I can tell you that there are many good things about this book, especially the essays by Ignatius ...

At 1196 pages, The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard has to be the longest short story collection I have ever read. It contains 94 stories, and comes at a time of renewed interest in the short story. I am going to review this book for the Sacramento or San Francisco Book Review , but for now, here are some details from W.W. Norton & Company, the publisher. Ballard passed away in April after a long battle with cancer, so this book comes as a perfect way to commemorate his fiction career. The stories span from 1956 to around 1996. Admired by authors like kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag, Ballard is credited with having invented cyberpunk and his novels and short fiction have influenced speculative fiction, but there is a literary quality to his "earnest, thoughtful, and elegant" (Norton) use of the genre. He was obsessed with human life in the face of rapid change, the concept of the near future reigning in all his works, which tend to...

I am a new-comer to the American short story writer and poet, Raymond Carver, but from the moment I read "Cathedral", I have been hooked. I was drawn to him first by what he says in " Principles of a Story ", his 1989 essay, which talks about the ease with which he approached short story writing ("Get in, get out"). Ease in the sense that he had to learn to demystify the writing process and aim for specificity, realism, clarity, and the sheer joy of the writing process (even where it may seem exhausting and time-consuming, the writer was trying to make an honest effort of producing a story, not because it was a special, world-changing story, but a creation, free of gimmicks and pretentiousness). After I finished reading this short essay and sharing it to a writer's workshop last April, I felt liberated, I loosened up in my approach to writing and lost some of the seriousness and faithful belief in the mystery of writing that had for years pursued me. W...

NSAA Today we feature a spoken word whose works I find moving. I have attended many of his performances, and we have shared the stage on several occassions. He is also a regular in the Sacramento Poetry scene, particularly at the Sacramento Poetry Center, Luna's Cafe, and the Mahogany poetry series, where he is a host. Please meet the poet known as NSAA. 1. Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. First, can you tell us a bit about yourself? My stage name is NSAA pronounced (en-sah-ah). It’s an African adinkra symbol that basically means quality, as I understand it. It’s like saying "The real McCoy". What I like about the word/symbol is that it is based on the quality of cloth, for example; this cloth is hand made nsaa. I’m a bit of an odd duck I’m afraid to say, my stage name is a case in point, how odd I will keep on the low-low, very political too. I love NPR, BBC and Democracy Now. My pet peeve right now, driving me insane, is what’s up with congress not fighting...

This post features MyAfricanDiaspora co-founder, Veronica Henry. In this blog she introduces the organization and its mission, and provides information on the group's first Annual short story competition. Enjoy. Our website: www.myafricandiaspora.com , provides news and information aimed at reconnecting the African Diaspora. My partner and I launched the site after tracing our African ancestry to Sierra Leone and deciding to use the power of the Internet to help foster the reconnection between people of African descent and their ancestral homes. We're sponsoring a Short Story Writing Competition - open to anyone, any country or continent, but the main character must be of African descent. I believe this is a first of its kind, an international competition focused on providing positive, diverse images of people of color in literature. I'd like to invite all writers to participate and hope you'd like to help us spread the word. Full contest details are available here and...

Chielo Zona Eze, author of The Trial of Robert Mugabe , blogs frequently on African Literature News & Review ,and I follow his news updates on African literature. Brief postings that link you to the source. His latest post is on Chinua Achebe's rejection of the label "Father of African Literature", which has been reported on the Guardian and is based on an interview done by the Brown University newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald . Eze's blog will lead to other news about African literature, interesting reviews on such books as Harare North , An Elegy for Easterly , The Thing Around Your Neck , and many others. Although short, his entries show a devotion to African literature, sometimes pure excitement, as when the announcement was made about the Oprah selection of Uwem Akpan's short story collection. Eze's entry celebrated the moment as great for African writers, pointing out that some agents and editors there may realize that they can profit from African...

I am trying to take Wealth of Ideas (WOI) to another level by encouraging the participation of other writers/bloggers. If you have a topic you would like to share with readers of WOI, please contact me at manu@munyori.com to express your interest, or just submit your blog entry to me using the same email address. Here is the range of possible topics: 1 Book Reviews : They don't have to be formal. Just your thoughts about a book you read recently, or one you read a long time ago. 2. Current issues and enduring questions : Yes, current issues, politics, etc. After all, we are called Wealth of Ideas . If you have new insights on an enduring question--what is love in the 21st century, what is beauty, etc, send us something. 3. Entries on tools for the writer's craft : You are an editor, a publisher, etc, and you want to give us advice on a craft issue--plot, point of view, detail, characterization, etc, send us something, help us out. I would do this myself, but I am trying to foll...

Many people have said 2009 is the year of the short story. And a lot of the short story collections published this year have won awards ranging from Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (which, of course, wouldn't be awarded to a novel or poetry collection), the Guardian Fiction Award and many others I can't think of right now. Only yesterday (Friday, November 6), CNN's Anderson Cooper and Oprah's Oprah Winfrey admitted that this had been the year they fell in love with the short story through their reading of Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them. For this reason, they have decided to co-broadcast a discussion of the book on Monday (9pm Eastern/8pm Central Time). This is a huge event for a short story collection. If all goes well, I may participate in some small way in the Webcast. Say You're One of Them has already been on the New York Times best seller list for weeks, and what that means is that Americans are buying (and reading) this book...

David Mungoshi, Vice President of PAWA . Zimbabwean writer David Mungoshi, whose new novel, The Fading Sun , is forthcoming from Lion Press, will present a paper at the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) in Ghana. This event,running from November 4 to 7 and attended by writers like Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrion, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiongo and others, will focus on the theme: "LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN A FRACTURED WORLD". Wole Soyinka will deliver the keynote speech. David Mungoshi will present a paper on HIV and its depiction in contemporary Southern African writing. Among other things, the paper reveals that there is "now a body of creative writing whose main driver is the HIV and AIDS pandemic." Mungoshi argues that "this writing cuts across all the literary genres (poetry, the short story, the novel and drama) and... the gender divide." The paper also examines "the language question with a view to suggesting how s...

Date: Friday, November 13, 2009 Time: 6:00pm - 11:00pm Location: Guild Theater Street: 2828 35th Street City/Town: Sacramento, CA FEATURING: Hour 1 (6 poets) 6-7pm Jim Nolt Emmanuel Sigauke Bari Kennedy Kate Asche Danny Romero Anna Marie Hour 2 (4 poets) 7-8pm Frank Withrow Lawrence Dinkins Sam Pierstorff Quinton Duval Hour 3 (Two dance groups, 1 band and one singer) 8-9pm Vocalist Carla Fleming Live band LSB Dance group JUSTICE Dance group TBA Hour 4 (4 poets) 9-10pm Kathleen Lynch Brad Buchanan Terry Moore Supanova Hour 5 (3 Poets) 10-11pm Bob Stanley Phoenyx Reign NerCity from Oakland Sponsored by the Sacramento Poetry Center & The Center for Fathers and Families. www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org www.fathersandfamilies.com

Chris Mlalazi This is big. Congratulations are in order for Chris, for his impressive creative journey from NAMA (Zimbabwe) to NOMA (Japan). His short story collection, Dancing with Life: Tales from the Township has won an Honourable Mention in the 2009 Noma Awards, one of the most significant book prizes in Africa. The book was one of the four books shortlisted for the 2009 Award, chosen from submissions by 43 publishers in 12 different African countries. Sefi Atta of Nigeria won Noma Award, worth $10 000, for her short story collection Lawless and Other Stories , which is published in the USA as News from Home . Tunisian writer Sonia Chamkhi’s Leila ou la femme de l’aube , and Love in the Time of Treason , by South Africa’s Zubeida Jaffer also received the Honourable Mention. The other members of the Jury in 2009 were Walter Bgoya from Tanzania (jury chair, Professor Simon Gikandi (a US-based expert on African literature), Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton Unive...

For six weeks, One Ghana, One Voice will feature poems on Zimbabwe. The first featured poet is the vibrant Prince Mensah, whose poem centers on the history of Zimbabwe and highlight resilience through highlighting the idea that Zimbabwe is indeed Zimba Remabwe (house of stone). The poem is accompanied by an author interview, in which Mensah displays his knowledge of the challenge bedevilling Africa. Here is an extract: 4. What lessons can Zimbabwe learn from Ghana's history? What lessons can Ghana learn from Zimbabwe? Zimbabweans can learn the power of tolerance from Ghana. Trust me; we have had volatile situations that could have ended up in chaos. Yet, there is a cultural underpinning that rejects bloodshed as a way of solving issues. The way of Gandhi is better than the way of guns. In the end, the best person to change Zimbabwe for the better is the Zimbabwean who is ready to make sacrifices and take risks, in order to move the dream forward. Ghanaians can learn the value of hi...

A new short story contest is being offered by MyAfricandiaspora . Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. See the whole story here. The African Roar fiction anthology was in the news a couple of time this week, Books SA and in the Sunday News (Bulawayo) .

Loads of student papers (essays and fiction pieces)--they keep flooding. Yet, my hunger for some leisure reading is insatiable too, so these are the books I carry around these days, hoping that maybe over lunch I may read several pages: Philip Caputo: Crossers (I actually finished this one and reviewed it for the Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review), Ha Jin: A Good Fall , which will be available in bookstores in December. Lucy Howard-Taylor: Biting Anorexia (reviewing it for Sac Book Review) Wil Wheaton: The Happiest Days of Our Lives (coming out in December); reviewing it for Sac Book Review William Styron: The Suicide Run , a collection of short stories. I love the serpentine wriggle of the sentences in these stories; Styron knew his way in the jungle of language; remember Sophie's Choice ? I probably owe the poetry world ten to fifteen reviews, but nowadays I carry around A Tiara for the Twentieth Century by Suzanne R Harvey. These are the new things out there, and there ar...

This post features an excerpt from Sunil Sharma's introduction to a new international journal called New Fiction Journal (NFJ). Here, in Sunil Sharma's words, is the information about this new journal: NFJ is all about fiction and fiction writing. Old fiction written in a new way and challenging/defying our pre-existing conceptions about this most popular form of the world literature. It is dangerous stuff being composed by very mobile imaginative minds across a fast-shrinking globe by some very talented writers---old and emerging. The NFJ wants screaming fiction: a piece of writing that is unhappy with the deterministic narrow framework of story-telling decided by previous generation(s) of writers, literary editors and academics---that is all the arbiters of tastes for you. The ideal New Writer (NW) for us at NFJ is typically impatient---the way our beloved Derrida was with the western logos and everything foundational, metaphysical and fixed. He was, as his comrades gleefull...

The following message was submitted by Tim Kahl, Events coordinator and Vice-President of the SPC Board: Presents 30th Anniversary Event for the Sacramento Poetry Center Monday, October 26 at 7:30 PM 1719 25th Street at HQ for the Arts The Sacramento Poetry Center - Sacramento's center for the literary arts since 1979, marks its anniversary with the release of Keepers of the Flame: The First 30 Years . Keepers , published by Rattlesnake Press, was collected and edited by Mary Zeppa, Kate Asche, and Emmanuel Sigauke. “Our goal is to give the reader a series of glimpses into the first 30 years of the Sacramento Poetry Center. Think of it as the in-print version of a highlight reel, brought to on-paper life by the remarkable generosity and amazing tech savvy of Photographer Charlie McComish and Graphic Designer Richard Hansen.” It’s going to be a festive night, a relax...