Press Release
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PEN New England and the Cambridge Forum to host THE AMERICAN BLANDSCAPE: Risky Writing and the Forces that Silence It

April 10, 2008, 7:30 p.m.
The First Parish Unitarian Universalist,Cambridge
3 Church Street Cambridge, MA 02138
Free and Open to the Public

On Thursday, April 10, PEN New England’s Freedom-to-Write (FTW) Committee, in partnership with the Cambridge Forum, will host The American Blandscape, a panel discussion about the forces in the world of publishing, society at large, and our own psyches that work to silence “risky writing,” the most dangerous but also most important of an author’s works. The discussion takes place at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church at 3 Church Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, at 7:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public. Books by the participants will be available for sale and signing courtesy of the Harvard Bookstore.

The panel, moderated by Richard Hoffman, poet, fiction writer, and author of the memoir Half the House, will feature:

•Carole Horne, General Manager, Harvard Book Store, long a supporter of the freedom to read and write;
•Linda McCarriston, professor of creative writing and literary arts at the University of Alaska, poet and National Book Award finalist for Eva-Mary;
•Mark Pawlak, professor of mathematics, University of Massachusetts, Boston, editor of Hanging Loose Press and poet, whose most recent collection is Official Versions;
• Jill Petty, editor and small press publisher.

The importance of politically challenging fiction and poetry throughout history is undeniable: from Turgenev’s powerful “A Sportsman’s Notebook,” which prompted Czar Alexander II to become the first world leader to free his country’s slaves, to the Lost Generation’s opposition to fascism; from Ginsburg’s “Howl” to Doris Lessing’s fiction to James Baldwin’s powerful and incisive essays. Has such writing been effectively denied its audience in our day? To what extent are the barriers to risky or oppositional writing real or imagined? What are the long-term societal and cultural dangers of a safe literature, of books as mere entertainment or escape? And what are the individual author and the reader hungry for substance, to do?

Most of us are familiar with the trends in publishing favoring a few big-name authors at the expense of the lesser known perhaps riskier writer: big publishers taking a Hollywood blockbuster approach to deciding what books to publish and market. Profit being the index of success, publishers no longer seem to feel an obligation, as Andre Chiffron has pointed out, to publish, even at a loss, a modicum of important, risky books each year. Many serious or unknown authors must look more and more to small presses to publish their work, but systemic distribution challenges make it hard for these books to reach a wide audience. The rock-star argument even exists in the academy: often authors with books published at smaller presses find it much harder to get tenure than those with books from the big publishers. But is there something more insidious than the market at work?

In her The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award), Frances Stonor Saunders details how after World War II the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, publishing and translating well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsoring abstract art to counter art with any social content, and subsidizing those journals that criticized revolutionary politics and defended or ignored violent and destructive U.S. policies at home and abroad.

The American Blandscape is being held in conjunction with the presentation of PEN New England’s annual Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award and the Thomas Paine Freedom-to-Write Award for American Writers.

PEN New England is one of five regional branches of PEN American Center, which in turn is part of International PEN, the only worldwide organization of writing professionals and the world’s first human rights organization. PEN’s mission is to promote literacy and a culture of literature, and to defend free expression everywhere.

Cambridge Forums are free and open to the public. Book signing will follow 
program. Open discussion follows speaker presentation. Events are recorded 
for public radio broadcast. CDs and tapes are available.  Call 617-495-2727.  
Forums can also be viewed online: Go to www.cambridgeforum.org and click on the 
WGBH Forum Network.

Cambridge Forum 
3 Church Street 
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone/fax:  617-495-2727
email: director@cambridgeforum.org
website:  http://www.cambridgeforum.org 

"Bringing people together to talk again . . ."