Jen at lunch with student writers, including seniors (from left) Ben Key and Zak Jason
The resident By Jane Whitehead
A three-day course in the facts of fiction
G
ish Jen may be the first person to deliver a Lowell Humanities Lecture while standing on a stack of cafeteria trays. The acclaimed novelist and short-story writer used the trays, requisitioned from Dining Services, to overcome a tall lectern when she read excerpts from her latest novel, World and Town (2010), and spoke about the writing life before an audience of around 200 students and faculty in the Murray Room on the evening of November 9. The lecture launched Jen’s three-day sojourn as University writer in residence. In addition to the Lowell lecture, which was open to the public, Jen taught a master class in English professor Elizabeth Graver’s writing workshop, held an open, book club–style discussion of World and Town in the amphitheater of McGuinn 121, fielded questions from English professor Min Song’s Asian-American literature class, met seniors in the creative writing concentration for lunch, and
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joined Song for a public Q&A in the lecture hall of Devlin 008. The residency, which Graver organized, was funded by the University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, with support from the Lowell Lectures Humanities Series, the University’s Asian-American Studies program, and Fiction Days, a project that brings writers to campus. Jen’s visit is “the most extended residency we’ve had,” says Graver, herself a novelist (author most recently of Awake, published in 2004), who started Fiction Days some 15 years ago. Other visits—by Edward P. Jones, Ann Patchett, and George Saunders—have been for one day only. Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrants and the author of novels centered on Asian immigrant and Asian-American characters—Typical American (1991), Mona in the Promised Land (1996), and The Love Wife (2004)—plus a short story collection, Who’s Irish? (1999), is often credited with reshaping the “immigrant novel.”
It’s a distinction she views conditionally. “No one sits down to rewrite the immigrant novel,” she told the Lowell lecture audience. “You sit down to tell a story.” Her most recent story, World and Town, unfolds in a small New England town buffeted by global forces: immigration, economic decline, terrorism, fundamentalism. Jen read several passages, showcasing the distinctive voices in which she tells the story. Technical and scientific terms infuse the language of Hattie Kong, 68, a retired biology teacher, daughter of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary, while Sophy (pronounced So-PEE), the teenage daughter of immigrant Cambodians, has adopted the adolescent American vernacular. “‘It’s all, like, whack,’” thinks Sophy, trying to unravel how her family coalesced in a refugee camp. “‘Like who even knows if there are names for what they are, or for their kind of family?’” “What was it like writing the different points of view?” a student asked. “My characters come to me very frequently by talking,” said Jen. “I’m just listening, listening, listening. Not that I’m becoming them—I’m trying very hard to understand what they’re saying to me.” the next morning, jen warned the 13 students in Graver’s fiction writing workshop, “I’m the kind of teacher that makes everybody talk.” (She has taught creative writing at Radcliffe and Harvard, among other academic settings.) With a combination of praise, probing questions, and astute observations, she drew out the three student-authors whose stories had been chosen randomly for her input— seniors Kelly Connolly, Sophie Dillman, and Suzannah Lutz. “If you set up a convention, keep to it,” Jen advised Connolly after a discussion of her use of space breaks to show shifting points of view among characters. “There’s a way in which the writer teaches us how to read the story,” she said. Lutz said that for two months she had wrestled with her fictional chronology, which several readers found confusing. Jen suggested she might sharpen the narrative by asking herself, “Where is the emotional weight of the story?” “That’s where you want the reader to invest,” she said.
photograph: Lee Pellegrini