Feb 13, 2021
There are times when Chang-rae Lee Pulitzer fiction finalist, PEN/Hemingway Award winner, English professor at Stanford University, beloved novelist with a sixth one recently released wonders if he can write.
My Year Abroad, by Chang-rae Lee
477 pages
RIVERHEAD
With every book he has published, he said, he has thought about the accolades he has received since his 1995 debut, “Native Speaker,” and thought, “This is all mirrors. It could dissipate. It’s fog.”
Over the years that Lee spent working on his latest novel, “My Year Abroad,” there were many moments, he said during a video interview from Honolulu, where he had spent most of January, “where I was absolutely sure I was on the wrong track and that I was this close to failure and throwing it away.”
Edward Hirsch with his father before a football game at Grinnell College, 1971. Courtesy of Edward Hirsch.
It has been nearly fifty years since I played college football, but sometimes I still wake up on Saturday with the old feeling. It’s fall, there’s a certain chill in the air, and suddenly I am catapulted back into the bruised light of my dorm room in the early morning, a brisk day dawning in rural Iowa, football weather. I can feel the tingle of anticipation as soon as I open my eyes a day for running routes and catching passes, blocking down on tackles, hitting, and getting hit.
He Canât Carry a Tune, but Chang-rae Lee Has a Song to Sing
âMy Year Abroad,â his sixth novel, is about letting yourself plunge into the world, even when it hurts. Heâs been thinking about that a lot over these past, painful months.
“I wanted this book to be a bodily experience,” Chang-rae Lee said of his latest novel, “My Year Abroad.”Credit.Michelle Mishina Kunz for The New York Times
Published Jan. 31, 2021Updated Feb. 5, 2021
There are times when Chang-rae Lee â Pulitzer fiction finalist, PEN/Hemingway Award winner, English professor at Stanford, beloved novelist with a sixth one on the way â wonders if he can write.
As a poet, creative writing instructor, and Chassidic Jew, I am fascinated by the surprising ways contemporary poetry and Judaism overlap. It was, therefore, a great honor and challenge to write the following essay, which serves as the “Foreword” to 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), an anthology of poems on the Jewish experience by a diverse group of today’s established and emerging poets.
Alaska Quarterly Review,
Guernica, and
Poets & Writers. Originally from Austin, Texas, she received an MFA from New York University and currently serves as the communications manager at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses
INTRODUCTION
If I could go back ten years and tell myself one thing about writing, it might be this: You can continue believing in a poem while also questioning and pushing it into a wilder and more emotionally precise version of itself. (Have I learned this yet? I’m trying.) Muriel Rukeyser might have said it best in her 1949 essay collection
The Life of Poetry: “We are poets; we can make the words. The emotional obstacle is the real one.” To me these sentences speak to the writer’s experience in two related ways. First: the hard part of being a writer isn’t just the actual writing it’s also the emotional obstacles, the anxiety and the self-doubt, that arise along the journey from idea to notes to draft to revision to revision to r