Regular VQR contributor Art Spiegelman speaks with The Nation’s Sam Graham-Felsen and fellow artist Joe Sacco about the Mohammed cartoon controversy, via AlterNet.

According to the Washington Post, a letter by William Faulkner complaining that he had been “conned” into a screenwriting contract with Warner Brothers sold yesterday for nearly $18,000, according to auction house Bonhams & Butterfields. Faulkner was the credited screenwriter on adaptations of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—both directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Of course, he also contributed to the screenplay of Land of the Pharoahs (a Hawks flop starring the young Joan Collins as Princess Nellifer—“Her treachery stained every stone of the Pyramid!”). No wonder he felt conned.

Greg Orr, professor of Creative Writing at UVa, read on orginal essay, “On the Making of Poems” this afternoon on “This I Believe,” a regular segment on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The “This I Believe” project invites Americans from all walks of life to share brief essays describing the core values and beliefs that guide their lives. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow.

When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what’s inside me—the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory—and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process brings me a kind of wild joy. Before I was powerless and passive in the face of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid meaning.

Tom Bissell, a contributing editor to VQR, weighs in on the “truth & nonfiction” debate in a great essay looking at truth in travel literature posted at World Hum.

The great nonfiction writer Lawrence Weschler once said to me that there are two kinds of nonfiction writers: Those who basically accept the idea that some type of fictionalizing almost always occurs in narrative nonfiction and those who cannot accept this idea. I am of the former camp. That said, what [James] Frey did is clearly beyond the pale.

Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt. Scribner, November 2005. $26

Ah, the mystery of teaching. Or, rather, the mystery of why any college graduate would want to join this underpaid, overworked, and under appreciated profession in today’s United States. The litany of problems is well known: starting salaries that border on being non-living wages, rude and under prepared students, pushy parents, weak administrators, and poorly funded facilities. As McCourt puts it, “Teaching is the downstairs maid of the professions.” And yet, many of our best young people continue to go into teaching, armed with an optimism and innocence that carries them past the obvious problems to that place where they connect with young minds, see that look of recognition and growth as real learning occurs, and savor the moments when they know that one person can indeed make a difference. McCourt’s entry, even forty years ago, was tough, but the masterful combination of humor and storytelling that we have come to expect from the author of Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis enabled him to break through the resistance and connect with generations of students in New York. He tells an engaging story as he moves between his hardscrabble life as a boy in Limerick (some of which we already know from Angela’s Ashes) and his hardscrabble life as a teacher in Staten Island and Manhattan. Read this in conjunction with Mark Edmunson’s Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, and ponder the mystery of why we seem to have better teachers than we deserve.
—David T. Gies

Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, by Vincent Carretta. Georgia, October 2005. $29.95

Archives hold their surprises. The one Vincent Carretta chanced upon, among British baptismal and naval records, has led to considerable fame for the University of Maryland literary scholar, and attention to his biography of Olaudah Equiano. Yet it is not hard to imagine Carretta rueing the day, over 10 years ago, when he came across evidence of South Carolina (not West African) birth for the author of the text widely regarded as founding African-American autobiography.

Therein lies much of the problem. Like I, Rigoberta Menchu, object of an earlier authenticity controversy, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) is asked to bear enormous burdens as proto-slave narrative, earliest literary incarnation of the Black freedom struggle, and ur-text of African Diasporic identity. Equiano’s memoir of slavery and manumission, seafaring labor and Christian conversion, and most of all abolitionist militancy is an extraordinary literary rendering of an exceptional life. A slave from childhood, Equiano became a master mariner; overcame unending frustration, violence, and fraud to earn manumission; traveled the world; and penned, financed, and promoted an unprecedented autobiography.

Carretta, an exhaustive sleuth and careful scholar, wields no hatchet in this biography. Its 350 pages brim with admiration for the achievement of the ultimate “self-made man”—forging identity, autonomy, and career from the crushing origin of chattel slavery. Carretta’s Equiano is also a master rhetorician and subtle reader of his audiences.

In quoting extensively from Equiano, Carretta seeks to underscore the power of an authorial voice he (correctly) finds extraordinary. The Interesting Narrative’s early sections on childhood in Africa, capture, and the Middle Passage, in Carretta’s view, are an act of literary (and self) creation, a rhetorical strategy Equiano likely saw as necessary to make his book an effective abolitionist weapon. The biography’s very title is telling: in referring to Equiano the African, Carretta acknowledges the literary and political strength of the identity Equiano took on.
—Pablo Julián Davis

John Casteen IV, a contributor to VQR (“Ditching the Rubric on Gun Control”), has another essay on the subject at Slate.com. “The Accidental Shootist” steers a middle ground between both sides of the debate and is worth reading.

[O]ur national discourse on gun policy has become polarized and extreme, with both sides now forced into polarizing and extreme positions. In fact, gun-control proponents are as guilty as the NRA of putting their lobbying shoulder behind tactics that are both ineffective and misleading.

Congratulations go out to VQR contributor Alan Heathcock—his story “Peacekeeper,” which VQR published in our Fall 2005 issue, has been chosen for inclusion in the 2006 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories by series editor Otto Penzler and guest editor Scott Turow.

The London Telegraph reports that a collection of lost recordings of Philip Larkin have been found in the attic of a former BBC sound engineer—who recorded the British poet in his garage studio. The engineer’s son jokes with the Yorkshire Post Today that Larkin sounds like a “stuffy old librarian” and adds that he hasn’t decided what to do with the tapes “other than a light-hearted suggestion from someone that I put them on eBay.” But not to worry, Larkin fans; he also says, “I’d quite like to see them published.” So would we.

In celebration of today being Darwin Day, we’re offering a sneak peek of an essay by Niles Eldredge (“Confessions of a Darwinist”) from our forthcoming Spring issue which features a portfolio of essays on Darwin, evolution, and intelligent design. Eldredge is best known as the codiscoverer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium—a milestone in evolutionary theory. He is curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and curated the “Darwin” exhibit that’s currently running at the Museum.

Other highlights of our Spring issue (due early April) are essays by David Quammen, Michael Ruse, Thomas Eisner, and Robert M. Sapolsky on Darwin and evolution; a symposium on Adrienne Rich, including new work by her; a new short story by Francine Prose; and an excerpt from Marjane Satrapi’s forthcoming graphic novel Chicken with Plums.