If creative writing were an industry, AWP would be the industry event of the year. With four days of literary readings, panel discussions, schmoozing, and an enormous book fair, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs 2009 Conference is kicking off this weekend at the Hilton in Chicago.

Art Speigelman will be keynoting, supported by a long and illustrious list of featured presenters, including Marilynne Robinson, Paul Muldoon, Aleksandar Hemon, and Lucille Clifton. There are tons of panels, from “Elegiac Memoirs of Protest” to “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood!: Five Chicago Writers Mark Their Territory” from “Getting Published for the First Time: What to Expect” to “The Sister Art(s): Toward A Feminist Ekphrasis.” And that’s just Thursday’s panels. In addition to the sanctioned conference activities, dozens of lit mags, MFA programs, and cultural centers are hosting off-site events around the city. These range from “Poetry in Translation” (a number of big name poets and translators reading at The Poetry Center of Chicago) to “An Evening of Consumption” (a reading at a coffee shop featuring last year’s crop of Bread Loaf waiters). Again, that’s just Thursday.

I’ll be blogging about the conference all weekend, posting each morning about the previous day’s noteworthy events. If you’re at the conference, feel free to post your impressions and other comments. If you can’t make it and there’s something you really want me to check out, feel free to make a request.

The decline of print book reviews has received plenty of deserved attention from the NBCC and other organizations. This development is certainly something to lament and to work to rectify, but there’s also a tremendous amount of quality coverage of books and culture available on the internet. Arts & Letters Daily is probably the best of the aggregator sites, presenting a bevy of content in a simple, eye-pleasing format that doesn’t strive for the screaming, in-your-face, tabloid style of The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast. Part of the beauty of A&LD is that there is no aristocracy: all are treated equally. Pieces from blogs, newspapers, esoteric journals, and magazines are lumped together under the categories “Articles of Note,” “New Books,” or “Essays and Opinion.” Like any good cultural gatekeeper, quality is what counts—not masthead—although they do have a clear preference for original material in established media, rather than the call-and-response format that often characterizes the blogosphere.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing here if I didn’t think that there is plenty of worthwhile cultural content on blogs. So, let’s skip over them for now and move on to what I think is a less discussed but still very worthwhile medium: podcasts. These are a tricky thing. iTunes makes it easy to find and subscribe to podcasts, and there are lots of great podcasts out there. But if you want to make a routine out of it by listening to podcasts on an iPod on the way to work, that requires a daily synching and updating of the device. When our days are already so heavily routinized by minutia—tooth brushing, breakfast making, coffee drinking, key finding, briefcase or bag packing, lunch making, and the numerous other little tasks that circumscribe and define our workweeks—it can be difficult to keep up or to remember at all. That is the beauty of a device like an iPhone, which allows one to conveniently update podcasts over the air. Charging remains the only concern.

Say you’re more organized than I and have the routine down. What, then, to listen to? I love Leonard Lopate’s podcasts, which in a single day might cover life in Nazi ghettos, eminent domain law, the origins of the Great Depression, and medical explanations of love. NPR has a fine books podcast, Fresh Air, and podcasts for practically all of its other material. When looked at in combination with their excellent website, it’s then no surprise that NPR is one of the few outlets (if not the only) to have recently increased its books coverage.

Ed Champion’s “Bat Segundo” interview show is frequently provocative, entertaining, and a little weird. Champion is also interesting because he, through his podcasts, his website, “Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits,” and his criticism, is part of the vanguard of culturally concerned writers who have translated internet popularity into remunerative, mainstream journalistic success. Mark Sarvas (of the blog The Elegant Variation and with a novel, Harry Revised, now out), Maud Newton, and Jessa Crispin (Bookslut founder and now NPR contributor) also belong to this group. (Perhaps to be more accurate, they are redefining how writers may enter the “mainstream,” which itself is being forced to shift to connect with a new, more digitally connected generation of readers, writers, and consumers.)

Rounding out my list, I also enjoy B&N’s “Meet the Writers” (though I wish the interviews were longer), New Yorker: Out Loud, KCRW’s Bookworm, and KCRW’s Politics of Culture. There are many other appealing shows out there that I don’t have time to get to—even many of these I only manage to listen to sporadically—but I’m going to try to dip into the new Yaddocast to see if it sheds any light on the much mythologized Yaddo artists’ community.

So which podcasts, cultural or otherwise, do you listen to? Are you able to keep up, or is struggling to track such variegated forms of media—blogs, podcasts, print, TV, Internet journalism—more trouble than it’s worth?

We just flipped the switch and made public every single poem, story, essay, and book review that appeared in VQR from 1975 through 2003—the whole of Staige Blackford’s tenure as editor—online for all the world to see. That’s 3,169 works in all. Some of these were already publicly available—1,608 in all, but the remaining 1,561 had only teaser previews available, and could be read in their entirety only by subscribers.

Here’s a selection of some works that caught my attention:

• Edwin Yoder’s frank account of his time at the foundering Washington Star in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a job arranged by George Will, from 1993.
• Historian Stephen J. Whitfield looks back on the strange, funny, adventurous life of Abbie Hoffman.
• An appropriately-anonymous author’s defense of anonymity, praising the reuse of existing ideas rather than the insistence that one’s ideas were formed in a vacuum, from 1987.
• David M. O’Brien, in praise of presidents who pack the Supreme Court with people who agree with them, an issue liable come to the public’s attention within the next few years, from 1986.
• “The Masquers,” a poem by Joyce Carol Oates, from 1984.
• A mind-blowingly prescient prediction of Wikipedia, e-book readers, and political blogs from sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz back in 1983. This article will have to get a blog entry dedicated to it at some point.
• David Wyatt looks forward to the Star Wars franchise from back in 1982, when A New Hope (Episode IV) and The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V) were the only two movies, and he seems awfully excited.
• Richard T. Selden makes an ill-advised attempt to forecast the decade ahead for the economy, from back in 1980, in which he predicts that “inflation will continue to plague Americans” (wrong), employment growth will slow (wrong), GNP would grow by just 3% over the decade (wrong), and “the U.S. will pursue better economic policies in the 80′s than in the 70′s (let’s talk about “better”…).
• Murat Williams’s lament of the word “liberal” becoming a slur, from 1976.
• A 24-year-old Larry Sabato writes about his experience as an American studying at Oxford during the American bicentennial, from our Summer 1976 issue, relating that he “was locked in a cemetery in Paris, hit by a car in Florence, robbed at gunpoint in Rome,” and fell down the stairs of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

You can page through our last 34 years of issues and find some other gems. Three thousand articles is a lot of reading.

In our Winter issue, Lygia Navarro’s essay, “Tropical Depression,” provides readers with a more revealing portrait of life in today’s Havana, where clinical depression and dependence on prescription sedatives are widespread. Through many intimate conversations with Havana’s citizens, Navarro narrows in on a definition for the city’s collective psyche that is sharply defined in the shadow of Fidel Castro’s legacy. I e-mailed Navarro to ask her a few short questions about her life as a journalist and her work to shed light on contemporary Latin American politics and culture.

1. How did you first get the idea for your essay? Was there a specific person you met, or place you visited, that inspired you?

The idea came to me through a convenient accident of sorts: I’d met up with one of the main sources in the story, Alejandro, to talk about a completely unrelated topic. After we’d been talking and walking around Havana for a few hours, at the end of our conversation Alejandro mentioned in passing that he and most people he knows take sedatives to help them sleep, which immediately had me hooked. While I hadn’t known this was the case, it made sense given the environment of frustration and depression in Havana. I immediately started asking around, and found that nearly everyone I spoke with knew someone who took sedatives, which made me want to know more about how people were getting the drugs.

2. What’s the most surprising thing that’s ever happened to you while working on a story?

A few years ago I was reporting on human smuggling in Mexico, and when I went to talk with the immigration official on a small island off of Cancun, he threatened to deport me. There’s a lot of government corruption in the smuggling trade, and this official had been reported to be involved. So when I told him what I wanted to talk to him about, he became furious and told me that he was detaining me for failing to have the correct visa. Eventually he calmed down and decided not to deport me, and later was transferred off the island.

3. Best place to travel as a journalist?

In Latin America especially, my favorite place to do interviews is in the countryside or in small towns. People are often isolated and don’t ever get a chance to see their lives talked about, and they’re eager to both tell you their opinions and find out about the outside world. But I think that’s true anywhere; the more ignored people feel—whether in urban or immigrant communities in the United States, or in other countries—the more desperate they are to tell their stories.

4. Best icebreaker question to ask during an interview?

I don’t have any one first question, but I think that people warm up the most when they’re talking about their own lives—not just telling the story of their lives, but somehow trying to explain the reason they acted a certain way, or how an event shaped their thinking or actions afterwards. Sometimes this even works when talking with public officials or academics or other people who spend a lot of their time talking about policy or facts. If they talk about some topic or occurrence that they feel passionate about, whether they are for or against it, once they get to the core of their emotional connection to the story the best conversation emerges.

5. Favorite thing to read on an airplane?

Just about anything. I always have so many books and magazines I want to read, and there is never enough time, so a quiet few hours on a plane is a luxury. I often stockpile these funny little collections of torn-out magazine articles or short stories to take with me to read on the plane.

During the recent clash in Gaza, The New York Times’s book blog, Paper Cuts, posted a reading list of books about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. While there is much to be learned from political and policy-minded books such as Dreams and Shadows and The Missing Peace (get it?), I was troubled to find no works of literature on the list. My degree in is in comparative literature (Arabic and Hebrew), and so I’ve always been of the opinion that literature is the best way to understand other cultures. The books below are a small sampling of two deep and inexorably intertwined literary traditions, with four from the Palestinians, four from the Israelis, and one in between.

Memory for Forgetfulness, Mahmoud Darwish
Before he died last year, Darwish was almost universally acknowledged as the national poet of the Palestinians. Memory for Forgetfulness is a book length prose poem about life in Beirut during a particularly intense period of Israeli bombing. It’s a difficult book (in both form and content) but very rewarding.

See Under: Love, David Grossman
Grossman has been for many years one of Israel’s leading men of letters, a fixture on talk shows and the opinion pages. One of his more fantastical and ambitious novels, See Under: Love centers around the childhood and adult writings of Momik, a second generation Holocaust survivor who believes he is channeling Bruno Schulz.

Palestine’s Children, Ghassan Kanafani
Born in Acre in 1936, Kanafani was a master short story writer, journalist, and PFLP activist. Men in the Sun, his book about Palestinian laborers in the Persian Gulf is widely taught in college. But Palestine’s Children, a series of portraits of life in the Galilee before and immediately after the creation of the state of Israel, is his most accomplished and moving work.

The Nimrod Flipout, Etgar Keret
Foremost among the younger generation of Israeli writers, Keret’s stories tap into the profound existential absurdity of waking up every morning in a tiny, battle-torn Jewish state, going to work, eating sunflower seeds, and watching TV, all the while wondering, When will I be blown up? In the process of excavating this particularly Israeli truth, he also reveals the profound existential absurdity of life in the early 21st century, of being alive at all.

Wild Thorns, Sahar Khalifeh
Khalifeh is one of the foremost living Palestinian writers and a widely respected feminist activist. (Plus, she has a PhD in American literature from the University of Iowa.) A beautifully rendered novel, Wild Thorns explores deteriorating Palestinian social structures and the effect of the first Intifada on daily life in Nablus.

In the Land of Israel, Amos Oz
Known in the United States primarily for his novels, Israeli writer Amos Oz is also a journalist and political writer of some regard. In the Land of Israel records a series of conversations Oz had in the 1980s with settlers, activists, military judges, and more. What might be a stock piece of journalism is transformed, in his hands, to a work of art.

Orientalism, Edward Said
A literary critic and classical pianist, Said was probably not the most likely candidate to be the Palestinian’s “most powerful political voice.” And yet, he was. A brilliant thinker and tireless advocate for the Palestinian cause, Said was and continues to be reviled by the right. Orientalism, his critique of Western depictions of the “orient,” is one of the more influential books of the last fifty years.

Flowers of Perhaps, Rachel Bluwstein
The Poetess Rachel (as she is known in Israel) is like a cross between Whitman, Frost, and Dickinson. Her lyric, idyllic poems about the joys of agricultural life on the Sea of Gallile are a mandatory part of the Israeli curriculum. Compared to the rest of the selections on this list, these poems may seem a bit cheesy, but they give a good sense of the idealistic determination of the early Zionists.

Arabesques, Anton Shammas
Shammas is the author in between. A Palestinian citizen of Israel, Shammas grew up in a small village near Haifa and like the million or so other “Arab Israelis” he spoke Arabic at home, but learned Hebrew at schools. A fantastical, multi-generational chronicle of the Shammas family, Arabesques was written in Hebrew and remains one of the few novels in Modern Hebrew written by a non-Jew.

“[John] Updike kept in touch with the literary world mostly by mail,” Charles McGrath wrote in an extended appreciation published by the New York Times. “He was a regular at the post office and eagerly awaited the arrival every day of the FedEx truck. He was old-fashioned in promptly and politely answering letters, and his correspondence was like the man himself: stylish, charming, gently self-deprecatory.”

All of this, I can confirm, is true. Back in the 1980s, my parents bought their first home, in Georgetown, Massachusetts, from a writer named John Updike. I would later recognize parts of the house—and the tangled, overgrown backyard, which bordered on a parking lot for school buses—in “Rabbit is Rich,” and “Too Far to Go,” a short story collection. I was very young at the time, and my memories from that time are coated in a good deal of dust, but my mom wrote last week in an email that Updike often came and said hello while I was in my high chair at the kitchen table, playing with “fat Legos.” Later, once we were settled in, we got a good deal of wrongly-addressed correspondence from Updike’s friends—from famous novelists, musicians, and poets.

Four years ago, after I landed my first real job, I contacted Updike’s publisher, and asked if I could write Updike a letter; one of the editors emailed back to say the novelist would be “glad” to hear from me. So I wrote, mostly expecting silence. Exactly a week later, the letter arrived—a page long and neatly-typed, punctuated by the stamp McGrath mentions near the end of his article. I think I’ll keep some of the contents to myself, but I do want to share one excerpt, which I have returned to repeatedly in recent years.

“Yes, of course I agree that where we write affects the way we write, often in ways we are not conscious of,” Updike explained. “I felt happy and energetic in the Georgetown house because, in part, it duplicated the shape of my boyhood home—a long house facing the street, with a generous backyard. It was wooden and my old house—my maternal grandparents’ house, in fact, where I lived with my parents through the Depression and World War II – was brick, but the psychic layout was the same… I built a lot of bookcases in my studio room, so many that one visitor thought I was running a bookshop and reached toward his wallet to buy some.”

As it turns out, most of those books went on donation to a library in Peabody. But my family got a pair of them—they are beautifully inscribed—and they have since migrated to my writing desk at home, in Brooklyn, where I often pick them up, and flip the pages, and feel some sort of connection, frayed a little by the passing decades, but still alive.

1. Articles from our archives are occasionally rediscovered by bloggers, giving new life to decades-old works. Often that’s when we rediscover them, too. Morris Freedman’s 2002 article, “Why I Don’t Read Books Much Anymore,” has been making those rounds this week:

For several years now I’ve been reading fewer books, from start to finish, that is. Not that my reading has diminished. If anything, I’m reading more now, more words certainly, every day, every week, daily and Sunday newspapers, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, book reviews, quarterlies, portions of books, encyclopedia articles, professional publications, computer manuals and magazines, student papers. [...] I am confident that I cover a wider, more diverse, and even a more nourishing intellectual landscape at this point in my life by grazing widely, occasionally pausing to linger over an appetizing patch, rather than feeding narrowly and deeply all the time.

2. Morris Freedman’s endorsement of reading online might be encouraging to those lamenting that the Washington Post‘s book section is ceasing print publication. It will live online, and the paper will still print some book reviews, scattered about the newspaper.

3. Poets are celebrating Barack Obama’s inauguration with a poem each day “written for and during the first 100 days of this new administration.” Day 4 brought a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, whose poetry was published in VQR a few years ago. (The work of the actual inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander, was met with mixed reviews, but Graywolf Press is loving it.)

4. PEN is calling attention to the plight of Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist who has been detained by the Chinese government in a secret location for the last month and a half. The State Department has called on China to release him, as have 300 writers, including VQR contributors Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.

5. We published Dan Chaon’s short story, “Shepherdess,” in our Fall 2006 issue, and it got a great public reaction. (The opening sentence starts things off on the right foot: “This girl I’ve been seeing falls out of a tree one June evening.” Whether you loved it the first time around or you never read it in the first place, now you can listen to Dan read it aloud, courtesy of Ohio University’s “Wired for Books.”

6. A classic updated to reflect our post-apocalyptic, flesh-eating times: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Seth Grahame-Smith. The publisher describes it:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

7. Just to bring things full circle, Jane Austen fans may well enjoy “‘A Barkeeper Entering the Kingdom of Heaven’: Did Mark Twain Really Hate Jane Austen?,” Emily Auerbach’s article from our Winter 1999 issue. Bloggers have been passing around this article for the last couple of years, and seem to delight in this particular passage:

Twain marveled that Austen had been allowed to die a natural death rather than face execution for her literary crimes. “Her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy,” Twain observed, apparently viewing an Austen novel as a book which “once you put it down you simply can’t pick it up.” Yet one becomes suspicious of Twain’s supposedly frenzied loathing when he confesses that he likes to reread Jane Austen’s novels just so he can hate them all over again. In a letter to Joseph Twichell in 1898, Twain fumed, “I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read “Pride and Prejudice” I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”