Nan Cohen

The USC MPW Writing for Stage and Screen Festival

Posted on March 31, 2010 by nancohen

Three of our MPW students, Kevin Avery, Marlene Leach, and Tom Rastrelli, are having staged readings of their short dramatic writing this Friday and Saturday night at USC. They’ve been working with directors, dramaturgs and actors as they prepare their scripts. This is one of the most festive evenings of the year in MPW, and it’s free and open to the public in room 101 of Taper Hall of Humanities at 8 PM.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Ai, 1947-2010

Posted on March 27, 2010 by nancohen

I think most of us (meaning people of my age, who began to read poetry pre-Internet) tend to remember who were the first few poets of our own time we encountered when we first began to recognize that poetry was still being written, now, by living people who went to the supermarket and had arguments with their families, like us. One of those for me was Ai. She was near the beginning (if memory serves) of both Edward Field’s Geography of Poets anthology and of The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, edited by Dave Smith and David Bottoms. I met a lot of poets for the first time in those pages. The first poem I remember reading of hers was in the Morrow anthology–“Twenty-Year Marriage.”

Auden says in the elegy for Yeats, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems,” but picking up the book for the first time since hearing of the death (in this case, a tandem reprint edition of Cruelty/Killing Floor, Thunder’s Mouth Press), one notices change as well as lack of change. The poems are still vigorous, sinewy; their effects are immediate. But they are touched around the edges with something–a little gilt, a little glue? (“Sad friend, you cannot change”).

Posted in poets | 1 Comment

Complete freedom

Posted on March 14, 2010 by nancohen

We were listening to Beyond the Fringe in the car today as we drove to Miri’s soccer game. In “Sitting on the Bench,” Peter Cook ruminates, “It’s quite interesting work, mining. You’re given absolute free hand to do whatever you like, providing you get hold of two tons of coal every day.”

It’s rather like teaching. Lots of freedom to do whatever you like and in whatever way you want to do it, provided you get hold of two tons of coal every day.

(Oh, and you should stay away from writing “loser” on your students’ papers. But you probably already knew that.)

Posted in teaching | 1 Comment

Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009)

Posted on January 2, 2010 by nancohen

Simone de Beauvoir, on the death of Albert Camus:

“It wasn’t the fifty-year-old man I was mourning…it was the companion of our hopeful years, whose open face laughed and smiled so easily, the young, ambitious writer, wild to enjoy life, its pleasures, its triumphs, and comradeship, friendship, love and happiness. Death had brought him back to life; for him time no longer existed, yesterday had no more truth now than the day before; Camus as I had loved him emerged from the night about me, in the same instant recovered and painfully lost. Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.” (From Hard Times: Force of Circumstances, 1952-1962, 206).

Posted in poets | 1 Comment

The travelling poet blogs

Posted on October 5, 2009 by nancohen

Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet, is the 2010 recipient of the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and he’ll be contributing to the New York Times’ Home Fires blog as he travels. His first post is on deciding where–and why–to go. This will be one to follow!

Posted in poets | 2 Comments

The Natural Laws of Good Luck

Posted on September 2, 2009 by nancohen

When Aimee Liu emailed me the announcement for a Book Soup reading and conversation with Ellen Graf, author of the new memoir The Natural Laws of Good Luck, her brief description of the book reminded me immediately of the author’s Modern Love essay in the New York Times two years ago: “Our Joy Knows No Bounds, or Lanes.” Lonely after a midlife divorce, Graf accepted a friend’s offer to visit China and meet her brother. In short order they married and, after waiting 18 months for his visa, began life together in upstate New York.

Ellen Graf appears at Book Soup on September 15 at 7 pm. Here’s the full text of the jacket copy from the publisher, Trumpeter/Shambhala:

The quirky and funny story of a woman in upstate New York who marries a man from China whom she barely knows. They don’t share a language or a culture, but together they discover what matters most—a story of taking risks, culture clash, and the journey to real love.
Ellen was lonely and having no luck with personal ads when her Chinese girlfriend suggested that she meet Zhong-Hua, her brother in northern China. Ellen soon finds herself going to Beijing to meet him, and although they speak only a few words of each other’s language, they dec ide to get married.
Ellen and Zhong-Hua settle at Ellen’s farmhouse in upstate New York where they face a host of challenges, including the language barrier, financial problems, and profound cultural differences. When Ellen tries to teach Zhong-Hua to drive, explaining to him the concept of right-of-way and the meaning of a red light, he cheerfully replies, “I don’t think so,” and develops his own free-form, heart-stopping style of driving. A character worthy of first-rate fiction, Zhong-Hua rarely fails to surprise and entertain us, whether by his driving style, his culinary tastes (Ellen must learn to appreciate rock fungus, among other unusual delicacies), and his creative low-budget home maintenance solutions (who knew that concrete had so many uses?).
But Zhong-Hua is also a man with a complicated and painful past, which includes time spent in forced labor during Mao’s cultural revolution. He’s a survivor who has emerged from his struggles with remarkable optimism. Whenever things appear hopeless, his refrain to Ellen is, “Just try, maybe work.” Somehow, it usually does.
At its heart, The Natural Laws of Good Luck is a story of acceptance and of love beyond words. It is also a tale of finding renewal at midlife by taking a brave leap into the unknown.

The Natural Laws of Good Luck is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next List Notable, and a Borders Original Voices pick. And here is Aimee’s blurb:

In The Natural Laws of Good Luck, Ellen Graf and her husband, Lu Zhong-hua, take the realm of marriage and spin it on an irresistible new axis. Conventional notions of romance become riddles as these two quirky, endearing individuals fumble from delight to disaster and back again. Graf’s exquisite memoir is quite simply the greatest love story I’ve ever read.

Posted in events, nonfiction | 1 Comment

Virtual Car Wash for Homeboy Industries

Posted on August 28, 2009 by nancohen

Terribly hot in L.A. this week, fires, haze, high pressure system; the moon looks fuzzy tonight because there is so much particulate matter in the air. And Homeboy Industries, the now-venerable job training and services program for former gang members (they now publish a literary magazine, too; here’s the current issue), is holding a Virtual Carwash to raise money for its important programs, which are under strain in these difficult economic times. Better for the lungs, not too damaging to the pocketbook, and low-impact environmentally. You can direct your donation to honor someone’s birthday or other event, too. Thanks to my marvelous neighbor Mary for the link:

Homeboy Industries Virtual Carwash.

Posted in life in L.A., literary magazines | Comments Off

Happy birthday, Baby T.

Posted on August 28, 2009 by nancohen

This is the kind of thing that delights a poet in the early twenty-first century: someone makes your poem part of a child’s first birthday celebration and writes about it on a blog.

Posted in poetry | Comments Off

Your Bright Future/Late Night Korea

Posted on August 24, 2009 by nancohen

Choi Jeong-Hwa, Welcome, 2009, colored fabric, dimensions vary, courtesy of the artist, © Choi Jeong-Hwa.

The Master of Professional Writing Program at USC is participating in one of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Late Night Art events, this one on Saturday, September 12, in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea.

MPW fiction student Sue Yon Kim will read in the galleries with Los Angeles fiction writer Leonard Chang. A $10 ticket gets you into LACMA from 8-11 pm and includes the exhibits and collections, music, dance performances, and readings.

MPW participated in one of these Late Night Art events last spring, in conjunction with the two exhibits Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof and Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures. It was an evening of massive sensory overload–art, music, language, refreshments, and swirling mobs of people, nearly all of whom were much more thin, sexy, and ironic than I. Still, it was pretty wonderful, and I’m up for another go.

Posted in events, life in L.A., readings | Comments Off

Sleepwalking Through September

Posted on August 20, 2009 by nancohen

Retired Philadelphia Phillie Doug Glanville (who was the first African-American Ivy League grad* to play in the major leagues) has been writing a series of Op-Extra columns for the New York Times over the last couple of years. They combine inside glimpses of the game with insights that can only be gleaned from lived experience. I really admire Glanville’s cool, wry, thoughtful tone in these pieces. The current one, posted yesterday, is “Sleepwalking Through September,” a meditation on how to mentally approach the game when you know your team can’t make the playoffs, yet you still have six weeks to play.