Continuous reports from the 2007 New Yorker Festival, by the Emdashes staff and special guest correspondents.
The magic began late, in a frigid warehouse of folding chairs. My guest and I had been gazing for several moments at the cheery yellow New Yorker projection when Jonathan Franzen lurched out, accosted a chair, and bullied himself into a seated posture. Under the guise of switching off my cell phone, I nabbed a shadowy but unmistakable pic of the one-man discomfort zone.

Far from the chap zipped into a bulky brown tuxedo at a Poets & Writers party a few years prior, Franzen 2.0 was sleek and Queer-Eyed in a well-cut grey suit jacket, pressed white shirt, and whiskered dark jeans. Why was I gazing at that section of the Franzen anatomy, you ask? Why, simply because I grew up during the Girbaud era and have never quite kicked the habit of allowing my eyes to graze the crotches of others for that small horizontal tag. Only this and nothing more.
The anemic moderator gave us an unsourced (I suspect Brian Greene) overview of string theory and the microgeometry that hides the other nine dimensions from our sight, comparing the microgeometric force to an Ann Beattie story. Ann Beattie herself loped up to the Lucite podium and introduced “Skeletons,” a “Halloween story.” Like a good 65 percent of her audience, her person was lanky and aquiline, hair a slight frizz. The story began with a lengthy description of an outfit no one should wear: sweatpants and a Chinese jacket. There was someone named Garret and someone named Kyle, and Linda, who was engaged to one of them. The odd fellow out was a Mormon, and his identification as such constituted the great humor of the story, according to the audience, who expulsed their first collective chuckle when the landlady of the story printed “Mormon” at the top of his telephone messages. Somewhere in the microgeometry of the story, Linda was a child again, in a skeleton outfit, leading some boys forward with a pumpkin flashlight; not much later, she was appearing in a ghostlike vision to the Mormon (heh heh heh) at a gas station, just before a crash. Feeling thoroughly tripped up by the many strings, N’Sync-style, I gave up and allowed Ann Beattie’s level alto to lull me into a passive fugue. Only the tetchy observation, to my guest, that characters should never be English majors or in therapy, roused me. Jonathan Franzen’s presence crackled nearby, gulping and grasping for water and replacing the glass.
After a flurry of academic applause for Ann Beattie, the moderator ambled up for a bizarrely tepid praise session of Le Franz. He joked, unsuccessfully, that our chap was an “up-and-comer” who wrote “mammoth undertakings,” and extolled him further as a “guest star on the Simpsons.” No string theory or geometries, micro- or macro. During his introduction, Franzen himself appeared to be folding himself into his torso, and had the air of an unengaged student. Putting off his approach until the last second, he finally hauled himself into the air, only to bend a second time to retrieve his glass of water, which was stowed modestly under his chair.
Several copious throat clears preceded a tousled, boyish, “Hi.” A greyed wing of Franzen fleece fell rakishly over one eye as he grinned frightfully and paid tribute to Ann Beattie’s work as “effortless, heartbreaking, and humane.” His cadence grew easier as he warned that his next story would be 32 minutes long and “unpleasant.” Centering on the relations between a detestable couple named Betsy and Jim, the trademark Franzen forked tongue delivered some splendid one-liners. In the moment, something was delightful about the sentence, “She had never spent a day with someone she disliked as intensely as her husband,” and the observation that Betsy and Jim are “each obliged to the other for overlooking so much.” Titters accompanied observations about how the indolent couple declines to participate in the battles for the best prep schools and allows their children to consume soft drinks. “Perfect characters for the New Yorker crowd,” observed my guest. The story swelled with the adipose tissue of an empty nest, an affair (Jim’s), and Franzen’s own nettled compassion for the characters. I revised my previous decree against characters in therapy when Franzen narrated Betsy’s visit to a therapist named Frank Clasper (here I pictured a salesman of the overly sincere variety). From Dr. Clasper emerges the pithy, Protestant observation about why Betsy’s brainy, acerbic older sister was preferred over Betsy, the pretty one: good looks are a symbol of social injustice and unmerited privilege; brains are something one works at. Resentful of being forced to talk, and wary after finding white dog hairs in her dog-less apartment, Betsy eschews the incisive clasp of the Dr. for a human “vending machine” of psychopharmaceuticals. On her way home from a visit to the vending machine, Betsy sees a Jack Russell terrier (aha, white hairs!) gazing intently into a bookstore window. She follows his gaze to the broad back of her pinstriped husband, standing in the fiction section (!) and clasped at the armpit by a younger version of herself. Enraged, she spits upon the dog, twice, and returns home, waiting to confront her husband. Franzen earned a hearty round of New Yorkerian guffaws for his observation that Jim laughs at Betsy as he does “at Democrats.”
At the finish, Franzen’s pleasant ease dropped from him like a pair of sweaty gym shorts. During his descent from the stage, I noticed a tender but insistent belly pushing out the pressed front of his button-down. Adipose tissue aside, he regained his chair as if he had been tasered and began to hunch actively.
The Q&A were full of the typical inquiries–who inspired you? What’s a typical writing day for you? An elfin sycophant with a handlebar mustache skipped whimsically to the mic and inquired of both Beattie and Franzen what they felt was their best work. Beattie replied that she was largely unable to judge and was never entirely happy; Franzen quipped that “‘like’ was not a verb that had [his] work as predicate.” His best work, he said, involved the rare moments when he said something sincere, that he still believed, and didn’t sound stupid soon after it was written. His tone suggested that the quantity of such somethings were not tremendous.
One sycophant, who purred that he was a “huge” fan of “The Corrections,” informed Franzen that he had a “pretty good idea” of why he used the name Aslan for the drug in that same, being also a “huge” fan of Narnia. At this point, Le Franz needed only an air sickness bag to bring his posture to full fruition, but he responded with a cordial invitation to the Narnian to interpret the reference, assuring him he could probably do a much better job than Franz himself. The sycophant deferred for a nanosecond before prattling that Aslan was a Jesus figure in Lewis’s “Chronicles,” and that Franzen had probably been making the point that the psychiatric drug was the messiah of the 21st century. He grinned, proud as a graduate reading his thesis to Mom. Franzen looked mildly tickled, and answered that even if that was what he meant, he would never admit it in public. The sycophant was seated, no doubt still feeling clever.
The requisite question about technique: what were the more difficult points for each? Beattie answered seriously that dialogue was easy, but transition and exposition were still challenging. With time, she added, she had developed a more innate sense of how to move through a story, rather than basing every story on its predecessor. Franzen approached the question with typical self-deprecating drollery, professing an unwareness, for the first five years of his writing career, that anyone would actually read what he wrote, which resulted in copious pages of writing that “only their father would love.” He described one afternoon where he saw the light and began slashing pages “in big chunks.” Aslan, the “six different layers of symbol and allusion,” and the “great, colorful, metaphorical, two-page paragraphs fell away.”
Outside the venue, a waxed black limo (license plate: MUSICP) waited, a “Franzen” sign taped to the window under the driver’s nose. I did not, for the record, jump into the back seat like a Motley Crüe groupie.
—Tiffany De Vos

Continuous reports from the 2007 New Yorker Festival, by the Emdashes staff and special guest correspondents.
The remarkable thing about New Yorker Festival events is their unique ability to bring together seeming diverse writers, only to find out they have a similar approach to the same issue. Two writers, both brought into the venue to discuss mothers; two men who saw their mothers in a different light.
The first, Donald Antrim, is the author of The Afterlife, a memoir about his mother. He openly admits he hated her at a number of points in his life, and it took therapy and this book to bring him to a point where he could deal with his feelings. He likened her to a resistance fighter—a woman who was forced into a mold she didn’t want by a woman she didn’t like. His mother was an alcoholic who got sober in the last part of her life, a woman who always insisted they were both artists. She created clothing of unusual design, shape, color, form, the subject of one of his New Yorker essays that’s also in The Afterlife.
Until this book, he said, he’d never written about “mother” in any of his novels. When he first started the book, he had no plans on publishing it, he told himself. He ran it past his family before it was published, and everyone was okay with how it turned out. He now misses her at times. And this is good.
Colm Toibin grew up with four siblings and a mother who would say, “Oh, if I’d have known about birth control, there’d have been none of you.” She was, as he put it, an absent mother. He never felt she knew anything about him, nor paid any attention to what he said or who he was. It was when he was driving her one day, and she said, “You drive like you are—you are constant,” that he realized she’d ever noticed him at all. He was quite pleased with this kind of non-attention, which allowed him to go about his business as a teen in a household where the older siblings were gone, his father had died when Toibin was 12, and he and his younger brother were still there with their mother. He puts her in most of his work, and never plans on writing directly about her. He’s killed her off, married her, put her away—done everything to her on the page. She always pretended that she was not the source of the mothers in his fiction, and he helped her maintain that fiction about the fiction. He spoke of the ebb of grief that still will sweep over him, of how he misses her still. There was no love or hate, their relationship was limbo; still, she was his DNA, his pulse, and he wishes her back.
The two approaches to mothers was unique, yet both men held their mothers in regard in different ways. One, Antrim, was fascinated that his mother had turned out to be the artist she’d claimed to be, even if he cannot keep her art on display, since the pain associated with its creation is too intense. The other, Toibin, laughs at the fact that the only coming out he ever did was out the front door. Both seem at ease, in their own way, with their relationships with their mothers, who happened to die a few months apart from each other. Mothers and sons. Intense, deep, complex relationships. Books are written, plays, films. And we sit in a small venue and listen to two men give their up their memories of their lives with their mothers. Some funny, some heartbreakingly sad. Women who shaped how they write simply by bearing the name “Mother.”
—Quin Browne

Continuous reports from the 2007 New Yorker Festival.
The audience who gathered for a reading from these two authors was a human Chex mix: bits and pieces of every group were there to listen to Annie Proulx and Junot Diaz, who write in different styles, have different cultural backgrounds and different styles of writing, and clearly respect each other a great deal as friends and as artists.

High energy abounded. “It used to Mick Jagger that got me excited,” said the woman next to me. “You know, rocker boys. Now it’s literary women that I drive hours to see.” Junot Diaz read a short paragraph from his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—a paragraph in which, once again, his protagonist was being beaten up. He was self-deprecating as he read, apologetic to the audience, as if we wouldn’t enjoy his beautifully constructed sentences and wordplay. He was mistaken.
He talked about the fact that he continues to write short stories about humans and their failings in relationships. “As long as you keep cheating, I’ll keep writing.” he said. To prove this, he read the story of Alma and her lover; Alma has long arms, beautiful legs, and “an ass that exists beyond the 4th dimension.” Alma is all her lover isn’t, but as much as he loves being with her, he cheats on her, writing it all in his journal—which she finds. It’s not the journal that is his downfall, though, but the lie he tells to explain the contents that end it all with the delectable Alma.
Annie Proulx spoke briefly of the book she’d just finished about Wyoming’s Red Desert. When asked by a friend to write the text in his book of photography on that part of the country, she was surprised to find nothing written about it, and it became her next project to produce a book of short stories set there.
As she was researching the book, someone asked her to fill the chasm in sagebrush stories—less than a dearth, there have been none till now—and that brought about the short story she read next. “The Sagebrush Kid” is about the Sandy Skull stagecoach station, run by Mizpah and Bill Furr. Unable to have children, thwarted by eagles and coyotes not understanding that the piglet and dressed-up chicken were substitute children (you had to be there), Mizpah adopted a special sagebrush, and fed it gravy and bones and, well, that sagebrush grew and grew. While it grew, the station gained a reputation of, shall we say, not a place you wanted to spend the night.
Laced with the wonderful richness of language Proulx uses in all her work, we heard sentences that were spectacular in their music and accuracy: “He would buy cattle for a song, fatten them up, then sell them for an opera.” The story ends years later, with the understanding that the Sagebrush Kid has a cousin somewhere, and her name is Audrey.
The Q. & A. that followed was brisk, with both authors advising other writers to remember that fiction has to be disciplined, very structured and organized. Diaz said he felt that Proulx respects humanity, and that he’s a “self-hating boy,” because Proulx treats both sexes equally in her writing and doesn’t allow her subject matter to be defined by her sex. It was obvious that despite their differences, both writers have a great deal of admiration for each other, and that made for a cozy, stimulating evening.
—Quin Browne (Read more about Quin.)