October 1997
Joiner Center's Summer Programs Focus on Vietnam & Post-War Issues
This summer, some 115 writers interrupted work and family routines to attend the 10th annual William Joiner Center's Writer's Workshop from June 16-27. Participants came from Virginia, California, Idaho, Minnesota, and Louisiana as well as the local area.
The workshop faculty was distinguished and diverse. In addition to conducting writing workshops, they participated in seminars, panel discussions, readings, and consulted with students. Faculty members included Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, noted short story writer Grace Paley, Central American poet Claribel Alegria, and Lee Swenson of the Institute of the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources in Berkeley, California.
A Vietnamese delegation -- including fiction writers Le Luu, Do Chu, Nguyen Thi Nhu Trang and poet Nguyen Quang Thieu -- joined National Book Award winning novelists Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann and poet Bruce Weigl to discuss writing from both sides of the war and post-war experience.
Le Luu's novel, A Time Far Past, was published last year by the University of Massachusetts Press. Thieu was visiting to mark the publication of his book of poetry, The Women Carry River Water, translated by Professor Martha Collins of the Creative Writing Program and published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
One feature of this year's workshop was outreach to aspiring high school writers and the local Latino and Asian American communities, coordinated by Jaime Rodriguez of the Joiner Center and the Gastón Institute Fifty Hispanic students from the Boston Public Schools spent a day studying with the Latino members of the faculty, Martin Espada, Demetria Martinez, Claribel Alegria, Leroy Quintana, Tino Villanueva, Norberto James, Alan West and Marjorie Agosin. Twenty Asian American high school students attended a workshop conducted by the Vietnamese American poets Barbara Tran and Christian Langworthy.
The workshop is supported by funding from the Lannan, Ford, and William Joiner Foundations, and was coordinated by Michael Sullivan of the Joiner Center.
For the fifth year, the Joiner Center also sponsored the Vietnam Institute June 23-25 which hosted 15 high school teachers interested in teaching the Vietnam war as part of their curriculum. The focus of this Institute was on postwar Vietnam, issues of economic development, and the status of women.
Discussions ranged from the effects of foreign capital on traditional Vietnamese culture, including rising prostitution and organized crime, to the pressures on society because of the reduced numbers of men due to war losses, and the consequences for women of child bearing age. In the words of Nguyen Ba Chung, Institute faculty member and research associate at the Joiner Center, "Vietnam's house is one of many mansions, some harmonious, some in stark opposition, and all in some form of transition. Vietnam will have to remake itself ... if it hopes to come out of the modern challenge intact and with confidence."
Faculty included Marilyn Young, Professor of history at New York University; Karen Turner, Professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross; and Lady Borton, head of the American Friends Service Committee in Hanoi. The Vietnam Institute was coordinated by Paul Atwood of the Joiner Center.