Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope
Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope. Edited by Luke and Jennifer Reynolds
While I was off in New York these past weeks, a nonfiction collection appeared in the mailbox: Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope. The essays range in approach, voice, and subject matter.
In the volume, J.C. Hallman, author of The Chess Artist, the anthology The Story about the Story, and the short story collection The Hospital for Bad Poets, weighs the risks of a writing life:
Looking back, the guy who told me that becoming a writer was hard didn't have it quite right. Implied in the way he put it--or in the way I heard it--was that once you got there and were a "writer," it wasn't hard any more. You'd made it. This seems to be a prevailing opinion, and just about everyone who "succeeds" experiences the various tiers of anticlimax--first it's publication, then it's a book, then it's a couple of books, then it's the next book. Conceptually, success keeps receding.
For a metaphor to make sense of this, I can return to Dostoevsky and gambling. You'll know what I mean if I say that writing is a long-shot bet, but that's not quite accurate either. It still implies that you can win. Rather, writing is like a roll in craps: you come out on a number, back up your bet, and then you just keep rolling, with everything you've got on the line, and you never really win or lose. For Dostoevsky, this was both literal and workable material. The Gambler wasn't one of his better books, but critics have argued that his struggle with gambling informed the spiritual crises of his best work. It seems that experiences like the ones I had and literature both are fairly risky endeavors, differing only in quality. Psychoanalyst Linda Scierse Leonard, writing about Dostoevsky in Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction, argues that "all creation is a risk! The difference between the risk of addiction and the risk of the creative process is that the former leads in the end only to slavery and self-destruction, while the latter opens up new worlds."
-J.C. Hallman, "On the Line"
Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope, edited by Luke and Jennifer Reynolds, came out this summer through Rutgers University Press. All royalties from the sale of the book are donated to The Save Darfur Coalition.
The impressive contributor list includes Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, O.Henry award recipients, and many best-selling authors. They include: Jane Armstrong, Lindsey Collen, Nadine Gordimer, Tom Grimes, J.C. Hallman, Ron Hansen, James McPherson, and George Saunders.
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