“Only hook up,” E. M. Forster famously wrote. Forster’s dictum is a program of action for writer, poet, editor, and translator Christopher Merrill, who is the director of the International Producing Program (IWP), centered at the College of Iowa. It’s been callled the “United Nations of Writers.” The late W.S. Merwin called him “one particular of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an incredible loaded era.” He’s in Hong Kong ideal now to rejoice the IWP’s 29th anniversary.
IWP organizes a quantity of applications that connects literary communities overseas with distinguished American writers. He shipped a shorter keynote address celebrating the connections at the Hong Kong Book Festival.
He available some thoughts on literary residencies:
“When I was employed in 2000 to rebuild the storied Worldwide Creating Plan, there was concern in the leadership at the University of Iowa that another educational institution may possibly find State Section funding to generate a literary residency like ours, so undercutting our partnership with that federal company, which dates to the IWP’s founding in 1967. This did not worry me, partly because I experienced so many administrative fires to set out, and partly mainly because it seems to me that any literary residency is a good thing not only for particular person writers but for the greater community: when poets and writers are presented space to browse, create, and replicate, good issues generally adhere to.
“I normally return Robert Hass’s poem, ‘Spring Rain,’ which commences with the speaker having be aware of the intervals of light sparked by “a Pacific squall, began no one is aware the place, which moves its personal way, like water or the brain.”
Accordingly Hass will make an imaginative journey, tracing the likely route of the rain… and then charts ends with calls ‘the blessedness of accumulating.’” Additional than 1,600 distinguished poets, fiction writers, essayists, and playwrights have collected in our UNESCO Town of Literature to compose, give readings, and interact with their counterparts from all-around the environment, growing their aesthetic horizons and constructing a community of literary connections that endure, and that is why I was thrilled to discover 20 a long time back that Hong Kong Baptist University had resolved to develop its very own model of the IWP. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I am pleased to sign up for Nieh Hualing Engle, the co-founder of the IWP, in welcoming the Global Writers’ Workshop. That several alumni of the IWP have had the great fortune to just take aspect in the IWW makes this all the sweeter.”