by contributor Donna Shor
Photo credit: James R. Brantley
“Renewal” was the theme of Pen/Faulkner’s 25th Anniversary Gala with eleven authors reading original pieces on the subject from the stage of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Elizabethan Theatre.
Back row, from left: Calvin Trillin, Mona Simpson, George Pelecanos, Matt Gallagher, Roy Scranton, Anthony Marra, Christopher Tilghman, YiYun Li
Front Row: Meg Wolitzer, Tiphanie Yanique, Mary Kay Zuravleff, Rachel Page
Humorist Calvin Trillin, who anchored the program, said that when he heard the theme was renewal – thoughts of his driver’s license immediately leapt to mind. Ten writers abstained from the linkage, but Christopher Castellani, as coda to his essay, spoke of his attempts to thwart renewal of his elderly father’s license.
Trillin has earned his spurs as a leading American humorist with nineteen books and more than 300 New Yorker pieces published. His latest “Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff.” is Trillin’s take on Trillin.
Senator Patrick Leahy and Calvin Trillin
Despair, nostalgia, and compassion were intermixed with humor in the essays. The sacrifices of the military were evoked by three of the authors.
Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher, both Iraq veterans, took the mike together speaking alternate paragraphs from their work. Scranton, who spent four years in the Army, fourteen months of it in Iraq, was co-editor of the book “Fire and Forget: Short Stories from a Long War,” to which Matt Gallagher contributed. Gallagher, a former U.S. Army officer, wrote the Iraq War memoir “Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War.”
George Pelecanos
Best-selling author George Pelecanos, who has published nineteen novels, spoke with an undertone of controlled anger of visiting wounded veterans in Walter Reed MedicalCenter.
Twenty-eight year old Anthony Marra’s first novel ”A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” was recently nominated for the 2013 National Book Award. Among other awards he has received for his short stories, in 2010 he won the coveted Pushcart Prize for his story “Chechnya.” The subject of his essay at the event was a Chechen man.
Marra, though only 28, was not the youngest author of the evening. That honor, and prolonged applause for her reading, went to 15-year-old Rachel Page, a sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High. During their visit here, writers from the gala went to D.C. public and public charter schools where free copies of their books had been sent earlier, and the students had the invaluable experience of discussing writing and literature with the author whose book they had read.
Other writers included Yiyun Li, Mona Simpson, Christopher Tilghman, Meg Wolitzer, Tiphanie Yanique, and Mary Kaye Zuraleff.
The Pen/Faulkner Annual Gala proceeds support both the Writers in the Schools program and the annual Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Benefit Committee Chairs were Senator Thad Cochran, Mary Haft, Senator Patrick Leahy and Susan Richards Shreve. Frazier O’Leary is President of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation Board.
