Release of "Writers on America" -- A New Collection of Essays by Prominent American Writers

11:00 A.M. EST

MS. SCHALOW: -- I’d like to introduce Stuart Holliday, who is the coordinator for International Information Programs at the State Department, and Mark Jacobs, a contributing author to our new publication, Writers on America. I'll be very brief, just mention that this is on the record, and if you do have a question, if you could introduce yourself and the media organization you come from before you ask your question.

With that, I'll give it over to Stuart.

MR. HOLLIDAY: Good morning. Thank you for coming out on a Friday to hear a little bit about what I think is an interesting approach to public diplomacy and a way to convey the complexity of the American ideal.

We commissioned 15 prominent fiction writers, including a number of Pulitzer Prize winners and the Poet Laureate of the United States, to comment on what it means to be an American writer. This tradition of self-description of the American ideal goes back to a tradition that started with St.Jean de Crevecoeur in the late 18th century when he wrote his paper about the American farmer and what defines -- what is this American, anyway? We know that this country was founded on a set of ideals and not essentially a nation-state as such that was based either on land or ethnicity or national treasure, but more of a set of ideals that actually predated the independence of the country.

So we hope that the diversity of views in this publication will allow people to reflect in a more textured way on the variety of experiences that Americans bring to their work and their point of view. We have a number of new Americans, or people whose families came to the United States and who, in many cases, had to overcome issues and hardships in their personal experiences, but understood, at the end of the day, that America stood for possibility and opportunity. Naomi Shihab Nye, who was a Palestinian American, commented on the fact that she understood that America, at the end of the day, was a land of possibility.

We also have prominent African-American author Charles Johnson, who comments on the fact that while we are certainly not perfect, that America is uniquely self-correcting; that we have an evolutionary process of taking the fundamental values on which this country was founded and using them in a continual process of self-improvement.

This publication will be distributed in various languages -- French, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Russian -- overseas and we hope will complement a program that we have to actually send these writers overseas to discuss in a more contemplative way the American ideal.

Let me just say that this is not entirely a new concept of involving culture in public diplomacy. It's a long tradition that we perhaps allowed to recede somewhat over the last decade, and we'd like to see in conjunction with our Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs that administers the exchange programs, the Fulbright program and the International Visitor Program, a more robust incorporation of cultural programming.

Not simply because we think that people don't have access to American culture. We know they do. In fact, in many cases they -- in some cases they complain that they have too much access to American culture. But more importantly, because we think the experience, the shared experience of expression that is a product of freedom, innovation and self-examination is something that can be a powerful message that resonates with people everywhere.

Before I turn the microphone over to Mark Jacobs, a distinguished writer and really the person who conceived of this publication, I would also like to mention -- and I will take questions, be happy to take questions after we discuss this publication. I would like to mention that today Ambassador Boucher will also be mentioning another publication that we have released today on Iraq, called Iraq: From Fear to Freedom. This is something that's been in the works for a long time, that has essentially an overview of the conditions that Iraqis have been living under for the last several -- couple of decades, and covers not only human rights but weapons of mass destruction and hope for the future.

So this is available for you all here. Again, it's an International Information product that we are very proud of and I think is an interesting description of the challenge that we all face.

George. I'm sorry. Mark. I was looking at George.

MR. JACOBS: Thanks, Stuart. First, I'd like to say thanks to a number of people sitting around the room with whom I worked to get this project off the ground. The idea did occur to me -- and I'd like to speak real briefly about how that came up for me, but obviously it took a whole bunch of people to put it together and I played the smallest role there. I did the least work.

I started out overseas as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, a country that is bilingual, full of Spanish and Guarani speakers. That was a double challenge. I lived out in a remote village and spent two years trying to understand the language, the culture, the people, the society around me.

At the same time, I began reading in Paraguayan literature, and that sort of established a pattern for me. I began with the tough stuff, unfortunately. I began with the great Paraguayan writer, Augusto Roa Bastos, and I have strong memories from way back when of that dual process of trying to understand a culture and a society and a language by living in it and also by reading the literature that comes out of that place.

That's a process that continued for me when I joined the Foreign Service. And I was, like a lot of people, much taken with Latin American writers of the boom generation -- Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez and that crowd. I served in Turkey a couple of times and tried real hard to get enough Turkish to be able to read some of their prominent writers. I won't say I succeeded totally, but I tried. It's a difficult language to read the literature.

And my last overseas assignment -- I recently left the Foreign Service -- was in Spain and I had an absolutely splendid time getting to know the work, and sometimes the people who wrote the work, of authors like Belén Gopegui and Antonio Munoz Molina.

So coming back to the United States, working in the State Department here in Washington, working in the office that Stuart runs, whose mission is to communicate American values and society and policy and a little bit about who we are, it seemed a natural kind of thing to invite American writers to reflect a bit. And the specific question that we asked them to consider was how any aspect of America or being in America has influenced their work.

Not surprisingly, we have 15 very different takes on what it's like to be an American and 15 different takes on American identity. I think if you've had a chance to look at the book, you'll see that the book, I think, fairly reflects the diversity of American society in writing, as we speak.

The book has no policy connection. One of my favorite quotes from the book is from an essay that I like an enormous amount by Bharati Mukherjee. She talks about writers in an international connection as being, and I'll quote here, "I found serious writers to be universally skeptical of authority, ironic, and sympathetic to the lost and baffled." I find that to be the case and I find it encouraging that we have a truly broad range of thought, response and perception to the American experience, and the American experience on the world stage is well represented in this volume.

I'll be happy to take questions too, but let me read maybe just two paragraphs or so from an essay that I did for this volume, and I'll be quick. "Writers like Achebe and Said have pointed out how easy it is to 'orientalize' a foreign culture, to use it as an exotic background on which to paint characters from one's own culture. When that happens, the appropriated culture at best provides local color. At worst, the story dehumanizes people in the horrific way that Achebe asserts Heart of Darkness as doing through Marlowe's depictions of black Africans."

And that's kind of the take that I have started from in my own writing in trying to understand the world in which I've lived outside my own culture and country. The last paragraph of the essay says: "The 19th century English critic Matthew Arnold once wrote that to truly appreciate the literature of one's own culture, it was necessary to know that of another. Arnold was talking about how important it was to know French to understand English. Today, the notion of paying careful attention to a culture not one's own is even more compelling. It's also more of a challenge. The Borges I pick up tonight is not the Borges I read while living in a converted meat market in Encarnacion, Paraguay. Fortunately, American writers writing fiction set in cultures not their own have a tremendous resource available to them, and that is the literature of the countries about which they want to write. Maybe it's true that wherever you travel, the way to the writing is still through the reading."

So I'll leave it at that and be happy to answer questions or refer to Stuart, because I don't work for the government anymore.

MR. HOLLIDAY: That's right. You can say anything you want.

MS. SCHALOW: Somebody always has to be first. That's the hard part.

QUESTION: Could you maybe just talk a little bit more about the impetus behind the project, how it came about?

MR. HOLLIDAY: Sure. There are really two things. One is that we happen to be fortunate enough to have a diplomat and staff member who also happens to be a writer and has been published. The concept, as I mentioned before, is not new. We have writers who regularly travel and speak to groups.

But the subject, I think, was probably a reflection of the -- I would say the perception that following September 11th and perhaps maybe even predating that, that there has been perhaps a simplification of the American -- maybe the American value system. And this is something that we recognize and we think that these writers, by putting into their own words such an array of experiences but with some common ideals, is a useful way of people to learn for themselves about the texture and the fabric of our society.

QUESTION: And how you came to this selection of these writers and what are the criteria, based on what? I mean, their ethnic backgrounds to look like America or their writings or their creative -- or their age?

MR. HOLLIDAY: We tried, I think, to include writers who had reached a level of recognition and stature as writers. We did consciously try to represent American diversity and I think you can see that; I'd say we succeeded quite well there.

American writing has changed in the past 50 years pretty dramatically. New voices are being heard. Those new voices have changed the language. They've changed the canon of literature. They've changed the way we approach reading, even. And we thought that it was important for all those very profound changes to reflect it in this volume since it's the -- in a way, this is the volume we're sending out to the world.

QUESTION: I have another question. One of the worst things for a writer to be -- I mean, to write on demand is, I assume. I mean, I’ve interviewed hundreds of writers and everywhere, all over the world, they say the same thing. How you make this equation, being asked to write and writing, but maybe probably it's something you want to write or you don't want to write? It depends how you are thinking about writing.

MR. JACOBS: I don't know that I could answer that. I didn't -- except for myself, and of course I was pleased to be offered the opportunity to have a space to reflect on my, I think, unique experience, which is to have had a foot in both worlds, a foot in the world of diplomacy, so to speak, but also to have written. There may be other people who --

MR. HOLLIDAY: I'm just going to ask George Clack maybe to come up for a moment. George is the editor of this publication. And maybe you could comment on that.

MR. CLACK: Sure. I would say a couple of things about that. When we commissioned these 15 writers, we were doing what magazine journalists do all the time, which is to say, "Here's an assignment. Would you like to be paid money to do it?" I think more than that, though, there were two things at work, from talking to people.

One thing was I think the very question and its openendedness, "What does it mean to be an American writer?" I think, oddly, this tapped a kind of vein in people. I think they found -- many, many of them found it an intriguing question and were intellectually interested in dealing with the question. It's an old question, as we've said before.

The second thing that I would say is we began this project a month or two after September 11th, and I hesitate to use the word "patriotism" lightly, but I think a lot of the writers were aware of the events of September 11th and were feeling, perhaps, more patriotic than usual, more in need of explaining our country to the world. So, in general, I was surprised at what a favorable response we received from many writers.

QUESTION: I can understand in the aftermath of September 11th of course you had different kind of results, but will it not be a tricky exercise for diplomats to indulge in, because you might get dissident writers offering you pieces, and obviously Sontag and Gore Vidal, you may not like the project or the world leadership more than they are already projected? So how will you draw a balance between the needs of literature, I mean needs of projecting American literature and the needs of diplomacy?

MR. HOLLIDAY: Well, I think that the government, the US Government, handles a very, very small portion of the information space, really -- the amount, the volume of cultural communication that comes out of the United States. And so we ultimately think that having a contact with Americans at the -- we've seen time and time again that when Americans travel and discuss issues of importance to them overseas, fundamentally the audience comes away with an improved understanding or improved picture of the United States.

I think that obviously we, as part of the administration, seek to -- we have products that deal with policy, we have products that don't deal with policy. This product doesn't deal with policy. But clearly, these writers were free to write whatever came to their minds and I think the -- there was no censorship or desire to tell them how to project what it means to be an American writer.

So we think at the end of the day, if we let the free market take its course, that the weight of information out there will be constructive and positive for us.

Anybody else have anything to add on that point?

QUESTION: How do you plan to reach your readers? Will you send them to embassies or --

MR. HOLLIDAY: Yes, we have put it up on the -- well, several ways. We have put it up on the web on our International Information Programs website and the embassies traditionally take the language versions and download them and distribute them. We also have a very, very significant number of requests from the embassies for printed copies, which we will be fulfilling. Additionally, we'll be following up, as I mentioned, with digital video conferences and speaker tours by some of the authors and other authors in these publications.

The demand and the coverage -- you may have seen New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among others, and some European publications have taken note of this publication because perhaps it's a little, as we say, outside the box. But we have been pleasantly surprised by the level of interest in it and we'd like to do more programs that deal with, whether it's writers, music, culture, film, we think that these are all important aspects of our experience that we can share.

QUESTION: But the problem, you know, is that people who come to embassies are already sympathetic and I think you want to reach a less sympathetic audience.

MR. HOLLIDAY: Yes. I think that the embassies -- the job of our information resource officers and public affairs officers is really to engage a broad spectrum of civil society in every country, whether it's opposition figures, nongovernmental organizations, universities. Universities haven't traditionally been bedrocks of support for the United States and our policies, but nonetheless our staff at our embassies have excellent relationships with these institutions and really seek to get these products distributed and make sure that the audience -- we're not, as you say, preaching to the choir.

QUESTION: My first question is related to what's next and the other question is, assume I read some of the pieces and I assume this is mainly for literary and cultural people, I mean, because all the references you are using in -- the writers using, I mean, it has to -- it is like 200 footnotes down there, you know, to say who is this guy, who is that guy, who is this author, who is this book.

How do you see this is helpful to discuss a discourse of literary or cultural communication or dialogue? Because, at the end, I mean, what I realized, I mean I already know but I -- but print -- print is like that America is not just a geography, it's more than that. I mean, that is the concept which I think is literary people or people who have some creativity, they have to give that concept or try to reach out with that concept more than a geographic country or a continent or somewhere on the map. I mean, those two questions.

MR. HOLLIDAY: I think the first comment is that we recognize that this product is focused on, you know, a certain segment of the public that, frankly, has been left out of the equation for a little while. We have enough room in our public diplomacy programs to make sure that whether it's Sesame Street for young kids, or working with Sesame Street, whether it's television cooperative programs, news, or even Ambassador Boucher getting up on the podium, that we have to cover that spectrum.

What I'd say about this publication and how it ties into the future of what we are trying to convey is that you, rightly, said that what you concluded out of this is that America is a sort of a concept and not geography. We believe that in many cases our policies are seen without reference to the fundamental values that have created what has been a pretty unique national historic exercise of power, which has been broadly not expansionist, rather limited, people seeking to live essentially a life that they came from somewhere else to try to get. You know, we're a nation of immigrants. We're a nation of people who have sought stability, openness, freedom of religion, tolerance. And as Johnson said, it hasn't always been perfect, but there's a self-correcting mechanism.

What we would like to do in the future with our routine, I should say, work of conveying policy is step back so that we understand that an international audience has to believe that what we are doing as a country is in their interest, conveys a -- will create an environment and a world where there is more stability rather than less stability, more security rather than less security. And I think we recognize that in many cases there has been a disconnect in people's minds between what our values are and what our actions are, and we believe that we need to do a more effective job of connecting those two, and we plan to do that.

QUESTION: Can I just make a counterpoint? Since you say that this is the result of a lack of awareness of American values, somebody might say that it is actually the result of too much awareness of American values that causes the problem because they tend to put such high standards when it comes to judging America that the divergence creates the problem, the divergence from -- I'm sure the words of all your declarations and Gettysburg Address and all these things are reverberating so much in the universe that the minutest departure from all those values creates a problem of how to view America. So the best thing will be perhaps not to publicize American values at all. They will not expect anything.

MR. HOLLIDAY: That's a fair point of view. I think that what we have recognized is, if you go back one more level behind documents like the Gettysburg Address, and instead of talking about the Gettysburg Address, talk about what the President has called the inalienable rights of man -- dignity, tolerance, things that we are not necessarily characterizing as American values, as in we have the copyright or we originated these values. I think that you're correct in that people can get turned off with the projection, repeated projection of certain things in the context of we have it, you don't, you need it. But I think our message is we have it, you have it, we all want it. And that's the kind of message, I think, that we want to get towards.

QUESTION: In your answer to my question you stress more on the philosophy more than kind of practical steps. I mean, I understand what you want to do, but what next when I say this is literature, for example? I mean, I assume that the literature, American literature, specifically speaking, the main consumers are the Americans more than the world. I mean, with the exception sometimes when a Nobel Prize Laureate, recently Toni Morrison and the others.

The main impact for me, it's like from my perspective, and I think a lot of people in the world discuss -- at least those with whom I discussed the issues, are talking about the movies. I mean, you can go anywhere all over the world and find somebody's talking like Clark Gable, for example, or putting hats like somebody or trying to imitate somebody. I mean, and I know that a lot of people in this country, even they are in the rest of the world they are arguing that, as my colleague was saying, that their crime or anything related to anything bad in their life, they say because of Hollywood, you know, because they see something similar to it in the films.

I mean, are you trying to make -- What about children books? What about cinema? What about poetry?

MR. HOLLIDAY: Yes, you're very right in that this is a product that has a certain audience. I can tell you that we have a strong interest in addressing the demographic transformation of the world focusing on youth, those who for whom, you know, the moon landing and the university scholarship and the -- some of the things that were identified with -- polio vaccines, whatever it is -- with America, have receded into history.

So we have a number of programs, one of which, for example, is simply getting back to books and kids getting books in both English and books in their own language that might help them understand America. Books are very important. The Internet is not a panacea, (a); (b), we want to revisit a cultural presence in the field, in these countries that perhaps we decided were not a primary focus of American diplomacy. Well, I guarantee you that the very first thing I hear when I travel overseas is, "Why did you all close the -- " you name it, whatever center it was? "What kind of statement was that about your relationship and your regard for our country?" And we hear that very loud and clear.

As far as the private sector, this is a complex issue. You know, our fundamental premise has been that Hollywood, as you say, is a self-regulating body with the exception of the parental notifications and the rating system and that the market will take care of itself; i.e., if people want to watch whatever it is, they're going to watch it and order it. And does that mean that America is exporting these films or does that mean that, on the other side, that people like them and want to see them?

I think it's a complex question that involves looking at -- you know, analyzing the market and I think we have focused our attention on developing a relationship with Hollywood and developing a relationship with the American film community that is one of consultation and mutual interest. But I think that at the present time we have to impart what we think the world is thinking about the United States to them, and if they choose to incorporate that into their products, that's fine. If they don't, right now, that's fine, too.

QUESTION: Coming to a nonoperational question from your experience as a literary observer or observer of the literary scene, do you think there is a trend towards kind of writers becoming a little more inward looking as far as the nation is concerned, rather than being more universal? Is that what is happening?

MR. JACOBS: I think that's a process or it's a phenomenon that ebbs and flows. My own sense right now is it's going in just the opposite direction, that there is a movement away from sort of a minimalist obsession with and concern with the details of domestic, life to an awareness of the larger world, whether it is domestically or genuinely around the world, and struggling to come to terms with political engagement and what that means for writers. That's the way I see it happening now, anyway.

QUESTION: Is there Amore activist role which is being sought after by writers, as compared to the Vietnam war days or early days of American history?

MR. JACOBS: I think in the same way that Americans are politically engaged in different forms and fashions than they were in the era of the Vietnam war, writers themselves, being one reflection of American society, are engaging, but engaging in ways that you might not recognize if you try to compare it back to the way people dealt with the Vietnam war.

QUESTION: So is that a no?

MR. JACOBS: No, I think they are.

QUESTION: What languages are going to be printed, or this is the finished slate?

MR. HOLLIDAY: French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese.

MR. CLACK: Yes, probably those certainly. In addition to that, in different countries around the world, if the people in the embassies see this book and think that it's worthwhile having in their language, let's say Thai, they will do a local version of it. And I would expect a book like this would have, in the end, 20 to 30 local versions of it, based on previous books.

MR. HOLLIDAY: What country do you represent?

QUESTION: Egypt.

MR. HOLLIDAY: You all have a distinguished literary tradition -- Mahfouz and others.

QUESTION: What is the perception of American leaders now as far as what an Indian writer calls sofa bed -- the activist as a writer or writer as an activist? Do they go down well? Do they cause reaction? Adverse reaction?

MR. HOLLIDAY: On the part of whom?

QUESTION: On the part of the readers in general, the literary audience. How does it react to writer-activist?

MR. JACOBS: That's a tough question to answer because the reading public is pretty diverse in its reactions and who they are, and I don't know how to give you anything that I would think of as an accurate take on it. I don't know.

George, do you have a sense?

MR. CLACK: I'm not sure fully of the question, but a number of writers in this book, if you read their essays, pretty clearly qualify as what anyone would describe as activists, and they have played political roles in various movements over time. Yes.

MS. SCHALOW: Last chance, one more question?

QUESTION: Do you see any increasing self-confidence in American literary community, as compared to days when the prominent writers had to leave American shores, and to be able to write they had to settle down in Europe?

MR. HOLLIDAY: I think that's a fair thing to say, yeah. I think the tradition has enough years and enough books behind it now that it is a little more secure than it would have been when Washington Irving went to Spain and camped in Alhambra.

MS. SCHALOW: Okay, I think we'll wrap up after that.

But thank you all for coming this morning. I would like to remind you we do have copies of Iraq: From Fear to Freedom, and as Stuart said, Ambassador Boucher will also be presenting this at the 12:45 briefing today, and Under Secretary Beers will be appearing at the ballroom at the National Press Club on Wednesday and I believe she'll be mentioning and happy to talk about both these publications next Wednesday.

So, with that, thank you very much, and have a good weekend.