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Daily Schedule
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July 20th (Friday)Golden Cupid Hotel
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2:00 – 4:30
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Rebecca Walker's workshop
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6:00 – 8:00
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Travel Writer JOE CUMMINGS."No one smoothes the path like Joe Cummings, guidebook author supreme." -- Outside
"Perhaps the hardest working, best known, and most successful guidebook writer in the world." Thailand & Indochina Traveller
on Lonely Planet Thailand: "One of those rare travel guides written with such care and insight it deserves listing as literature." -- American Geographical Society
"The best guidebook by far is the Lonely Planet. It is written by Joe Cummings, who has been traveling around Thailand for more than 20 years, exploring every nook and cranny, and its material and judgements are correspondingly authoritative." -- Pico Ayer, Conde Nast Traveler
"The standard to which all others are compared. Essential." -- Thai-Language.com
on Lonely Planet Thai phrasebook: "Brilliant, as we have come to expect from all of Joe's work. Includes a non-trivial section on grammar, a handy menu decoder where the Thai script is listed first, and now includes hill tribe languages (previously a separate book)." -- Thai-Language.com
on Lonely Planet Bangkok city guide: "A superb and well-organized guide." -- Vancouver Sun
GUIDEBOOKS
Insight Guides Laos & Cambodia; Laos Compact Guide; Myanmar; Thailand.
Lonely Planet Publications: Bangkok City Guide; China; Indonesia; Laos; Malaysia, Singapore & Brunei; Myanmar (Burma); Southeast Asia on a Shoestring; Thailand; Sri Lanka; Thailand's Islands & Beaches.
Moon Handbooks: Baja; Cabo; Mexico; Northern Mexico; Mexico City; Road Trip USA; Texas.
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8:00
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Performance & Dinner
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8:30 - 1:30
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Pepe's Cooking class at the Golden Cupid.
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1:30 – 4:00
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Rebecca’s workshop
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6:00 - 6:45
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British author, Robert Tillery.
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7:00 - 8:30
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An evening with Rebecca Walker
Rebecca Walker, the daughter of famed novelist Alice Walker, is a best-selling author, an acclaimed speaker and teacher, and an award-winning visionary and activist in the fields of intergenerational feminism, multi-cultural identity, enlightened masculinity, and transformational human awareness. When she was just twenty-five, Time Magazine named her one of the fifty most influential future leaders of America—an award which has since been followed by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, the Champion of Choice Award from CARAL, and the Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women.
In 1995 Rebecca published To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, an anthology that remains in print after more than ten years. Hailed a "foundational text of Third Wave feminism," To Be Real is taught in Women's Studies programs around the world. In 2002, Rebecca's memoir, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, became an international bestseller and won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. People Magazine called Black, White, and Jewish, "A heartbreaking tale of self-creation,” adding, “Walker masterfully illuminates differences between black and white America." A second anthology, What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future, was published in 2004 to similar acclaim: "Walker has done society at large a great service by bringing forth these voices, these views." (Booklist)
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8:30
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Buffet Dinner with music.
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8:30 – 11:00
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Rebecca Walker's workshop.
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5:00 – 8:30
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An evening with Lama Choyin Rangdrol. Lama Choyin Rangdrol, is the only African-American dharma teacher recognized by the First Conference of Tibetan Buddhist Centers. He founded Rainbow Dharma to serve the needs of people regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or religious belief.
Lama Choyin Rangdrol, African American student of the abbot of Namgyal Monastery, and recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Community Service.
Lama Rangdrol is a first generation American. His father, a descendant of enslaved Africans, worked on a banana plantation in Trinidad. In 1994, he met the abbot of Namgyal Monastery, Khenpo Yurmed Tinly, with whom he studied for the next ten years. Books: “Diversity is Dead (Poems), White Buddha”, “108 Buddhist Contemplations for African American Men”, “Meditation Journal for African Americans”, “ABC’s of Liberating Black Anger”, “Staying Alive: African Americans Christians and Asian American Buddhists in Frontier American”, “Traitors, Converts, and Heathens”.
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8:30 – 10:30
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Rebecca Walker's workshop
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10:45 – 12:45
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Chris Abani's workshop
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6:15 – 8:15
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Panel with Chris Abani, Birtil Lintner & Rebecca Walker.
Bertil Lintner is regarded by many as the most authoritative Western voice on Burma. But these days his articles on Burma appear less frequently in the Far Eastern Economic Review, for whom he has written for the last 20 years.
Bertil Lintner is a Swedish journalist based in Thailand, a REVIEW senior writer and the author of several works on Asia, including Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia.
Lintner is one of a many blacklisted journalists who have not been allowed to enter Burma since 1989. Lintner has written numerous articles and books on Burma, and is considered to be one of the most knowledgeable foreign journalists on Burmese affairs. The junta says his reports on Burma are groundless and based on wishful thinking. Ironically, blacklisted journatists tend to garner better respect as primary sources, and due to this, Lintner was the first foreign journalist to learn about Aung San Suu Kyi's release from house arrest in 1995. Nowadays Lintner's main focuses have shifted to Laos and North Korea.
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8:30 – 10:30
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Rebecca Walker's workshop
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10:45 – 12:45
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Chris Abani's workshop
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5:15 – 6:45
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Book Publisher Trasvin Jittidecharak from "Silkwood Press".
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7:00 – 8:30
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panel: Rebecca Walker & Thai women writers
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8:30 – 10:30
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Rebecca Walker's workshop
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10:45 – 12:45
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Chris Abani's workshop
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6:15 – 8:00
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Authors Living in a world without a Country,
Chris Abani and Mohezin Tejani.
Art has served as both weapon and savior for Abani. Art helped him survive the horrors of the Kalakuta Republic. Telling those stories in verse helped him to document full, rich humanity under the most inhumane conditions.
"Art is essential," he says. "It's what is human in us. People have always tried to create narratives. Through stories, rock painting, sons. Trying to make sense of what it means to exist in this often-painful life, what it means to be human. Art becomes a way to meditate the terror. It connects us. Like James Baldwin said, 'Your pain has no meaning unless you can connect it with someone else's pain.”
Abani is called a "fiction writer of mature and bounteous gifts" by Sam Lipsyte for the New York Times, Abani's own life story sounds like a harrowing political thriller. He was imprisoned at the age of 18 by the Nigerian regime on grounds that his first novel, written when he was 16, had been a blueprint for the failed coup of General Vatsa.
During college, Abani's activities as a member of a guerrilla theater group that performed plays in front of government offices resulted in another year's imprisonment in the Kiri Kiri maximum security prison. Abani wrote the play "Song of a Broken Flute" for his university's convocation ceremony (1990), which got him another 18 months in prison, under threat of death. There he wrote "Kalakuta Republic," a collection of poetry that pays tribute to those who suffered and died in prison.
When released in 1991, Abani chose exile, settling first in the United Kingdom, then California.
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8:30 – 1:30
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Cooking Class
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1:30 – 4:00
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Chris Abani's workshop
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6:00
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We'll be going to Chiang Mai for dinner and to watch a performance; afterwards, we'll visit the Writer's Club.
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8:30 – 1:30
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Cooking Class
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1:30 – 4:00
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Chris Abani's workshop
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5:45 – 6:45
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Dealing with Success or Failure, author LeeThomas
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7:00 – 8:30
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How to get published--understanding the ins and outs of the New York Publishing World, with New York Literary agent Renee Zuckerbrot
Lecture followed by a Q & A session
Renee Zuckerbrot began her career as an editorial assistant at
G.P. Putnam's, then moved on to Doubleday where she became an editor.
She also worked at Franklin Square press, the book division of
Harper's Magazine. Before opening her own agency, she was an
associate of Marly Rusoff & Associates. Her impressive list of
clients includes Kelly Link, Pauls Toutonghi, landscape ecologist
Eric Sanderson, Matthew Derby, award-winning short story writer Keith
Lee Morris, and Harley Jane Kozak.
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8:30 – 11:00
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Chris Abani's workshop
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6:00 – 7:00
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Jim Goodman, originally from Cincinnati, moved to Asia permanently in 1972 and has published several books on Nepal and Thailand. In 1988 he settled in Chiang Mai and has been engaged for ten years in handicraft production with the Akha people. Since 1992 he has been exploring the minority-inhabited areas of China's Yunnan province where he spends several months a year.
Books: Children of the Jade Dragon-The Naxi of Lijiang and their mountain neighbours the Yi, The Akha - Guardians of the Forest.
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7:15 – 8:30
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An Evening with Chris Abani, followed by Q & A session.
Tonight Chris will be reading from his new book The Virgin of Flames (Penguin January 2007).
It’s become the New York Times Editor's Choice and Barnes and Noble Discovery Selection.
For Black, a mural artist in East L.A., his city's tumbledown landscape is his canvas. Residing in a ramshackle apartment above "The Ugly Store," he lives for his art and obsesses over Sweet Girl, the transsexual stripper who serves as his muse. As Black navigates life alongside the Los Angeles River, "iridescent in its concrete sleeve," he enlists his friends - Iggy, the beautiful tattoo artist who has beguiled Hollywood's elite, and Bomboy, a wealthy Rwandan butcher - as he confronts his past and struggles to find his place in the world.
Advance Praise:
Chris Abani reveals Los Angeles as we have never seen it before - magical and crumbling, a place of deserted rooftop oases and intersections where new identities are bought and sold. He has rewritten our American story and brought the world into our streets, our most private negotiations and confessions.
— Walter Mosely
A powerful, scary and beautiful novel. Abani is a force to be reckoned with, a world-class novelist and poet.
— Russell Banks
Chris Abani is a force of nature. In the world of letters he is a luminous shattering talent, and The Virgin of Flames is his strangest and wildest trip yet. I don't think there's ever been a protagonist quite like Black, or an LA quite like this one.
— Junot Diaz
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8:30
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Dinner and Performance
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July 30
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Departure in the morning.
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