Reality Chick

Award-winning, Best-selling Rhode Island Authors to Speak at Ocean State Writers Conference

            View a slide show of the event (which like the entire conference, was a smashing success) here: tp://picasaweb.google.com/Peter.Leviten/URIWriterSConferenceWritingAboutTheFamily#

  All Providence-native Priscilla Warner ever wanted was a mother “in a black sheath dress and a single strand of pearls, who could discuss the Vietnam War intelligently at cocktail parties.”

            What she got was “A whacked-out artist in army fatigues, blouses made of flour sacks, and black patent leather earth shoes.” 

            New York Times best-selling author Priscilla Warner (my sister-in-law) will be speaking about the challenges of writing about her mother (my mother-in-law), the renowned Providence artist, 80-year old Riva Leviten at the Ocean State Writing Conference to be held at the University of Rhode Island Thursday June 18 through Saturday June 20. An excerpt from her upcoming memoir ran recently in More magazine. http://www.more.com/4298/2742-a-portrait-of-the-artist/2.

            Warner will be speaking on a panel I’m moderating titled Writing and the Family, at 10:30 a.m., Saturday, June 20. She is the co-author of the New York Times best-seller, The Faith Club, in which she grappled with writing about her father’s often confusing attitude towards his family’s religion. A religious Jew, he first sent her to Providence Hebrew Day School, then, abruptly, the Quaker Lincoln School, where she was made to sing Christian hymns.

            Now out in paperback, The Faith Club garnered Warner and her co-authors a spot on The Today Show, write ups in USA Today and a world publicity tour. www.thefaithclub.com.  

              Warner will be joined in talking about the challenges of writing about, while  continuing to honor, our families by North Kingstown resident Padma Venkatraman,  author of Climbing the Stairs. The much-acclaimed novel is based on her parents’ experience in World War II era colonial India, and was named winner of the 2009 Julia Ward Howe Boston Authors Club award. The literary society is the oldest author’s club in the nation. 

              Says Venkatraman, “Most other novels about Indian Hindus tend to confuse the issue by describing customs and ignoring the spiritual truths that the religion is actually about.”   

           A research scientist with the Oceanography Center at URI, Venkatraman first considered writing the story as a memoir. “I felt that fiction would liberate my story to highlight its three most important threads – Hindu spirituality and philosophy, the debate between nonviolence and violence which took place in my family, and providing the colonial perspective on World War II. I felt that a memoir would tie me down -  as a scientist, I have a nonfiction reporting voice  I wanted to break away from, cleanly and completely.”

             Says Venkatraman, “The novel’s central question is of violence versus nonviolence. I want people who read it to see its relevance in America today, rather than merely reading the story as historical fiction set in India.”
              

         PEN-award winning writer and Providence-native Patrick Tracey, author of Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia, agonized over writing the story of his two sisters who “dropped down the elevator shaft” of schizophrenia in early adult hood.  He feared exposing their personal struggles, but was compelled on a quest to find a cause for the illness that plagued his family for generations. He ultimately found it in Ireland’s history of oppression and starvation at the hands of the British. 

            The haunting yet uplifting memoir was chosen – among thousands – as one of the Best Books of 2008 by Slate magazine, and was recognized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness as the book most helpful to families dealing with mental illness. Tracey’s memoir received national publicity, including write-ups in USA Today and a lengthy NPR interview, which can be found at www.stalkingirishmadness.com.

(p.s. Tracey moved the audience to tears and sold out his supply of books.)

           These are just a few of the writers who will be featured at the Ocean State Writers Conference.  Many of the events are free to the public, for a full schedule and registration information see: http://www.uri.edu/summerwriting/

 Was It All a Lie?

The disintegrating company’s news Googles into my inbox like jagged rocks tumbling down an avalanche. The plunging stock price, the sell-offs of prized divisions and landmark buildings. Witnessing the end of my old employer is like attending the funeral of a highly dysfunctional, but much beloved family member.

Reading the outrage of the press lynch-mob, however justified, is like watching distant relatives and far-removed acquaintances — who didn’t even know the deceased yet lived off his largess — spit on his coffin. 

The quickest way to isolate yourself socially is to say that you worked for AIG and that it was a great company. “This never would have happened,” I told people with conviction last fall, “If Spitzer hadn’t forced Hank Greenberg out. It’s been brain-dead ever since, it was a one-man company.” 

In ousting the CEO of nearly four decades in 2006,, Eliot Spitzer did exactly what George W. Bush did in Iraq. Launched an attack against a regime that had long played by its own rules, decided to knock out a leader without investigating what the consequences might be. Without knowing enough about how the financial world works to foresee the disastrous outcome. You can’t take out a leader without a secession plan. In acting prematurely and without foresight, Spitzer made things infinitely worse for the entire world.

All Is Greenberg

“You’ve got a company, AIG, which used to be just a regular old insurance company,” President Obama explained on his famous Tonight Show appearance. “Then they decided–some smart person decided–let’s put a hedge fund on top of the insurance company and let’s sell these derivative products to banks all around the world.”

But the President was wrong. AIG has never been an ordinary insurance company. As Ron  Shelp wrote in Fallen Giant: The Amazing Story of Hank Greenberg and the History of AIG, within the company and among Wall Street analysts, A.I.G. has always been an acronym for All Is Greenberg.  John Wiley put out the book in late 2006, soon after Mr. Greenberg was forced from the helm.  I recommend the just-released updated version  as a backgrounder for anyone wondering how a company they may not have heard of until last fall came to be so powerful.

 AIG was an invisible country, with its own rules. I’m not saying that was t a right or good thing, but it was the reality that the average person didn’t know, not because the information was hidden, but because they didn’t want to.

http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Giant-Amazing-Greenberg-History/dp/047191696X

P.S. — To those working in the business, the blow-up wasn’t completely unanticipated. In 2002 I was writing of the threat of a Hedge Fund blow-up in the London Review of Books.  In a piece titled, “Everybody Knows” speaking of the Long Term Capital Management bail-out of 1998, “It will happen again, and there will be pain.”

 http://www.christinagombar.com/pdf/everyone-knows.pdf

Related links:  http://www.christinagombar.com/doc.php?doc=war-zone&p=1

 http://www.christinagombar.com/doc.php?doc=the-pink-dress&p=1