Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

What happens, what emotional threads get pulled when halfway around the globe a father gets sick from Covid? In an evocative personal essay for The New Yorker, My Father's Voice from Paris, novelist Alexander Maksik faces those questions and all the attendant thoughts and feelings provoked by them. Living in Maui with his wife, the novelist Madhuri Vijay, and his 6-month-old daughter Ela, Maksik's only contact with his father was through the phone. He listened as his father grew weaker knowing he could not go to him. It is both a story for our time and a timeless one about a son's love for a father. In this episode of Beyond the Page, Xander talks with Anne Taylor Fleming, associate director of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference, about the essay, about fatherhood and about Paris, the city both father and son know intimately.           Alexander Maksik is the author of the novels You Deserve Nothing, A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a 2013 New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and Shelter in Place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the spring of 2016, author DANI SHAPIRO received the stunning news through a genealogy website that her father was not her biological father.  Her memoir, Inheritance, captures her urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It caused her to rethink everything she knew about herself, her roots, her family, the ground underneath her. In this episode of Beyond the Page, she talks with physician and author Abraham Verghese about living in a time in which science and technology are uncovering long-held secrets and about the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1996, (a 66-year-old) retired New York City public school teacher named Frank McCourt published his first book, a memoir about his brutally impoverished Irish Catholic childhood in the slums of Limerick. If ever there was a “rags-to-riches” story in publishing, Angela’s Ashes was it: The book would go on to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, sell more than four million copies in hardcover alone, and become a film directed by Alan Parker. At the age of 66, Frank emerged almost overnight as one of the most celebrated authors in America. But if you knew Frank, you knew two things, at least: First, he never took anything at face value, including, and perhaps especially, his own extraordinary, late-blooming success. And second, for all the joy and gratitude he took from his unexpected good fortune, he refused to ever completely shed his (the) core of (coal-dark) anger that remained from (his childhood of poverty) growing up in terrible poverty. That he was able to so often turn that anger into unforgettable humor was just one of the many reasons why he was such a gifted writer. As he himself tells us, however, before becoming that writer, he somehow had to learn what he still needed to know. And in order to do that, he first had to become teacher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In one way or another, from the moment she left Haiti to settle in Brooklyn, New York, at age 12, Edwidge Danticat has been writing stories (prize-winning novels, memoirs, and essays) about the experience and effects of immigration. In conversation with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour, she will talk about the ways that first seismic journey in her life has shaped all the journeys she has lived and written since. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of his city in May, 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve throughout the nation – his brave and inspirational speech has now been heard by millions. As he described that experience in his powerful memoir In the Shadow of Statues – and as he tells it here – Mayor Landrieu’s relationship to the question of race in America is deeply personal and complicated, and begins for him with his own family’s history, and the history of the city of his birth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, <i>Beyond the Page</i> curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.Below is an edited recording of writer Alexandra Fuller at the 2012 Sun Valley Writers' Conference. Fuller, whose two best-selling, award-winning memoirs about her parents and her childhood in southern Africa, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, indelibly evoking a landscape of love, loss, longing and reconciliation, will discuss both what she has found in the process of writing those books, and what she has lost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No playwright has challenged our perceptions of Muslims in America as boldly, and with such dramatic vigor, as has AYAD AKHTAR, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Disgraced, the most produced play of the 2015-2016 season.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the award-winning novelist Min Jin Lee. Speech, memory, and the power to tell one's story -- for Lee, these are not abstract, philosophical ideas. They are doorways leading her back to the process by which after great struggle she was able to find her own voice, first as a profoundly shy Korean girl growing up in America and eventually as the exceptional novelist she became. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the great Israeli novelist David Grossman, widely regarded as part of the collective liberal conscience of Israel, about his masterpiece To the End of the Land.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In a world obsessed with success, Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist ANTHONY DOERR has maintained an abiding belief in, and a creative need for, the bracing tonic of failure. In a talk filled with humor and hard-won wisdom, he discusses how being willing to risk failing at stuff to realize one’s original vision is the writer’s most essential job. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices