FictionThatMatters.org

Larry Siems is the Director of the PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write Project. He has worked to support writers facing persecution in Nigeria, China, Turkey, and the U.S. Siems is also an accomplished poet and author in his own right who received numerous accolades for his book Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexican and Latin American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends (Harper Collins). He offers the rare, inspiring combination of fervent advocacy and a passion for the creative arts.

Larry spoke to FictionthatMatters about his work. I decided to divide his interview into two parts because he speaks in depth about a variety of complex subjects. This first half is roughly dedicated to literature and letters. The second half will focus on his work as an activist.

FTM: Tell us about your own background as a creative artist and your poetry.

Siems: I have an MFA in Poetry that I got at Columbia in 1984. It was really what I saw myself doing and did for some years. I sort of lived the life of a young MFA – I taught in college part time, I worked on my poetry, and went through various residencies and fellowships: McDowell, Yaddo, and I had a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in the winter of 1986 or 1987. I decided it was really cold and dark and decided to move to California in 1988, where I got a teaching job. After a year or so, I became really interested in the immigration experience in LA. I would look around and see day laborers, gardeners, sitting on lunch breaks and reading letters. I became really interested in that and it occurred to me that if there was a literature of the experience of undocumented immigrants in the United States, it would be in letters. I assumed that somebody would have written a book, but I looked and there wasn’t a book. My Spanish wasn’t very good, but a friend of mine encouraged me to do it. So I traveled around LA gathering letters and wrote a book that is a compilation of letters. When I was working on the book, Human Rights Watch had just opened an office in LA to address issues on the U.S.-Mexico border. I got a job with them researching human rights abuses by the Border Patrol. This was the early 90s. Out of the book and that job, I began migrating towards human rights work. I wrote feature articles and journalism for 10 years about the border region. In 1995, the book that I had written was a finalist at the PEN office in LA, and I’d gotten to know the person involved in the Freedom to Write project. When he decided to move on, he called me and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect job for you’. I’ve been with PEN ever since.

FTM: Your experience in Mexico sounds like it was formative, but did you have concerns about social justice issues before you moved to LA?

Siems: Certainly. It’s funny because when I first arrived in LA, the U.S. was involved in political conflicts in Central America. I’d go and join protests outside the federal building in downtown LA. It wasn’t only in the letters that I was reading, but also the political issues that I was reading about in the newspaper. In my neighborhood and all over there were people who had a direct experience of those things. They had to migrate because of those realities. I was drawn to the presence of people whose lives contained narratives that I was interested in.

I had an undergraduate professor at Notre Dame named John Matthias who was a great poet and a great teacher of many poets. We read a lot of [W.H.] Auden. There’s a great poem of Auden’s to Christopher Isherwood in which he writes that he wants the kind of poetry that ‘makes action urgent and its nature clear.’ I always thought writing was a kind of engagement. The funny thing about my career is that in some ways it has been an attempt to find different ways to make that happen. Auden famously concluded that poetry makes nothing happen. I’ve found that journalism and non-fiction are a much more immediate way to engage issues that I was troubled by. Ultimately, human rights work — which is ironically anonymous writing — has the biggest impact of anything I’ve ever written.

FTM: One of the themes of FictionthatMatters.org is that I do believe that fiction and creativity can move people. It sounds like Auden is saying that’s not true of poetry. Hemingway started For Whom the Bell Tolls — a book about the Spanish Civil War — with a poem by John Donne. Donne wrote that ‘No Man is an Island’. Even the fact that it was included in that book suggests that people can be moved by poetry to do something. Do you agree with that?

Siems: I don’t know. Literature in general exerts all kinds of formal pressures. I think that great art is first and foremost responsible to the formal demands of the art. If you sit down and write a poem, and you know at the beginning of the poem what the poem is going to say and what you’re going to say in it, then you’re not writing a poem, you’re writing a treatise. I think the experience of writing a poem, which is more amazing and gratifying and difficult than any other kind of writing that I know, is that you are in a conversation with poetry. You’re in a conversation with form, with the history of poetry, with the shape of language, with grammar, with syntax, and with certain shapes of arguments. It’s only by being true to those things that you are led places in poems that you didn’t even expect you were going. Then it becomes something really timeless. Poetry aspires to a kind of timelessness even more than other arts — something universal and lasting. I think “No Man is an Island” is an interesting example. How many hundreds of years passed after Donne wrote those lines? Yes, they’re meaningful through time and history, but for me that’s how I feel.

FTM: Do you feel that becoming more of an activist has changed your poetry?

Siems: I don’t write as much of it as I used to. I just don’t expect my poetry to DO anything. I don’t expect my reading, especially my reading of literature, to inform my life as an activist. Literature is about deep human emotional and psychological experience. That’s what I look for in literature. When I look at poetry, I look for something different. I don’t think that I’m going to change the world when I write a poem.

FTM: People talk about empathy and the ability of a story to evoke an empathic reaction in the reader. Do you feel that’s overstated?

Siems: I would say activism is anti-empathic in a way. It’s ‘us and them’, ‘good guys-bad guys’, or whatever. Literature is much more nuanced. The conversation we’re having at PEN these days is, ‘what is the role of literature at a time that we’re in right now’, like any number of nations that have come through a time where the government has committed human rights abuses. What does literature do at that moment? There are two things that writing does at a time like this. One, it exposes the story and communicates the story. There are a lot of writers who have been doing that for the past six or seven years and the books are excellent. Exposés are out there and they’re piling up. That’s non-fiction. So what is it that fiction does? You look at the German post-war literature, something like that, and what you’ll find is that literature takes these moments that look black and white, when it was us and them, good guys and bad guys, and it looks at a society and it finds that the levels of complicity, involvement, or acquiescence, are much deeper than the legal system admits. When you really deal with the legacy of [George W.] Bush, you can talk about prosecutions, prosecuting a handful of people, or more than a handful of people, but where in that conversation does society face the fact that we have a democratic system of government and that we bear responsibility for our government? This country re-elected George Bush in 2004 after the Abu Ghraib photographs were released, after the black site prisons, after we knew that we were rendering people to other countries. Bush said quite triumphantly after the election, ‘we had our accountability moment and I won.’

FTM: He had a ‘mandate’.

Siems: Exactly. A lot of creative writers are starting to turn their attention to this. [Don] Delillo’s got a new book out that deals with rendition. [Paul] Auster’s got a book. What we’ll see is literature that really probes that question: what is the relationship between these events and the lives of so-called ordinary individuals?

FTM: What you’re hinting at — as a fiction writer myself — and something I’ve found challenging and troubling is that, when you try to write about someone you want to be an evil character, at a certain point you will have to think from their point of view, and then their decisions become less evil. It changes the black and white issue.

Siems: That’s exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about empathy literature. Empathy is not just empathy for people who obviously arouse pathos. Empathy is also looking at those who seem monstrous. That’s where literature gets complicated. It isn’t a straight road map.

–Deji Olukotun

CHECK BACK SOON FOR PART TWO.

Photo of Larry Siems by Beowulf Sheehan (c) 2009