Contemporary writers read their works as part of series

A published book is a journey of a thousand miles.

Three emerging authors attested to the… A published book is a journey of a thousand miles.

Three emerging authors attested to the trials of writing for publication at a reading in the Contemporary Writers Series last Monday.

“We want to introduce you to people who have gone through the gauntlet of trying to publish a book,” Lee Gutkind, a professor of English at Pitt, said before they spoke.

The night’s first reader, Anahita Firouz, worked as a writer for 25 years before her first book was published. She read from her debut novel, “In the Walled Gardens.”

Firouz began with the first chapter from her tale of a Marxist revolutionary and a married, upper-class woman in Iran in 1976.

She then moved to an emotional prison scene, where a father visits his incarcerated son. The audience responded with silence.

To contrast the somber prison scene, Firouz read a comically disastrous party scene from the novel.

“A lot of my readers really love [this scene], because everything is going wrong,” Firouz said, before tearing into a catalog of quarreling servants, sassy waiters, clogged toilets and failing electricity.

Firouz concluded her portion of the event by reading a selection from the novel that highlighted what she felt was at the crux of the division and misunderstanding between people of Eastern and Western cultures.

The father from the aforementioned prison scene meets with a French journalist.

“Things don’t go as the father expects, nor as the journalist expects,” Firouz said.

The scene dealt with a discussion of why the father’s son was imprisoned. It concluded with the father storming out, terribly offended.

Next to take the stage, Joel Brouwer read from his two published collections of poetry, along with three unpublished poems.

Brouwer’s first book, “Exactly What Happened,” featured poems with titles taken directly from newspaper headlines.

“What this book is really about is the impossibility of figuring out what happened,” Brouwer said.

He read poems that dissected the connotative meanings behind life found in space, a rampaging elephant and the arrest of a Kenyan Parliament member for the crime of imagining the death of the president.

Brouwer’s second book of poems, the aptly titled “Centuries,” presented prose poems, all of exactly 100 words.

“[It] is a challenge that I set for myself, probably because I need medication,” Brouwer said.

Brouwer’s poems elicited laughter from the audience, but tended to silence the crowd with particularly shocking revelations, such as the fact that the elephant was shot 40 times before she died.

“Of course, the [book] you’re always most excited about is the one you haven’t published yet,” Brouwer said before concluding with three of his new poems.

More than an hour into the program, Mark Rotella approached the microphone with a small minority of audience members getting up to leave.

“Well, thank you all for coming,” Rotella said, “and thank you all for staying.”

Some of those not with their backs to Rotella laughed.

Rotella read two passages from his memoir, “Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria.”

“It was first an exploration of family; [it] became an exploration of a region,” Rotella said.

His work reflected a lifetime of stories and experiences. Rotella traced his lineage through the Italian countryside and told of his determination to gain Italian citizenship, occasionally pausing to relay an anecdote, such as his first bocce game, which he played with a belligerent, elderly Italian person.

Rotella finished with a revelation about the inevitable futility of his mission to be fully accepted by the people of another culture.

The audience applauded, then dispersed to a reception outside of the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium.