I’m over at LitHub today, with the opening essay to a new feature in the Virginia Quarterly Review. The print issue, on Citizenship, is well worth a read – and VQR in general is one of the best journals out there. Here’s an excerpt (below). You can read the complete essay here. . . .
Read MoreMy favorite aunt, the last person my mother called on the phone before she passed away, wrote these words to me today: “What cannot be cured, must be endured.” She was talking about personal difficulties, the lives we’ve each lived, the set-backs experienced. I’ve been staring out of my window here in . . .
Read MoreI have a good friend, a dear one who does all kinds of favors for me, practical ones and impractical outrageous ones. Mostly, she listens to me. She reminds me of home. Recently I had a chance to visit her where she now lives, both of us far from the place where . . .
Read MoreOn August 3, 2006, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelem (LTTE),slaughtered over 100 Muslim civilians including women and children at Pachchanoor, Sri Lanka. Before then, the LTTE butchered 103 Muslims while they wre praying in the grand mosque of Kattankudiy in the coastal city of Batticaloa. You can see the images of . . .
Read MoreLast year, my middle-child, the thinking feeling one, wrote a question to me in a book that we pass back and forth to each other: Is Santa Claus real? She had already experienced a near-miss with the tooth fairy who hadn’t yet come by 4.30am, a fact which she had taken, tearful, . . .
Read MoreTwo years ago I was in Sri Lanka, getting ready to return home to ordinary life. Life that had to go on, life that would, with all its accompanying routines. As I sat in the home I had grown up, surrounded by all the things that my mother had left behind, quite . . .
Read MoreI’m over at the Huffington Post today, writing about Clinton’s recent visit to India and her meeting with the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (and ardent supporter of the LTTE and separatism), J. Jayalalitha. You can read the full article here. Here’s an excerpt: It is usually the case that America’s foreign . . .
Read MoreI have a brother who writes (another who does not and many more “brothers” who are engaged in doing good things in the world). People who know me know how much I admire this writer-brother of mine. Over the years I have tried to organize his poetry (he has a collection out), . . .
Read MoreThis is a piece from a speech I gave not too long ago. A person who was there wrote me a lovely note and asked me to post the text of this particular section and so, here goes: Perhaps the constant for any immigrant is our disassociation with a specific place even . . .
Read MoreI’m over at the Huffington Post today, writing about debut novlist, Shehan Karunatilaka, a Sri Lankan writer with talent to burn. You can read the interview over there. Here’s an excerpt. On April secnd, Sri Lanka takes on India in the final for the ICC World Cup. What better day on which . . .
Read MoreLast year, around this time, I was getting ready to fly home to Sri Lanka to attend the Galle Literary Festival, an event I reflected on afterward in a post titled ‘The Dutch, The British and the Galle Literary Festival,’ a post meant to consider its many pluses as well as suggest . . .
Read MoreI am over at Huffington Post Books blogging about the new $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. You can read the full post at this link, but here’s an excerpt: I heard about being included on the long list for this prize via a google alert that also had one alerting . . .
Read MoreI became a citizen of the United States on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Sitting in a room at the University of Maine, I listened to a speech made by a senior administrator at the university that spoke not of the benefits of citizenship but of its responsibilities: to participate . . .
Read MorePoor. Poverty. Impoverishment. I’ve heard these words bandied about a lot recently. That last one in particular is a funny word. It sounds as though the state of being poor is a fact, that “impoverishment” is endemic to the place that is suffering from the condition. And yet, what impoverish actually means . . .
Read MoreEarlier this year I gave a couple of speeches, one at the State Department and another to an assorted collection of expatriates and Sri Lankans courtesy of the American embassy in Sri Lanka. The speech was on immigration, emigration and writing. Part of what I spoke about involved a sort of meditation . . .
Read MoreToday my best friend celebrates his birthday in a state, New York, which denies him and many of his friends basic rights and benefits that the rest of us take for granted. As I think about that, I am reminded of a Fall morning many years ago, when I sat in a . . .
Read MoreI was born in a country usually described by those subscribing to the dominant paradigm of development as being poor and developing. Year after year, beginning from first grade, in our classrooms both public and private (we have a national curriculum), we learned mathematics, reading and writing, but also world history. We . . .
Read MoreI keep being pressed to write about the Galle International Literary Festival at which I was a guest. Some of the requests have been the result of simple interest in my impressions as both native and visitor, others have been somewhat hostile. I have never been an either with us or against . . .
Read MoreIt is now 2 a.m. on the 27th of January, 2010 in Sri Lanka and the election results are 68.32% for President Mahinda Rajapakse and 31.32% for Sarath Fonseka. Maybe it is no big deal to win against someone who did not take the trouble to register himself to vote in the . . .
Read MoreThe week has passed by in a blur as I get ready to leave for Sri Lanka and then to London. Anybody in either place, do come to one or more of the events being planned. Click here for details Meanwhile, last week, I wrote about Independent Book Stores for the Huffington . . .
Read MoreThis was an article that I wrote which was was intended for a news source here in the U.S. I am re-posting it here with the necessary links. On Sunday, the NYT put Sri Lanka at number one on its list of places to go in 2010: “For a quarter century, Sri . . .
Read MoreFive years ago today, I was still fast asleep when the 2004 tsunami swept over large parts of my island country, Sri Lanka. A friend called me from Washington DC, where she was working, to tell give me this cryptic message: “There was a tsunami in Thailand but don’t worry, your brother . . .
Read MoreThis is a gripe about a trip with a few inconveniences. The Amtrak train that I was on was heading its peaceable way to Boston from Philly when its engine conked. As a woman with a near psychotic schedule, I was not overly perturbed to be given an extra hour on what . . .
Read MoreOn the road with the book, there’s a question people keep coming back to that I find a little odd, and it concerns women and the strength of the female characters in my novel. I think Eric Forbes’ interview with me is the best example of this, and my response to him . . .
Read MoreI’m over at the Lost in Books site guest posting a few thoughts about raising cross-cultural children in America. There’s an excerpt below. Click this link for the full post and browse Rebecca’s other love, design through the Ruby’s Upcycled Designs site which has a hundred other links to gorgeous treasures made . . .
Read MoreBecause of the book tour – and two periods of being pretty sick – I have been unable to keep up with the blog as diligently as I had tried to do before. Also because of these same things I have not been able to stay abreast of everything about which I . . .
Read MoreIt is a little shameful that I have not written a word here since that last brief bleep from the mountain in the wee hours of the morning of the 14th of August. But only just a little. Last year, the summer before Bread Loaf, I suffered a head injury as I . . .
Read MoreIf I delay this post for one more day I fear I will have to make it a photo essay. My love of words is sandwiched by my love of dance and my love of photographs, and the camera has taken over my life this week! There’s a sample gallery below. The . . .
Read MoreIt’s been a couple of weeks since I got back from Chicago, but the conversation which I wanted to write about then is still on my mind and will be for a while. There was a bottle of wine and a group of writers discussing the matter of America, what could be . . .
Read MoreIt’s been a week since I’ve been back from Chicago where I experienced a range of emotions. I got to be intensely frustrated, for instance, by having to look for a table as though we were trying to birth Jesus in a manger, and then having to wait an hour for no . . .
Read MoreI have been away from the blog for a few days now – more on all that, I’m sure, at some later date when I have figured out how to talk about the latest discoveries of my life! Meanwhile, I wanted to share this aerial view of Sri Lanka. I had never . . .
Read MoreReflections at the dawn of the ‘Post-LTTE Moment’ by Malinda Seneviratne This is a momentous occasion for Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans, regardless of ideological persuasion and preferred Utopia. Whether or not, as some have (in my opinion injudiciously) predicted, the LTTE will revert to its guerrilla avatar, it is clear that . . .
Read MoreWell, I don’t know if I have swine flu. Maybe the question is, how would anybody ever escape any viral virulence when all I see are germs – on the train, in the metro, public rest rooms (which I prefer to call public distress room!), and the head-rests of seats anywhere. The . . .
Read MoreI should have written this while I was still sneezing among the dogwood, tulips and cherry blossoms, but DC has a way of taking up all available space, time and mind and I have a way of dancing to the music… I was in the area for a multitude of reasons: community . . .
Read MoreThe photographs coming out of the Summit of the Americas, to which Cuba may soon return, are heart-warming in more ways than one. The absence of a shifty eyed, inarticulate representative from the United States and the presence of a new president on whom all of the member states, as well as . . .
Read MoreSo everybody has heard, by now, that the Boston Globe was threatened with closure by its owner, the NYT Co. The demand is for the unions to agree to $20 million worth of concessions: Executives from the Times Co. and Globe made the demands Thursday morning in an approximately 90- minute meeting . . .
Read MoreI am not sure how old I was when my older brothers and I, our lives unfolding in a still-quiet Sri Lanka, began singing “Good morning starshine, the earth says hello..you twinkle above us, we twinkle below…Good morning starshine, you lead us along…my love and me as we sing our early morning . . .
Read MoreAmong the journalists who are commended in her article is Roy Gutman, who reported from 1989 to 1994 as Europe bureau chief for Newsday, work for which he was honored with a Pulitzer in 1993 and the George Polk Award for foreign reporting. Gutman’s claims the work he put into building a solid base of knowledge and “becoming intimately acquainted with the territory” he covered as his strengths. “You have to have experienced people who can figure out the big pictures as well as the little picture. The worst thing that can happen in a crisis…is taking the word of one side or the other and running with it and not understanding the context,” he is quoted as saying at the time.
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