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Last Thursday, Oregon’s Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen visited Ashland during her southern swing. She read from her recent book Voluptuary and talked about the inspiration she’s gotten from Walt Whitman and Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (check out Hannah Darling’s interview with Petersen in the Ashland Daily Tidings and the Medford Mail Tribune).
I didn’t know much about Hikmet before but learned about his influence on Turkish poetry—taking the traditional poetic voice away from the Ottoman style by establishing a Whitmanesque lyrical voice for social justice. And I learned that Hikmet spent decades in prison for sedition by poetry.
The Sultanahmet Prison in Istanbul, where Hikmet was jailed, has been converted into a luxury Four Seasons Hotel. Really. For a time, the hotel boasted that some of Turkey’s finest writers had stayed there.
When Petersen read her poem The Four Seasons, my mind stuck on the idea of a prison being made into a luxury hotel. Who is less free, I wondered, imprisoned writers or well-heeled tourist? It’s an idea that loses something the more prosaically you articulate it, but shines grimly as a poetic image.
On Friday, thriller-writer Simon Wood visited Bookwagon and taped an episode of Ashland Mystery RVTV Noir. Simon is an Englishman who’s a former racing driver and pilot. Simon is also an oil engineer by training and he described his fiction in those terms—he looks for the ways that very plausible ideas can go very wrong. And hearing about Simon’s latest novel Terminated, I was struck by his idea that a few bad days and a few small slights may be all it takes to turn the most of us down the road to perdition. Yikes.
Simon has also written the multimedia story Lowlifes, which features story told in novel form, video and blog, each from a different character’s point of view. And with his forthcoming Did Not Finish, he’s beginning a mystery series set in the world of auto racing. Look out Dick Francis.
Molly Tinsley’s visit this week sparked discussion about the relationship between the literary and the business sides of publishing. Her career as a writer spans genres—she’s written a novel, short stories, a creative writing textbook and award winning plays. In 2009, she and Karetta Hubbard founded 
Tinsley explained the consolidation of the publishing industry in the 1980s and she described how the resulting moves to increase profit margins blurred the separation between art and commerce . As a result, large publishers gave increased priority to profitable instant books (including the celebrity bio genre), they took fewer risks (resulting in less diversity in what got published, fewer “quiet books,” and fewer chances–or second chances–for authors). As Ryland Taylor phrased it, censorship by business model was a result.