New York State Writers Institute - Nonfiction: The State of the Art

October 21, 1999
(Thursday)
at 8:00 p.m.
Recital Hall
Performing Arts Center
UAlbany's Uptown Campus

Donald Faulkner
Moderator

Nonfiction: The State of the Art

Four of America's leading nonfiction writers discuss feature writing, commercialism, censorship, and editorial standards in a wide-ranging panel discussion moderated by Donald Faulkner, the Writers Institute's Associate Director. This panel discussion will include leading nonfiction writers:

Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post

Susan Orlean
The New Yorker

Lawrence Weschler
The New Yorker

JoAnn Wypijewski
The Nation

Joel Achenbach is a staff writer for The Washington Post and a regular commentator for National Public Radio. He is the author of three books based on his well-known newspaper column: Why Things Are, Why Things Are: The Big Picture, and Why Things Are & Why Things Aren't. His most recent book Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe is scheduled to be released in November 1999. Christopher Buckley praised the book as "Brilliant, funny, and like everything else he writes, a joy to read. He is one of the best writers working today." Achenbach has also written for GQ, National Georgraphic, Smithsonian, George, and Esquire among others.

Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of The Orchid Thief (1999), and Saturday Night, named a New York Times Notable Book of 1990. The Orchid Thief explores the bizarre underworld of passionate orchid collectors, and follows the real-life misadventures of rare plant dealer and poacher, John Larooche. The New York Times called it, "Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, [and] quirkily detailed. The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean's] gifts in full bloom."

Lawrence Weschler, long-time writer for The New Yorker, chronicles the work and antics of currency artist and the accused counterfeiter J. S. G. Boggs in Boggs: A Comedy of Values. Toby Lester, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, says, ". . .the book, like the artist, challenges people to pause and consider the extent to which the economic bedrock of everyday life is in part a confusing welter of artistic abstractions. It's a work that is at once informative, entertaining, and provocative--a reading experience, one may say, of rather good values." Weschler is also the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast and Other Mavels. . . (1995), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

JoAnn Wypijewski, is the senior editor at The Nation. She has also written for Harper's, New Left Review, Il Manifesto and Counter-Punch. She wrote the text for Triptychs: Buffalo's Lower West Side, by the photographer Milton Rogovin (Norton, 1994), is editor of The Thirty Years' War: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, the collected work of Andrew Kopkind (Verso, 1995). Her book Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), was issued in paperback this year by University of California Press.

Cosponsored by the
Greater Capital Region Teacher Center

Albany Times Union Article
Writers Online Magazine Articles on Joel Achenbach, Susan Orlean, Lawrence Weschler, JoAnn Wypijewski
Lawrence Weschler & J. S. G. Boggs discussion 10/20/99