NYWW faculties speak about their Nepal visit

New York Writers Workshop (NYWW) is organizing its annual workshop and conference in Kathmandu on May 22. The workshop is scheduled to culminate in the Himalayan Literature Festival (HLF) at Kathmandu Guest House on May 27 and 28. The workshop and the festival shall have participation of over 35 international authors and faculties as well as over 50 Nepali writers covering various genres. The workshop will be facilitated by expert faculties including Tim Tomlinson, co-founder of NYWW, Yuyutsu RD Sharma, poet and curator of HLF, Ravi Shankar, board member of NYWW, Julie William-Krishnan, international fine art photographer, Jami Proctor Xu, poet, essayist and translator, Dr Tony Barnstone, professor at Whittier College, California, and others.

Ken Subedi talked to them about the event.  

Tim Tomlinson

Nepal strikes me as complicated and colorful. Spiritual retreats, rugged treks, white-capped mountains, lavender lotuses. I’m excited to experience it all. Above all, I come here to learn. The conference/workshop participants are coming from Poland and Panama, Australia and Armenia, the US and the UK, Singapore and South Africa, India and China. This will be a truly international conference filled with highly accomplished poets and writers engaged in generous cultural cross-pollination.

I’ll be looking at various ways that fiction intersects with and draws from travel. And I’ll be launching a new book, Listening to Fish, which provides something of an account of my own experiences visiting other worlds, specifically those under the surface of the sea.  

Yuyutsu RD Sharma

Having worked in the Nepalese literary circles for the last four decades, I take this event as a summary of my struggles in the nation. To live with the currents and cross-currents of Nepali literary life, writing in Nepali, translating from Nepali into English, translating from English into Nepali, editing journal, Pratik and Nirala series, teaching in various campuses, all the contacts I earned will come into force in HLF festival and NYWW. So, I am very excited about doing in my own world what I have been doing during my travels across the world, to sing songs of the mighty Himalayas.

I have been traveling the world and in the words of American poet Walt Whitman building friendships as thick as tree-trunks. Finally curating the festival looks like returning home in its truest sense. I see the festival and workshop as grand feast for the Nepalese readerships and Nepalese literary community. I am sure the workshop will become a grand bridge to build connections between far flung literary worlds.

This workshop and festival will be the first of its kind covering 12 days with most exciting panels and readings and interactions. I plan to present a rich selection of finest writers out of the treasure trove of my literary friendships I have forged across continents. Scores of best-known poets and writers from five continents seems an exotic treat for my Nepali audiences. I can't believe it's actually happening right now.

Ravi Shankar

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Exactly a decade ago in 2014, I had the good fortune to visit Nepal. I spent a week marveling at the syncretic culture, the emplacements of Buddhist stupas and Hindu shrines next to one another, the multicolored stalls of flower sellers and icon hawkers and copper utensils and DVDs next to pockets of profound meditative silence. I ran a poetry workshop at a local school, visited Pashupatinath and Swayambhunath, vying with monkeys for the view, was treated to Newari song and dance, strolled by the gnarled, coin-festooned stump of Viasha Dev, the toothache tree, along a chowk past Thahiti Tole, ate momos and tsampa in streetside stalls, was treated warmly by the Neaplese people, all under the magnificent presence of the Himalayas, which lent a mystical air to the everyday. I was commissioned to write a poem about Thomas Jefferson while visiting, and that poem "Thomas Jefferson in Kathmandu" was published in Caravan and has been anthologized and included on school curriculums.

Therefore, I am ecstatic to visit again, this time with the hope that I can penetrate further into the shamanistic mysteries of Nepalese culture and engage even more fully with readers and writers both local and international. Given the scope of the inaugural Himalayan Literature Festival, which we have been planning for months, I'm keen for the exchange between languages to happen and for us to be united in the shared love of art and letters.

The New York Writers Workshop and the Himalayan Literature Festival are truly unprecedented historical events. We will be bringing students and faculty from around the world, including Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, Poetry Society and Pablo Neruda prize-winning poets, the first Asian to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture at the Nobel Laureate Festival, publishers of iconic publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Nirala, Drunken Boat, translators from the Chinese, Tamil, Spanish, Hindi, Dutch and Malayalam, professors who have taught at NYU, Columbia, Tufts, City University of Hong Kong, IIT-New Delhi, given TED talks and been featured at festivals around the world. During the NYWW workshop we will be doing generative writing exercises with well-published authors and creative excursions into the heart of Kathmandu and the two-day HLF (open to all!) will host simultaneous panels, including concurrent ones run in Nepalese, English and Newari, and a special keynote on the state of Indian literature that's not to be missed.  Based on the shape of the program and interest from the locals, this should be a truly spectacular event.

I will be participating as host, moderator, panelist and performer at HLF. I plan to discuss bhakti poetry and writing through the mundane to arrive at the divine, to explore the spectrum of translation practice, and to introduce the audience to six of India's finest living writers who will appear together on stage for the very first time. I will also have some copies of my Memoir Magazine and Connecticut Book Award finalist memoir Correctional and my Muse India award winning translations of Andal, The Autobiography of a Goddess, with me for my Nepalese readers, and I will be available throughout the festival to speak formally and informally about publishing and the ways that we might collaborate with and sustain each other. For those who are interested, there is still space available in both the workshops and HLF and the coordinators can be contacted for sign ups. In my writing workshops, all the members will depart with a deeper understanding of craft and an original new text of their own that they can continue to polish for publication. I will be documenting my visit on the socials @empurpler.

Julie William-Krishnan

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​​​​​​​I am so very excited about this opportunity to visit Nepal, and for the purpose to be related to creativity. I have several friends from Nepal, and I have learned about Nepal through them over the years, and I am so excited to have the chance to experience their home country firsthand. The NYWW program is very inspiring, and I am excited to meet the various participants, as well as to visit the sites in Kathmandu and the surrounding region. I look forward to delicious food, beautiful sights, talking about writing/art, and seeing old friends and making some new ones.

I expect the NYWW workshop and the Himalayan Literature Festival to be enriching and exciting. I have been very excited to watch the momentum grow over the past few months as participants from around the world have confirmed their attendance. I expect many connections to be made between writers/artists, new conversations, the sharing of ideas, and lasting friendships to be formed.

I am a photographer first. Though I dabble in writing and have studied literature as well as photography. I am planning to share how images and words can work together for creative purpose, how they can each inspire the other. I will also share my personal journey as a fine art photographer.

Jami Proctor Xu

Nepal is a country I have wanted to visit for many years. China has been like my second home ever since I first lived there when I was nineteen, so I think of Nepal as a neighbor. I’ve also traveled many times to India, but somehow the timing never worked out to visit Nepal. I’ve been drawn there for the natural beauty, the cultural uniqueness and diversity of the Nepali people (as well as spiritual and cultural resonances with China, Tibet, and India), and by Nepali poets I’ve met at poetry events in China. I became friends with Yuyu several years ago, and he has kept inviting me. I’m grateful and thrilled I am finally able to get here. I know it will be meaningful for me on a spiritual level, and in terms of the Nepali people I meet. I am looking forward to hearing the work of many more Nepali writers during the Himalayan Literature Festival.

I think the workshop will be a magical time, the way writing events tend to be. Having writers and artists from around the world come together to share their ideas and work always seems to bring about exciting collaborations, as well as new work. The participants come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and the faculty also has diverse yet overlapping interests that should bring about lively discussions and readings. I am extremely grateful to be part of a workshop in Kathmandu.

I will be reading some of my own poems, as well as translations by Chinese writers, discussing my work as a translator, and facilitating conversations with poets and visual artists on creating work within different media. I’ll also be exploring ways being in dialogue with place, self, other writers, and the natural world allows us to expand the possibilities of our own work. I think of poetry as a healing practice, and hope to bring some aspects of that into the shared spaces during the festival.