Midwifery

Three new literary lights emerge, blinking

Urban Eye by Chris Wright

There are many awards batting around the book world these days: prestigious awards, lucrative awards, prestigious and lucrative awards. For sheer toe-curling drama, though, you can't top PEN New England's annual Discovery Evening. A sort of literary cesarean, the event wrenches writers from the amniotic ease of obscurity and thrusts them into the glare of media, academic, and literary scrutiny. It's the kind of recognition that has writers using words like "delighted," "thrilled," and "absolutely terrified." Such are the pleasures and pains of being officially up-and-coming.

Established in 1980, the PEN program invites each of three accomplished authors to pick the work of a promising unpublished writer, and it culminates in a reading at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute. This year, Elinor Lipman, Patricia Powell, and David Rivard selected, respectively, novelists Risa Miller and Ricco Villanueva Siasoco and poet Joshua Weiner.

Being picked is the easy part. Reading the chosen work in the august environs of Radcliffe, before an audience bristling with distinction -- that's where it gets tricky. "Agents attend the events," says the evening's organizer, Marcie Hershman, "and editors, looking to see if there's someone they might want to grab hold of." There's nothing that sets a writer's heart aflutter like the prospect of getting published.

Indeed, many past discoverees -- including novelist Sue Miller (1980), critic Sven Birkerts (1982), novelist Ha Jin (1988), and fiction writer Elizabeth McCracken (1992) -- have been grabbed, picked up, and placed on the top shelves of the business. Birkerts, who has gone on to become an internationally renowned essayist, says the event "allowed me to conceive of myself as someone with a public voice." His discovery, he says, "was an enormous thrill."

Risa Miller, one of this year's nominees, calls the event "validation with a capital V and lots of exclamation marks," and says she expects her discovery to "plant me smack in the middle of the writing community in New England." One of her five children asks me, "Is she going to be famous?" And Miller herself quips that, Warhol's dictum aside, she expects "at least 22 minutes" in the limelight. "I feel very blessed," she says.

The poet Joshua Weiner is slightly less rapturous, saying before the reading that he's approaching the occasion with "a healthy amount of anxiety." There are, he concedes, obvious advantages to being discovered, such as finding an audience, which Weiner describes as "a veiled, mysterious process." But there are enormous pressures, too. "I'd like David Rivard to be pleased, not embarrassed, that he's chosen me," he says, audibly cringing.

Ricco Siasoco is with Weiner: his joy is tempered with unease. And it's not just the prospect of having "bigwigs" in the audience that bothers him.

"I'm a grad student," he says, "and a lot of faculty are going to come. They're not peers, they're not colleagues, they're my teachers."

Weiner's and Siasoco's stage fright is understandable. The esteemed Birkerts himself admits that the prospect of his Discovery Evening performance left him "a nervous wreck."

"Let's face it," says Hershman, "writing is full of doubts. You never know whether anyone wants to read this stuff." Yet at an event like the Discovery Evening, "you know if people are really listening. If an audience is restless, you know it. But if they're quiet, if they don't move: glorious." Yes, yes, but what if. . . .

On the evening of the reading, the moods of the three discoverees have achieved a jittery concordance. Milling about among such luminaries as James Carroll, the up-and-comers smile and banter, sip and nibble, and exude a kind of muted horror. "I'm nervous, really nervous," says Miller. "Very nervous," adds Siasoco. "Terrified," says Weiner.

And then -- finally -- there is the reading.

Perhaps it is simply a writer's lot: to fret endlessly, reach further, achieve more. Or maybe doubt is a kind of growing pain. Either way, all three writers leave no doubt as to the depth and breadth of their talent. Miller reads from her palimpsest-like novel, Welcome to the Heavenly Heights, which lyrically recounts the lives of the residents of a West Bank community. Siasoco reads from Squatters, a moving and witty exploration of the cultural and sexual struggles of a gay Filipino man living in Boston. Weiner reads some rich, compellingly discursive poetry from his collection The Dog State. It's marvelous stuff, delivered with remarkable fluency and brio.

The audience is certainly sold, erupting into a lengthy clatter of applause when the reading is done, and sticking around to slap backs and pump hands well into the evening. Beaming amid the crowd, Miller, Siasoco, and Weiner look as if they might have discovered something tonight, too. "I only wish the party could go on," says Miller.

As former discoveree Elizabeth McCracken puts it, "I can say that it really was a significant night for me: people made a fuss over the readers, and you always remember your first fuss."