When I dropped in on the Backspace Writers Conference last Thursday afternoon, I was expecting that I'd just meet some writers during the mixer and then sit in on a workshop where M.J. Rose and Douglas Clegg would give other writers advice on how to create marketing strategies for their books. But when I showed up at the hotel conference room, Rose and Clegg were both absent, and "Book Promotion 101" director Bella Stander was preparing to lead members of the audience through refining their pitches by herself. I volunteered to help out, and just like that we were off and running (with Carolyn Burns Bass snapping photos from her front row seat).

(Full disclosure: I attended the Book Promotion 101 seminar before my first book was published, and have returned several times since to speak about how authors can develop a successful online presence.)

One of Stander's first approaches to developing a concise oral pitch was to raise three fundamental questions any author needs to answer about their book: So what? Who cares? And what's in it for me? But as we began to listen to the authors describing the plots, and then talked them through figuring out what the core stories tucked away in those outlines, I started coming up with a different tack. "Look at the prologue to Romeo and Juliet," I said. "It lays out everything that's going to happen for the rest of the evening: Two households, both alike in dignity.... That's how your pitch needs to work: You deliver it, and somebody says, 'I want to read that story." A little later, I riffed on how the opening credits to old TV shows fulfill much the same function: Kirk's opening statement on Star Trek, or the theme song to Gilligan's Island. They tell you what the show's about, but they don't give away so much of the story that you feel you've already heard it all.

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Jessica Rotondi from St. Martin's Minotaur Publicity department was volunteering at the PEN event for Silenced Writers and offers this report of what happened Thursday evening, complementing our earlier report from Amanda ReCupido:

At PEN's "Bringing Down the Great Firewall of China: Silenced writers speak on the eve of the Olympics," prominent PEN members Rick Moody, Francine Prose, Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch and others came together to give voice to the works of leading dissidents and writers imprisoned by the Chinese government. The near-capacity crowd in Tishman auditorium also got to hear the voice of one particularly ardent audience member...

The evening's moment of truth came when dramatist Edward Albee took the stage, drawing a parallel between two countries that he felt suppressed their citizen's freedom of speech: "The United States of America, and the Peoples Republic of China." A conspicuous latecomer, sensing that the moment was ripe to test this statement, pumped his fist and shouted: "Long live the People's Republic of China! Long burn the Olympic torch!"

Albee attempted a dialogue with the protester (after all, the evening was about giving voice to the silenced), but when the latter's end devolved into ever-louder chants of "Long live the People's Republic of China! Long burn the Olympic torch!" and "PEN is CIA!" he was escorted outside of the auditorium, where he was allowed to continue his protest.

Albee didn't miss a beat: "I'm so glad I live in a country where people are allowed to say exactly what they feel." After the applause subsided, he continued his reading of Shen Noulian's "Nightmare."

The heart of the evening was garnering support for the over 40 writers and journalists currently held in Chinese prisons for various attacks on their freedom of speech. Hu Shigen's "How Big a Character is Xin" spoke for many of the silenced. The piece ends with the author in a prison cell, dreaming of letters from all over the world falling towards him like snowflakes. In the dream, he tries to open the letters, but finds they are blank.

Chen Pokong, in his message from the Independent Chinese PEN Center, urged the outside world not to turn their backs on the struggle for freedom of speech in China once the Olympic athletes have returned home. Members of the audience received a set of ten postcards pre-addressed to imprisoned writers, printed with the phrase "you are not forgotten."

Pictured above: Hu Shigen from PEN American Center

top row: Philip Gourevitch, Russell Bank
bottom: Edward Albee

Last week, I gave you a heads-up about a PEN-sponsored tribute to "Bringing down the Great Firewall of China," writers persecuted by the People's Republic. GalleyCat events correspondent Amanda ReCupido subsequently attended the event, which began, she says, with video surveillance footage of one writer under house arrest. "Each speaker then became the 'voice' of an imprisoned writer, " she reports, "reading a portion of their work since they cannot do it themselves." (You can listen to those readings at the PEN website.)

"Philip Gourevitch read from Liao Yiwu's humorous social commentary 'The Public-Toilet Manager,' which at one point states that the public restroom in China served as the only venue of free speech. Francine Prose read on behalf of Li Jianhong, who was only allowed to leave China when she received a fellowship in Stockholm, and then only if she promised never to return.

"The highlight, so to speak, of the evening was when an unruly audience member repeatedly interrupted Edward Albee, who read on behalf of Shen Youlian, with chants of 'Long live the People's Republic of China!' and accusations that I can't repeat here (the man was duly escorted out of the auditorium, but was spotted at the exit handing out copies of a Chinese daily newspaper). Albee, ever the professional, remarked, 'I'm so glad that I live in a country where people are allowed to say... that.' Ah yes, Albee: This is why New York named a day after you."

Last year, ReCupido adds, PEN reached out to more than 1,000 writers in nearly 100 countries, working to secure their liberty and physical safety and restore their freedom to write, with members carrying out intensive advocacy campaigns that include direct contact with the writers or their families, as well as moral support and material assistance when needed. You can learn more about authors imprisoned around the world at the PEN website, and join the hundreds of men and women who have already signed the petition calling upon China to support freedom of expression.

For the last eight months, PEN has been running a campaign called "We Are Ready for Freedom of Expression," aimed at calling attention to the Chinese government's persecution of writers like Liao Yiwu (left) and Tsering Woeser. Tomorrow night, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, their efforts will culminate in a literary rally at The New School with writers like Edward Albee, Jessica Hagedorn, and Rick Moody reading from the writing of dissident Chinese and Tibetan authors—in some cases works that has never been translated into English before this event (which starts at 7 p.m.).

The campaign also calls upon the People's Republic "to guarantee freedom of the press before, during, and after the Olympic Games," but we all know how that turned out.

(photos: Yiwu/The Arts Fuse; Woeser/PEN)

Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of the death of novelist, short story writer, and legendary New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell, and the National Book Foundation marked the occasion by hosting an early-evening discussion at the north end of Madison Square Park. Christopher Carduff, who recently edited a two-volume omnibus of Maxwell's fiction for the Library of America, described the author as "one of the essential American voices of our time," and proposed that Lincoln, Illinois, where some of those best stories were set, is "as much a part of the American literary landscape as Hannibal, Missouri, or Yoknapatawpha County."

Rather than read from that fiction, though, the guest speakers shared their personal reminiscenses of Maxwell. Dan Menaker, the former Random House editor (now an online talk show host, with the possibility of a second season of Titlepage in the fall), discussed how Maxwell gave him his first big break, at the fiction department of the New Yorker:

(That's Edward Hirsch sitting next to Menaker, by the way.)

During that time, Menaker added, as Maxwell began to acknowledge his notes on other writer's stories, he submitted some of his own fiction; when Maxwell accepted some stories, he then turned in some poems that had already been rejected by another editor at the magazine. Maxwell took the poems on a Wednesday and gave them back on Thursday, Menaker recalled: "He handed them back to me and said, 'Stick to prose.'" (As Ben Cheever,another of the evening's speakers, recalled, Maxwell was a gentle man, but he was known for being "more true than kind.")

Stewart O'Nan actually never met Maxwell, he admitted, but he attributed his own literary career to discovering a copy of So Long, See You Tomorrow in a used bookstore more than twenty years ago and being moved to emulate Maxwell's transformation of his youthful experiences into searingly honest art. "I had no idea of his gigantic backstory," O'Nan said, though he quickly learned, and eventually wrote to Maxwell in gratitude and was thrilled when an unexpected reply came. He still recommends So Long to people to this day: "It's 135 pages and there's a lot of white space on those pages," he observed. "You could read this entire book instead of watching that crappy movie on Starz tonight."

GalleyCat correspondent Amanda ReCupido went to Brooklyn's Book Court last night to see Amy Shearn read from her debut novel, How Far Is the Ocean From Here. "The novel, which follows a young, unmarried surrogate mother in her panicked journey from Chicago to the Southwest mere days before her delivery date, encompasses a theme that appears in much of Shearn's writing: of taking care of others, and sometimes failing," ReCupido writes. "The idea of the surrogate also follows Shearn's propensity for including somewhat unnatural and sci-fi elements of the human body in her work."

At the reading, ReCupido also learned about an informal raffle Shearn is conducting through her website—readers are invited to submit their own stories about bad model trips ("real or imagined"), which might earn them one of twenty handmade chapbooks featuring an all-new story about one of the novel's characters, who Shearn explained she "wanted to spend a little more time with."

Charles Bock is a big fan of rock poster art, which led to a friendship with Chuck Sperry, one half of San Francisco's Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company. Sperry even created a release poster for Bock's debut novel, Beautiful Children, when it came out earlier this year. So when Bock found out he'd be reading with Richard Price at Central Park's Summerstage next week, he told me, "I thought, what can I do to make it special and commemorate the event. Then I thought, yeah, poster. I showed Richard Price the poster Sperry did for my book and he was totally on board."

"Coincidentally," Bock added, "Chuck also is a huge fan of Richard Price, going back to The Wanderers, and he was more than stoked to do the poster." I've tucked the full art in the backend of this post; be sure to take a look. And if you're up for seeing Bock and Price together in New York for the first time since the online literary talk show Titlepage (though they did do a panel together at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April), head out to Central Park on July 31. And afterwards, if you go up to them with a book to sign, they'll give you a print of the poster... until they run out, that is.

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mediabistro.com's FishbowlNY blog had an observer in the crowd at last night's James Frey-Terry Richardson event at Strand Books, promoting their collaboration on an art book called Wives, Wheels, Weapons. You can get the full story there, but among Frey's statements about the project:

"I'm much more part of the art world than I am the literary world... I wanted to make a cool, sort of radical, fun art book. I have no interest in being called a memoirist. I'm a writer."

Also, "the idea was just to do a cool book that would piss people off."

The sound on this video is erratic, what with it being shot on an open ferry deck and all...

Actor-director Jess Winfield came to New York City to promote his debut novel, My Name Is Will, but in addition to reading from his book, he drew upon his background as a founding member of the legendary Reduced Shakespeare Company and designed a marathon performance of thirty-one plays that started, as seen in the video above, with a distillation of sixteen comedies into a pastiche which he declaimed on a ferry from Manhattan to Brooklyn early Saturday afternoon. Once the boat arrived in Red Hook, Winfield and his audience wandered around the neighborhood, with the multi-site performance culminating in a hip-hop Othello, a 30-second Romeo & Juliet, and, finally, at Freebird Books, a one-minute Hamlet.

On Monday, July 28, UnBeige blogger Steve Delahoyde is coming to town for an evening of readings from Field-Tested Books, an online (and print) essay collection compiled by the Coudal Partners design firm (which is where he has his day job). I'm one of the many contributors, and if plans hold firm, I'll be joining Steve at The Delancey that evening along with Ben Greenman, Randy Cohen, and a slew of other authors.

Coudal's also putting together a similar event on its Chicago home turf on July 22. That one features Jonathan Messinger, Claire Zulkey, Kevin Guilfoyle, and Wendy McClure, among others.