This past spring, Regents Professor of English Patricia Hampl was honored with the Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Faculty Award from the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes Professor Hampl's distinguished writing, teaching, and service in this area, including her work with the University's Human Rights Program establishing the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship. In 2011, Hampl co-organized an international conference devoted to the relationship between the personal narrative voice and human rights, "My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights." Hampl, of course, is the author of six celebrated memoirs, and she's working on a seventh. What's it about? Read on. . . .1. Can you talk briefly about the connection you see between human rights and the personal narrative voice? Your book A Romantic Education, about visiting Prague pre-Velvet Revolution, is a classic memoir, but also a moving example of a personal narrative intersecting with a larger story of human rights struggles. What are five other great books that take on this challenge?
It's one of the curiosities of American literature that the first person voice claims special authority for us. We seem to trust the individual voice over the "omniscient" narrator. This is even more true for stories of political trauma and radical human suffering. Why is a little girl's diary the undisputed essential document of the Holocaust? It was written, after all, before she saw and experienced the worst tortures of that genocide. Her voice doesn't embody "the worst," but gives us indelible proof of what we lost when this irreplaceable girl was murdered by the forces of "the worst." So I suppose for me the trust in the relation between the personal voice and the overwhelming crush of human rights violations started with Anne Frank's Diary. My passion for memoirs has always been rooted in a political and historical enterprise, rather than in the psychological how-I-got-to-be-me kind of writing. I think of the first person voice as an instrument, not as a subject in itself. The books that come to mind that remain my models for personally voiced writing contending with the forces of injustice include Hope Against Hope by Nadezdah Mandelstam (about the Soviet terror and the gulag), Native Realm and The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund deWaal, and Joe's War: My Father Decoded by Annette Kobak--to name only a few.
2. You and Human Rights Program Director Barbara Frey created the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship and granted the first one in 2006. Since then, MFA students, in collaboration with Human Rights Program staff/students, have researched and written about current stories from immigrant detention in the Midwest to sex slavery in Cambodia. After seven years, what do you see as the greatest accomplishment of the fellowship?
The fact that the University has a vibrant commitment to human rights and has a dynamic leader in Barbara Frey who saw instantly the connection between narrative writing and human rights--that's the biggest and most enduring accomplishment of the Scribes program and touches students beyond those who have been Scribes themselves. I think it has also been a challenge to all of our Scribes to understand they aren't meant to turn themselves into investigative journalists. Even though that's tempting in the face of some of the horrific cases the Human Rights Program studies and works on. Each Scribe is meant to be whatever writer he or she is--poet, fiction writer, memoirist. I think every Scribe has been humbled by the encounter with harrowing subject matter and has had to recommit to the service of literature and language in the face of experiences that invite silence and turning away. I like to think that each Scribe has not simply become a human rights activist but has reaffirmed a relation with the most vulnerable source of literature--the individual voice.
3. Okay, gotta ask: As a scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his work, what did you think of the Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby?
Crazy about it! A lot of my friends urged me not to go, as if I would somehow be wounded by seeing the movie. I guess they thought the movie was too down market for oh-so-literary me. But aside from the frame (of Nick Carraway being in a kind of nursing home where he writes The Great Gatsby) which was corny and flat-footed, I thought Baz Luhrmann did a brilliant job of breaking all the hallowed attitudes about the novel and making it live on the screen as no other attempt has managed. The choice of Jay-Z for the music was nothing short of genius. I saw it in 2D and 3D--went twice. I think this is one to see in 3D. And let's hear it for Leonardo DiCaprio who refused to deny Jim Gatz/Jay Gatsby his boyishness in the midst of his famous mystery. Did I mention I was crazy about the movie?
4. Your last memoir, The Florist's Daughter, won a Minnesota Book Award in 2008. What project(s) are you working on currently?
I'm writing a short book that's taking a long time called The Art of the Wasted Day, a riff on the idea of leisure and a homage to the inventor (sort of) of the essay, Michel Montaigne. I see this project (not that anyone else will) as the third in a trilogy of books, each about an art form. My first was Spillville, about Dvorak's 1893 summer in Spillville, Iowa, which was my book about music (I started as a piano performance major at the University), then Blue Arabesque, about visual art whose hero figure is Matisse, and now to literature with this one--and to what I see as literature's most feral form, the essay.
5. What are you reading or what have you read lately that you think is great?
Strange that someone like me is called (and call myself) a "writer." A more accurate label might be "reader" considering the time I spend on other people's work. I'm an omnivore reader--poetry, fiction, nonfiction. And I'm a magazine buff--everything from The New York Review of Books (my favorite literary review) and The New Yorker (I usually find a couple things worth finishing) to cooking magazines (I mourned the loss of Gourmet, a wonderful source of personal essays). I confess to the typical "late style" habits of many writers--re-reading books I've long loved. Recently I returned to Anna Karenina, a book I adored as a 19-year-old romantic, detested with fiery feminist outrage at 30, and now found myself putting down, saying, "OK, that's the greatest novel ever written," as if I were giving out an Academy Award. A more recent novel, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, is an extraordinary evocation of Central Europe between the two wars, based on a family's relation to a Modernist house modeled on one by Mies van der Rohe in Brno. Perhaps the most striking memoir of the last year is the great post-War historian Tony Judt's book, The Memory Chalet. Judt died of ALS before age 60, and wrote this book in the midst of his many losses, including his ability to write or speak. I return often to William Trevor, Alice Munro, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I'm always reading Montaigne these days--partly for my own project, but really because he's irresistible.
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Garrison Keillor (BA '66), wearing his bookstore owner hat, is presenting "
Regents Professor and memoirist Patricia Hampl has teamed up with Human Rights Program director Barbara Frey to create "