Upcoming Cultural Events

Howard Machtinger spent the fall semester in Hanoi with his wife, Trude Bennett, who served as faculty for UNC’s semester abroad program. She took a group of 11 undergraduate students whose studies combined public health, culture, and language. Howard will talk to us about current-day Vietnam and about the work he did while there.

Howard is retired, having worked in education as a public school teacher and as Director of the Teaching Fellows Program at UNC-CH. He has been to Viet Nam 6 times since 2002 and co-led a UNC Study Abroad in Ho Chi Minh City in 2005. He was an antiwar activist during the American War in Viet Nam and attended the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal in the fall of 1967 as SDS delegate. 

This fall, in Vietnam, he worked on an anthology of Vietnamese writings during and since the war with Huu Ngoc who is the author and editor of 162 works, including the indispensable Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, as well as being a key contributor to the valuable series: Vietnamese Culture: Frequently Asked Questions. He was the second editor of Vietnamese Studies and began his association with the journal in 1970. Countless visitors to Vietnam have benefited from his 1-hour tour de force lecture on Vietnamese history. His lifetime goal has been to introduce the world to Vietnamese culture and other cultures to the Vietnamese.

---

No Word for Welcome, Wendy Call 

Please note that this event is not at our regular day or time, due to the author's travel schedule. We are very pleased to present Wendy Call, who will read from her latest book, titled No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy. The book is the winner of the 2011 National Book Prize for Nonfiction from Grub Street.  Wendy's father, Doug Call, has studied Spanish at CHICLE. 

Publishers Weekly writes as follows:

Locals know the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the 120-mile-wide strip of land that connects the Yucatan Peninsula to Oaxaca and Veracruz, as "Mexico's little waist." The region is a hotbed of environmental and economic issues, such as the industrial shrimp farming that threatens to leave behind "the coastal equivalent of a desert." Drawing on research, extensive interviews, and firsthand experiences living there in the early 2000s, Call, a translator of Mexican poetry and fiction, portrays villagers' traditional ways of life in the throes of massive change. (A Wal-Mart has already set up shop.)

She cites Huatulco, a former fishing village, as foreshadowing what may lie in store for the isthmus: "more than 51,000 acres of beach, field, and forest became federal government property, controlled by FONATUR, the national tourism development agency." Villagers were expropriated, and two residents who refused to leave their homes wound up murdered.

Call is never dry or academic; rather, she writes lively narrative, detailed description, and engaging scenes that render her subjects--a schoolteacher, fishermen, activists--three-dimensional. By relating the lives and concerns of isthmus dwellers and the struggles they face, the author raises awareness of globalization's effects on the village economy.

Wendy Call has served as Writer in Residence at more than a dozen institutions, including universities, high schools, art centers, a public hospital and a national park. (Recent locales include Cornell College in Iowa, New College of Florida, Harborview Medical Center, Richard Hugo House, and Seattle University.)

She co-edited Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide (Penguin, 2007). Her narrative nonfiction book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (Nebraska, 2011) won Grub Street’s 2011 National Book Prize for Nonfiction. Her essays, literary journalism, and translations of Mexican poetry and fiction have appeared in more than fifty journals and magazines in seven countries.

Her current writing projects—creative nonfiction, personal essay, and poetry translation—are supported by the King County arts and culture commission, Seattle’s Jack Straw Foundation, and the K2 Foundation of Maine. She lives in Seattle and works as a writer, translator (from Spanish), editor, and educator. She holds a BA in Biology from Oberlin College and a MFA in Writing from Bennington College. Before turning to full-time word-working in 2000, she devoted a decade to work for grassroots, social change organizations in Seattle and Boston. 

---

Volunteering in Haiti, Courtney Mccurdy

---