Posts Tagged: Leah Lax

Nicole Krauss & Nathan Englander call attention to the radical resilience of cities in post Harvey Houston reading

September 25, 2017, by

small Nicole Krauss RM3_0950Last Monday’s sudden storms brought uncomfortable reminders of the recent devastation in and around Houston, echoed now in Puerto Rico, and Florida, and other parts of the Caribbean and the Gulf. Those of us who made it to this season’s first installment of the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series were soggy and a little anxious to come in from the rain. We crowded the orchestra section of Rice University’s Stude Concert Hall, borrowed in the wake of Harvey’s damage to the Wortham Center’s performance spaces.

But rather than distract us, both Nicole Krauss and Nathan Englander called attention to the radical resilience of cities, and how storytelling can serve that resilience. Their readings addressed the dedication and distress so many of us have recently witnessed and felt.

The excerpts Krauss chose from her new novel Forest Dark explored the threshold of self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and of how we probe and expand the rifts in our personal realities. She spoke of the ways in which writing can invent identity, that writing is often an act of self-invention instead of self-expression: “Each time you tell another story,” she said, “you amplify what it is to be yourself.” Continue reading →

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Uncovering the Path to Uncovered: A Celebration of Leah Lax

August 31, 2015, by

Book jacket for Uncovered by Leah LaxAs any writer will tell you, the publication of a book is an occasion for celebration—especially one that has been written and rewritten and agonized over for a decade. So it is clearly time for Leah Lax to celebrate the publication (on August 28) of her long awaited and compelling memoir, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home.

Inprint’s connection to Leah and this book goes back many years. You might consider this “extra-textual”: it’s not in the book.

Sometime in early 1996, when I was still “the new guy” at Inprint, I received a phone call from Rosellen Brown, the acclaimed writer and faculty member at the UH Creative Writing Program (UH CWP). Rosellen had a friend in the Houston Hasidic community who was a school teacher and a talented writer. Inprint gave scholarships to Houston-area K-12 teachers to take our writers workshops. (Now we offer Teachers-as-Writers Workshops, essentially the same thing.) Rosellen wondered: Could her friend Leah receive a teacher scholarship?

Of course, I said—and the rest is history. Continue reading →

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Writers, Opera, and Chitra Divakaruni’s River of Light

March 21, 2014, by

RIVER-art-newWhen we think of writers and the different mediums through which they share stories, we think of novels, memoirs, poems, perhaps even oral traditions. But do you ever think of opera?

Houston has a thriving literary community and one of the many ways writers are enhancing the cultural life of this city is through serving as librettists for the Houston Grand Opera.

The comingling of writers with the Opera has been going on for several years and Inprint is proud to be a part of it. In 2006, the Houston Grand Opera approached Inprint to identify a Houston writer who could develop and write a unique libretto for a main stage piece celebrating Houston’s diversity. The overall project was called “Song of Houston,” and the piece—for soloists, chorus, and orchestra—was called The Refuge. The writer was to spend months interviewing dozens of people in six different Houston immigrant communities, and then distill these stories into a libretto portraying the struggles to get to this country and adjust to life here in the United States. Inprint recommended Leah Lax, a UH Creative Writing Program (UH CWP) alumna, on the basis of her work teaching senior citizens for Inprint, and the piece was a great success, resulting in a major write-up in The New York Times.

Since then, Inprint has connected HGO with several Houston writers who have written libretti for original works commissioned by HGO, including Farnoosh Moshiri (The Bricklayer), Irene Keliher (A Way Home, a bilingual opera), Janine Joseph (From my Mother’s Mother), and Bao Long Chu (Bound)—all UH CWP alumni. Inprint also worked with the HGO staff to select Houston writers to teach writing workshops to senior citizens in the Third and Fifth Wards, which resulted in poems set to music by composers at UH and Rice—these teachers were also UH CWP graduate students. As a result of this partnership, Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy now serves on the HGO Community Outreach (HGOco) Committee, where he is helping the HGO staff to envision future collaborations with Houston area writers.

Now HGO is building on its success and continues to work with the city’s top writers.

As part of its Song of Houston: East + West series, HGOco is presenting River of Light with the libretto written by Houston writer Chitra Divakaruni. Amongst the literary community here, Chitra is a household name. Chitra, an American Book Award winner and faculty member at the UH Creative Writing Program, is the author of novels, short stories, and poems, including her latest novel Oleander Girl. Continue reading →

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