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At Slate, Ariel Bogle recaps a discussion I had last week with AJ Jacobs, Wilhelmina Rhodes-Kelly, and Chris Whitten on how technology is affecting the family tree. I talked a little bit about what drew me to research my ancestry in the first place.

Although technology is changing the way we discover our personal histories, the reasons why people may begin to investigate in the first place have stayed the same. Curiosity, of course, but also a sense of history. Maud Newton told the audience how her interest in her family tree was sparked by the improbable stories her mother told about their predecessors. But the importance of ancestry cut very close for Newton. “I myself was basically a eugenics project,” she said. “My parents married because they thought they would have smart children together, not because they loved each other.” Her father was particularly obsessed with the idea of purity of blood, she added. “Someone suggested to me that there might be something [my father] was hiding, and then I got really interested.”

We had lots of fun; I don’t think any of us were ready for the panel to end when it did, and how often can you say that? The audio is below Bogle’s summary, if you’d like to listen.

In related reading: at Tin House, my series of brief but wide-ranging interviews with authors about ancestry is ongoing. Guests so far are Laila Lalami, Celeste Ng, Saeed Jones, and Christopher Beha. And at The Begats, I’ve written in the last few months about Alexander Chee’s jokbo (gorgeous books recording his family history back to the Joseon Dynasty, which began in 1392), ancestor worship in the Old Testament, and some disappointing (but not too surprising) discoveries about my self-given namesake, Maude Newton Simmons, among other things.

The stark and stunning image above is a grave map — taken from Alex’s jokbo — for one of his ancestors.

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I’ve always been interested in the ways writers think about family history—and especially about echoes, or the lack thereof, through the generations—if they do, as they work. I’m grateful to Tin House for allowing me to indulge this curiosity in a new series of brief but wide-ranging interviews with authors about ancestry. First up, Christopher Beha:

Maud Newton: When we first met to talk about the essay I eventually ended up writing for Harper’s, you mentioned an ancestral house upstate where your family spends time every summer. Do you think visiting that old homestead has influenced your thinking about ancestry?

 

Christopher Beha: Without a doubt. The house was built by the first Behas of my line to come to America from Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. They farmed for a couple of generations on land my family still owns, and members of the family continued to spend a lot of time there after my great-great grandmother moved the family down to New York City. So there’s a lot of family history there. There are still some Behas living in the area (though they pronounce the name differently than my family does), and there is a Beha Road not far from the house. I can walk a mile down the road to the churchyard and see the graves of Matthias and Theresa Beha, my great-great-great grandparents, who brought their family over 150 years ago. All of this has influenced my sense of ancestry as something that is still present in my world, even if it is often invisible.

The rest is here. Future interview subjects will include Laila Lalami, Emily Mandel, Celeste Ng, Saeed Jones, and Katherine Faw Morris.

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It was thrilling to hear from Emma Komlos-Hrobsky last week that my Lost & Found essay, originally published in the pages of that terrific literary magazine, Tin House, had been, well, found, and would be replayed on the Tin House blog today.  I include the opening lines of the essay here.  I hope you will follow the full trail here.

Beth Kephart brings us a tale of Appalachian wanderlust in this Lost & Found on her great grandfather Horace Kephart’s book, Our Southern Highlanders.
Growing up, we understood that we’d been entrusted with a name.  ”You go down south to Bryson City and you say ‘Kephart’ and you let them tell you who you are,” our father’s father would instruct us solemnly.  My sister, my brother, and I would sit in stiff obedience on his plastic-protected chairs, watching each other beneath raised eyebrows.  We might have had a storied name, but we could not imagine how it mattered.  We were northerners and not soon headed for a town called Bryson City.

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I was excited to discover that Dambudzo Marechera's bizarre, beautiful, disturbing, and utterly unique book Black Sunlight is now available again in what looks like a handsome edition from Penguin as part of their new African Writers Series.  It's an even wilder book than the novel Marechera is best known for, House of Hunger, and because of that fact it hasn't gotten the same attention, but Black Sunlight deserves as much notice.  If you're curious for a taste of the prose, I've quoted it here on the blog in the past.

I discovered that the book is available again when I read Akin Ajayi's commentary at The Guardian's Book Blog, "Penguin's African Writers Series is stuck in the past" (via The Literary Saloon).  Ajayi makes the case that the five books being released in the U.K. to inaugurate the new series are all at least 15 years old (a sixth book, Karen King-Aribisala's The Hangman's Game, is part of the series in South Africa, but not available [yet] in the U.K. or U.S.; it is more recent), and this presents an odd contrast to the accomplishments of the original African Writers Series from Heinemann, which made hundreds of contemporary African works available to a wide audience.

Ajayi's general point is an important one, and one I expect Penguin is aware of, given their sponsorship of the Penguin Prize for African Writing -- they do seem interested in new writers and new writing, and I would not be surprised to learn that the decision to start with older books had something to do with a desire to launch the series with titles that already have some name recognition.  I have a very different view of literature than Ajayi, though, who writes:

I don't have anything against the selection itself, it's just that it's hard to see what the selection can tell the curious reader about lives lived across Africa today. These books can't say much about the challenges of globalisation, migration, or the struggle by the citizens of Africa's 53 countries to form an authentic identity, because these books are not of the moment. Classics, yes; contemporary, no. And in this sense at least, the new AWS disappoints.

There's lots of great writing happening on the continent right now, and that's one of the reasons why I hope Penguin will move their primary focus to new works, but Ajayi's view of what books should do or be seems to me an awfully narrow one, and the idea that African writers are primarily valuable because of the up-to-the-minute content of their writing is ridiculous.  A book like Black Sunlight will not tell you what is happening in Zimbabwe right now, no -- for that, you need journalists and eyewitnesses.  For a whole lot other than that, you need Black Sunlight.

And while we're talking about exciting books being reprinted, I should also note that Tin House will be bringing Marlene van Niekerk's extraordinary novel Agaat to the U.S. this spring in Michiel Heyns's translation from the Afrikaans (complete with a blurb from

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I just discovered the other day that Tin House Books is offering a set of four of their books for $35.99 via their website as The Tin House Writers' Series.  This is a wonderful deal: The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House; The Story about the Story, a collection of thirty essays; The World Within, a collection of interviews; and The Journals of Jules Renard, which was the subject of one of my personal favorites among my Strange Horizons columns.

I'm planning to use the bundle as an assigned text for a course I'm teaching in the fall, "Writing and the Creative Process" because the content is varied and high quality and the price still allows me to assign another book if need be (I'm thinking of perhaps also using Lynda Barry's What It Is, but I'm still early in the planning process; a sales rep from Norton said he's sending me some things to look at, and he was friendly and knowledgeable, so I want to give those books a fair shake, too).

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