LREI: Calendars and Events

LREI students love books; everybody knows that. So what could be better than having a week of authors, illustrators and editors visiting all grades to talk about all aspects of book and magazine making? Add a Book Fair and a grown-up Literary Evening, and you have our ever-popular Book Week. Visiting authors ran the gamut from young, first-time writers to seasoned, prolific ones, including our own illustrious Marthe Jocelyn and William Wegman. Several LREI parent authors visited the High School, including Deborah Landau, James Marcus and Christine Vachon. The students were treated to presentations by comic book artists and graphic novelists, as well as an appearance by Laura Galen, LREI parent and editor of Nickolodeon magazine. At the Book Fair, parents, students and teachers were able to buy titles by visiting authors, as well as a wide selection of other books, for themselves and as holiday gifts. The excitement of the week culminated at the Literary Evening entitled Who Am I? An Evening Contemplating Cultural Identity. A diverse group of authors read from their work, bringing to light the ways in which we become ourselves, because of (or sometimes in spite of) the culture or part of the world is our home. Many thanks to all of our visiting authors! Coe Booth - Nick Bruel - Scott Cunningham - Laura Galen - Laura Anne Gilman - Jenny Han - Marthe Jocelyn - Deborah Landau - Tod Lippy - Patricia McCormick - Elizabeth Mann - James Marcus - Blake Nelson - Peter Parnell - Susanna Pitzer - Jenny Pollack - Aaron Renier - Justin Richardson - Steve Sheinkin - Tom Slaughter - Christine Vachon - William Wegman
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The theme of LREI's 2006 Literary Evening was "Who Am I? An Evening Contemplating Cultural Identity." LREI parent and Literary Committee stalwart Dovie Wingard welcomed the audience, thanked the parent volunteers, and called attention to the event's 10th anniversary; Literary Evening was created in 1997 to let adults in the LREI community share in the excitement of Book Week, when authors visit students in every grade and engage them in the art and craft of writing.
	High School Vice Principal and science teacher Sarvjit Moonga served as master of ceremonies. "I've asked the same question - Who am I? Born in Punjab in Northern India, raised in London in a neighborhood very much like the one I live in today - Jackson Heights, Queens." He is, he said, an Anglo-Punjabi-Sikh whose heart pounds with joy at the first snow of the season, just as it did so many years ago on a bright December day in London, when as a six-year old immigrant he saw and touched the wondrous white stuff for the very first time.
	Chinese-American Jocelyn Lieu read from her story collection Potential Weapons. Autobiographical protagonist Abby, a hardened New Yorker, moves to 1990s Indiana and "has my innocence removed" by "the unapologetic presence of the Ku Klux Klan." A Klansman's letter-to-the editor urges readers to "preserve the white race. Does that make me a racist? I don't think so." At those words Abby's mother howls with laughter, just as she and her husband had done at every sign of intolerance during their long interracial marriage. After protesting at a Klan rally, Abby has a revelation: "Laughter and resistance are two sides of the same coin. Why had it taken so long to see?"
	"When I'm not parenting, I'm writing the history of France." LREI parent Stephane Gerson said he tried out this opening line on his son, only to be told, "Dad, that's so lame!" As a Belgian with "[his] screwed-up relationship with France," Stephane became so fascinated with American Francophiles that he asked 18 such historians to contribute to the forthcoming anthology, Why France? Enamored, seduced, enthralled but also infuriated, the contributors ponder their attraction to France and, concluded their editor, ultimately find it "a great place to think about what it means to be American in an increasingly Americanized world."
	Why France? contributor Todd Shepherd read from an account of his visit as a young exchange student. Despite dreams of glamorous Paris or the sensual Mediterranean, he found himself landlocked in provincial Douai with a family of followers of the ultra-nationalist Jean le Pen. There he met "the first people I ever despised, the first people I ever knew who hated me." For them, "people from Africa were naturally lazy; people from North Africa could not help being thieves and liars." They did enlighten him about the "French approach to religion," as they refused to attend the local Catholic Church "not because of their atheism, but because it had been taken over by Communist priests."
	Iranian Nahid Rachlin explained that "after years of trying to figure out who I was by writing fiction, I wrote a memoir." She read a wrenching excerpt from Persian Girls , about her life with a beloved Aunt after she had been abandoned by her parents in the Shah's Iran. One day in the schoolyard "I noticed a man approach...Even from a distance he seemed powerful." "Don't you recognize your father?" he demanded, and though she had seen him only once before in her life, he had an absolute right to take her away forcefully from all she knew. "Don't go with strangers," her aunt had warned her. "Was father the stranger she was warning me against? Her worst fears were coming true."
	Playwright Nilo Cruz read from his 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning play Anna in the Tropics, set in Tampa in the 1920s. He explained that the play dramatizes a Cuban tradition brought to the US in the 1800s: Shakespeare and other great works were read to immigrants toiling in the cigar factories. As a result, "illiterates could quote sections from classics." In the play the novel Anna Karenina - a story of passion and betrayal - parallels the lives of factory worker Palomo, a man drifting toward estrangement from his wife Conchita, who says of Tolstoy's words, "My mind wanders to other places...places money can't buy...places made of dreams."
	Sarvjit Moonga introduced Madhur Jaffrey as the first person of color he had ever seen on British television. A Royal Academy-trained actress and renowned cookbook author, Ms. Jaffrey confirmed that she was, indeed, a "living, walking woman of color." In her elegant, aristocratic Anglo-Indian voice, she read from Climbing the Mango Trees, a memoir set in the bygone era of colonial India. It describes a time when lunch at a proper British school meant hampers of fragrant food delivered from home by turbaned servants, when Delhi was surrounded by "fields of mustard and millet," when "it did not occur to me that families came in sizes less than 30 people...This was our country."