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By Patrick Burns, February 12, 2010 1:38 am

I first saw Padma Viswanathan’s novel, The Toss of a Lemon, on a shelf in Borders and was immediately taken by the title. It’s an interesting phrase. One I’d never heard, yet it sounds like something someone could have said a hundred times, a hundred someones. The phrase refers to a character in her novel, a Brahmin astrologer who has someone toss a lemon out the window the very moment each of his children are born. It’s the precision of the moment that helps him create their astrological charts, which will not only interpret each of his children’s futures, but those of his and his wife.

After reading the novel, I found Padma on Facebook and made a strange request. I asked her if she’d sign my hard bound copy of her book if I sent it to her and promised to pay for the return postage. Not only did she agree (graciously), she also paid for the return postage. And this after the book had just been reviewed in the New York Times, a time I imagine friends and admirers must come out of the woodwork. Again, she couldn’t have been more approachable.

When we were looking for someone to interview for our next issue, she was the first author who came to mind. She’s kind, well-traveled, thoughtful: a great writer at the (relative) beginning of what will surely be a long and illustrious career. I approached her again, and again she accepted.

We talked, as we always do at Terrain.org, about place. This led to further questions about novels vs. plays, about Brahmins, about Elizabeth Bishop, and about the role of failure in art.

I can’t wait for it to come out, but in the meantime–if you’d like to sample some of Padma’s work–here’s a short story she wrote a couple of years ago that won the Boston Review’s annual short story contest. The work, “Transitory Cities,” has a very different tone from her novel. It’s more experimental, more a work of magical realism–though many authors might reject this term. Either way, it’s a great story and should more than get you warmed up for the interview.

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By Simmons Buntin, February 5, 2010 12:24 am

“A Short History of Falling” by Pamela Uschuk, appearing in the current issue (No. 24) of Terrain.org, has been named a “Best of the Web” award recipient by Dzanc Books and will be included in its Best of the Web 2010 anthology.

The selection completes the hat trick for Terrain.org, as we placed fiction in the 2008 edition (“The Split” by Kim Whitehead) and nonfiction in the 2009 edition (“Catching Hell: The Joe Holt Integration Story” by Heather Killelea McEntarfer).

Read and listen to the poem — and two others by Pamela Uschuk — at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/24/uschuk.htm.

We are delighted to once again place a contribution in the Dzanc Books Best of the Web anthology series!

Update:

Dzanc Books is setting up Dzanc National Workshop Day on March 20, 2010.  It has over 30 workshops set up in over 25 cities on that date. Learn more at the Dzanc Day website:

http://www.dzancbooks.org/dzancday

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By Simmons Buntin, November 18, 2009 5:50 pm

Yesterday I had the privelage of having lunch with Bill Keener, a senior attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency focusing on borderland issues. He was down in Tucson from San Francisco. Bill, writing as William Keener, has three poems in the current issue of Terrain.org that you shouldn’t miss: read and listen to them here.

We were hoping that Alison Hawthorne Deming, who also has poems in this issue, would be able to join us.  But alas, she couldn’t make it. I think they’d get along splendidly — they have a lot in common. And that strikes me as true of many poets who likewise write of science and environment. What is it that draws us together? Ideology, passion, scientific understanding, constant pursuit of truth and justice, a love for art and an acknowledgement that art and science are fundamentally linked? That’s why Terrain.org resounds, I think. It’s about nexus. In this case, the nexus between art and science, environment and humanity — the places real and virtual we all coexist, even if we don’t completely understand them.