Partying with PEN

I was honored to be able to help the PEN World Voices Festival throw a party at the Cervantes Institute on Friday.  For a list of the remaining events, go here.

About fifteen years ago, I was a college intern at PEN during a hellishly hot summer I spent in an illegal sublet in Williamsburg.  I worked in the mornings as a PEN intern and then I would go to my paying job at the Dean and Deluca espresso bar down the block.

Both gigs were equally difficult.  At Dean and Deluca I had to deal with mean, caffeine-starved yuppies (Martha Stewart was very rude to me while buying apple tarts, which I knew she was going to pass off as home-baked), and I left each night with swollen ankles and coffee-stained cuffs.  At PEN, I was shown the computer and told to write letters to heads of state expressing my outrage over human rights abuses.  Talk about writer's block.  I was nineteen years old, and I would stare at the computer screen in terror, trying to think of what to say to the Prime Minister of Turkey.

But my boss Siobhan Dowd was very kind.  I will always remember the shock I felt when she gave me the other intern's letters to edit.  Up until that point, I had thought I was doing an awful job.  I told Siobhan that and she said, "Yeah, well, your letters take me slightly less time to fix."  I edited the other girl's work, and Siobhan gave it back to me to redo. "Never edit in red pen," she said.

I named one of the special cocktails of the evening in Siobhan's honor, the Freedom to Write. 

I love the Cervantes Institute.  There's something sort of otherwordly about it.  It was really cold, but no one wanted to stay inside because the gardens were so beautiful. 

It was cool to be around so many writers.  It sort of made my brain hurt.

All for one, one for all, that is our motto:

Eduardo Lago was sort of like d'Artagnan: 

Then we slunk off into the night,

and we got up to mischief of one kind:

and another

  Many thanks to the excellent photographer Ezra Mabengeza.