The International Writers Center hosted the first annual celebration of Washington University authors on Wednesday, December 11, in the Women's Building. As I happily looked over the packed room, glanced at the many books on display, and listened to enthusiastic presentations by the four authors who discussed their work, I was reminded why it is that writing a book is like a journey.

As Gerald Early noted in his opening remarks, writing a book is extraordinarily difficult. A book is often a physical and always an intellectual journey that the author must travel. Both kinds of roads can be fraught with difficulties. To complete the journey, far-ranging intelligence is required, as well as a considerable amount of self-understanding and discipline. The best metaphor I know is from the ancient Chinese folk novel, Journey to the West, thought to have been written by Wu Ch'eng-en in the sixteenth century. On the surface, it reads like a tale of cosmic kung fu on the scale of Star Wars: a pilgrimage of the trickster Monkey and his encounters with a bizarre caste of demons, spirits, gods, and bodhisattvas as he and his companions travel to India to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China. Just beneath the surface, however, it is part historical epic, part folk novel, and part morality tale. It is a story of Monkey, who represents our own restless intelligence, journeying toward self-insights and transformation. At its deepest level, Journey to the West is an allegorical and symbolic account of both social realities and larger realities. Although none of our authors would claim that they needed kung fu to complete their manuscripts, writing a book is a journey through many layers of self-understanding as well as demons inside and challenges outside that must be overcome just as in Monkey's journey. These books attempt to transform us by explaining something about social realities and larger realities that surround us.

Readers of Journey to the West soon realize that the bizarre main characters are, in many ways, archetypical figures representing universal qualities of human nature. Hsüan-tsang, the monk sent by the king to gather the scriptures, represents "everyman" searching for meaning. The disciple Piggy embodies sensuality and appetite as well as the vitality and energy necessary to undertake a demanding journey. The disciple Sandy represents sincerity. And then, there is Monkey, who symbolizes the undisciplined intellect that must be tamed before the journey - the spiritual transformation - can be undertaken and successfully completed.

Our authors represent the scholarly "everyman" searching for meaning in the world around them, and the appetite and energy necessary for the creative act in content and design that is a book. They epitomize the restless intellect that must discipline itself to channel physical and psychic energies into the social, political, and cultural expression that is a book. Lastly, they must be sincere, because a book says something about both the world it enters and the author who offers it. Just as the Journey to the West is a morality tale read to Chinese children to teach them perseverance and sincerity, our authors serve as examples of what Gerald Early described as "the extraordinary level of concentration" that must be attained and sustained for multiple chapters and hundreds of pages.

The IWC is proud to have presented the first of what will be an annual event. This celebration of Washington University authors would not be possible without generous support from the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Campus Bookstore, Washington University Publications Office, and the many Washington University faculty and students who have committed themselves to that creative act of writing a book. We also thank the University Event Services, the Bon Appétit Catering Service, and the Photographic Services for their help. Finally, The IWC acknowledges the heroic efforts by our work-study students, who have labored behind the scenes at all the events this year. Thank you Jonathan Feig, Cara Johnson, Latisha Gilbert, Jonathan Magee, Katharine Ostrow, Jade Wandell, and Margaret Wichmann.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director, IWC

A Dialogue with Asian and American Journalists on Making the News

What we learn of Asia is largely crafted by the journalists who live and work there. Whether native to the countries they cover or not, journalists must navigate resident cultural values and government systems in an effort to get their stories. These systems differ from country to country and are often contrary to what is accepted and expected in the United States. Moreover, how reporters themselves interpret their positions as journalists plays an essential role in what kind of news is reported and how it is presented. Should journalists act as watchdogs or work in tandem with governmental forces? Issues accepted without question in the United States, for example, cannot be taken for granted in the Asian theater.

On November 9, 2002, the Visiting East Asian Professionals (VEAP) Program of Washington University sponsored a roundtable discussion between Asian and American journalists to explore just some of these issues and concerns. Held at the Chase Park Plaza in the Central West End, the roundtable featured four journalists from East Asia: Ms. Man-peng Tiao of Common Health Magazine in Taiwan; Mr. Nozomu Nakaoka formerly of the Guangzhou Daily Press Group in China; and 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Sang-hun Choe of the Asso-ciated Press in South Korea. These East Asian journalists were joined by American journalists with experience covering the news in Asia and local journalists including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor, Ms. Ellen Soeteber, and two Washington University alumni, Ms. Joyce Barnathan, former Asia regional editor and Hong Kong bureau manager for Business Week, and now an assistant managing editor for that magazine, and Mr. Steve Jones, an editor with Dow Jones Newswires in Jersey City, NJ, who spent thirteen years in Asia as a reporter, news editor and managing editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, posted in Hong Kong and Jakarta. Discussion was facilitated by Dr. Judy Polumbaum of The University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The Roundtable marked the inaugural event for the VEAP Program. Founded in January 2002 by a generous grant from the Freeman Foundation of New York, the VEAP Program is committed to promoting greater attention to Asia in the undergraduate curriculum. In addition to participating in the Roundtable, Asian journalists spent time on the Washington University campus interacting with students and faculty in classes and colloquia. In spring 2003, the VEAP program will bring Asian artists to campus.—painters from Taiwan and potters from Japan—to conduct workshops, visit classes, and speak to members of the St. Louis community about Asian art forms.

Rebecca L. Copeland, Associate Professor, Japanese Language and Literature of Washington University in St. Louis

The English Department, the Committee on Comparative Literature, and the International Writers Center will co-sponsor a talk by Professor Ian Duncan entitled "Hume, Scott and the 'Rise of Fiction'" on Thursday, January 30th, 2003, at 4pm in the Hurst Lounge in Duncker Hall.

Ian Duncan is a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge UP, 1992), is especially notable for combining penetrating narrative theory with a nuanced account of the social work that literary forms and their variations do for their audiences. Dramatically reorienting the way the novel has been conceptualized in Britain, Modern Romance illuminated the form's profound debts to the preceding romance tradition which, he shows, was reworked by some of realism's best known "practitioners": Scott and Dickens. More recently, Duncan's forthcoming book entitled Scott's Shadow: the Novel in Post-Enlightenment Scotland (Princeton, 2003) continues his path-breaking work on the novel and its social histories.

Combining literature and history, narratology and biography, the archive and the antiquarian, Duncan's work is important, innovative, and pioneering. His work on the Celtic colonies has vitalized postcolonial studies, just as his work on the romance has redirected novel theory in the last decade, and his work on Scott and national culture has revived Romanticism and its almost exclusive focus on poetry. It would be wonderful for students, colleagues, and St. Louis readers to hear what Ian Duncan will have to say to us in the year of 2003.