(Dispatch number 2 from Ubud, Bali, by Robin Hamley, um, Hemley)
I had been slightly dreading my first panel of the day at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, "State of the Union," in which we were going to discuss "the shifting preoccupations of literature, society, and politics in Obama's America."
As I've spent most of the last two years outside of the U.S., first in the Philippines and then in Southern , France, I didn't feel especially qualified. My other panelists seemed much more so, among them Los Angeles-based novelist and short story writer, Lisa Teasley, novelist and painter Rabih Alameddine, who splits his time between San Francisco and Lebanon, and Mike Otterman, a young New York writer who's written two books on torture and Iraq.
