The following blog was written by PEN World Voices correspondent Judith Benét Richardson.

Jeremy McCarter was the skillful moderator of this fascinating panel, introducing immediately the Festival’s theme of bravery.

Colm Tóibín, the author of the novel TESTAMENT OF MARY, replied that in a now more secular Ireland, he had only needed private bravery, to face the lurking Catholic attachments of his own youth. Fiona Shaw, the actress who plays Mary, also looked beyond what she felt was the arid Christianity of her childhood to old stories of the goddess. Deborah Warner, director of the play and raised a Quaker, felt it was extraordinary that no one had written as Tóibín has about Mary.

My notes are written like dialogue, but of course I am only paraphrasing and hope I don’t do these dynamic speakers an injustice.

JM: How did the novel become a play?

CT: It was better for them (FS & DW) that it was a novel, as it gave them more scope. They had to create the imagery.

FS: CT is a visionary like Blake, but the theater is more crude. It has to be more rooted, developing in action.

JM: how long did developing the play take?

FS: Months.

CT: MUCH longer. We talked about it for years, but they had to leave me out of most of it. “Writer go home. Writer shut up.”

FS: You have to see what will stand up theatrically.

CT: They needed to get down to 5 or 6 stories.

DW: High energy stories. It is so great to have a novel behind you.

CT: I was writing for a voice.

FS: But Mary doesn’t speak the way she would have, because there was a literary mind behind her voice. You get strange tenses when Mary tells stories as “what I heard.”

JM: The Reverend Jane Shaw described the play as a sermon.

DW: It is not a sermon, but it is definitely a spiritual work.

FS: We needed to make the ordinary poetical and vice versa.

CT: It was a bit like Wallace Stevens’s SUNDAY MORNING, in the effort to understand the truth of the matter, the ordinariness of the extraordinary.

FS: Must meditate on the reality of what really happens. We thought of the mother of Osama bin Laden.

In answering a question about protests against the play, the panelists felt they were nothing like previous protests in the Irish theater.

DW: Twenty-five years ago when we did ELECTRA in Derry, the audience was totally silent at the end of the play. Then someone stood up and said they wanted talk about it. It was very exciting.

CT: We’d like to do MARY in Gaza…or Tel Aviv. We need to address beliefs that lead to violence.

FS: Mary tells us she is not without sin, which makes the play humane and compassionate.

JM: Has this been a spiritual experience?

DW: Theater is a spritual experience, close to what church can be.

CT: There is a close connection between church and theater.

JM: As a child in the Catholic church, I was told every week that I was going to see a miracle - a good preparation for the theater! Is it tiring to play the part of Mary?

FS: Tiring, but worth it, if I can carry the audience with me.

Question from audience: How did you feel about the nude scene?

FS: I just do it. It has its place in the play.

JM: It’s short.

(laughter)

Q: How do you feel about your play being called blasphemous?

CT: Freedom of religion is fundamental, but so is freedom of speech. Both must be honored.

FS: MARY is a work of the imagination, not theology.

Q: Why did you have Mary feed a rabbit to a bird?

CT: I wanted an image of pure cruelty, the cruelty that is within us all.

Q: How do you reconcile your story with Mary as the handmaiden of the Lord?

FS: That was a story as well.

CT: I took my bearings from 15th century painters who tried to paint a real person. And, I taught a course here at the New School called RELENTLESSNESS. I wanted to write a relentless play. I drove along the Turkish coast and worked toward finding my rhythm. The landscape helped me find my rhythm.

Q: How did you develop the stage setting?

DW: There was only one written stage direction: NOW.

We tried hawks, rabbits and finally a vulture. We had Mary in a glass box with the vulture for awhile. It was a very long process. Production is very difficult.

End of panel.

APPLAUSE.

The following blog was written by PEN World Voices correspondent Judith Benét Richardson.

A.M. Homes seemed to enjoy drawing Fran Lebowitz’s fire for all to enjoy. In other words, they seemed to be friends.

Fran Lebowitz, famously witty and acerbic, showed that side of herself, but her remarks reflected a search for truth. She says herself that she is an observer. She pays attention, as fewer and fewer people seem to do.

Freedom of speech? Yes, but we should also have the freedom of not listening.

Bravery, the theme of this year’s PEN festival? Americans think they are brave if they are in a triathalon.

Micro-apartments Mayor Bloomberg hopes to build? We don’t need a billionaire to decide how big an apartment we need. Already the reason you see so much furniture on the streets is that there is no room for it in New Yorkers’ tiny apartments. But it does give tourists somewhere to sit, which Bloomberg loves because he does everything in NYC for tourists.

What is forgiveness? Forgiving people is Christian. The Jewish God is a judge. Lebowitz played a judge on TV and now in movies. She is hoping to become a Supreme Court judge, which is possible, as they don’t need to have gone to law school. (Insert here mean remarks about Clarence Thomas). The Supreme Court is the fountain of youth; they all live to be really old. Their cases are really easy, but even then, they get them wrong. Bush vs. Gore? Should we have counted the votes? Yes. That’s what democracy is. You count the votes.

Public school system? White people need to send their kids, and we need to forget about the business model. Business is only about making money, and schools are much more complicated.

There were many more riffs - weather channels, insomnia, Hurricane Sandy, writer’s block. And a story about going camping for one night so she could be on the cover of OUTSIDE MAGAZINE.

Gay marriage? She would vote for it, as many of her friends would like it, but she would not like it for herself, personally. Being gay used to have two perks: you didn’t have to get married and you didn’t have to go in the military. Why give these up?

Art world? There is no longer an art world, only an art market.

Contemporary art? Nothing new for 35 years.

Grammar? Only Catholics learned grammar, as the nuns were allowed to hit their students, which is the only way to teach a subject that has no logic, only rules.

Writing is so hard, she said, that the only worse thing is being a coal-miner. What she does mostly is read. But we should be glad she also likes to talk, as we came away refreshed from an encounter with a lively and insightful mind.

A.M.Homes did a wonderful job as Leibowitz’s companion on this whirlwind tour, goading and encouraging her to ever greater flights, not of fancy, but reality.

We gathered in a theater looking into the center well of the glassy NYTimes building; the stage was backed by green grass and a white birch forest.

A.L. Scott was an excellent moderator who seemed to enjoy the jousting of these three luminaries. In discussing their Times essays of April 29th on the future of America, they had agreed that Atwood’s was the silliest, involving the views of visiting Martians. In fact, to me this group all seemed to be visiting from their special planets in our literary stratosphere, favoring us with their god-like views.

In discussing their essays, the group moved on to the great American novel. Atwood and Doctorow disagreed about Moby Dick. He felt it could not be merely, or at all, about oil and money, as she viewed it. Amis leaped forward to The Adventures of Augie March as the great American novel. Doctorow and Atwood reached back farther to Twain, and Poe (the latter as the greatest bad writer.)

The audience was amused to learn that Doctorow was named after Poe! This was an amusing group, in which no one was afraid to mix it up.

Perhaps the most interesting to me was the discussion of how writing is always in the present, whether one is writing the so-called “historical” novel or “science fiction” ostensibly set in the future. Doctorow called to mind Einstein’s concept of “eternalism.”

Briefly touched on were the new media, but when asked how they wanted to view America, all three had great answers. Atwood wanted America to be what we all thought it was, the land of freedom and opportunity, which was why they were doing this PEN event. She reminded us America started as a utopian community.

Doctorow hewed to one view of America that he believed as a child: America as the place where things were going to be fair and people taken care of. But he allows for “Narrative B” and the opposing view that government should stay out of people’s business and individualism should prevail; these two views are always present here.

Amis, who, like Atwood, started with a childhood view of America as a foreign country, provided the answer to a question about anti-intellectualism. He called it the American “worship of stupidity,” which caused much laughter.

At the end, Amis was asked about his use of science in his writing, but he said it was merely “another form of imagery,” though professing his fascination with cosmology. “The universe is much cleverer than we are.”

Doctorow said this brought us back to Melville. It brought me back to my vision of these writers as luminous planets, each one different, orbiting high above us, and just for this one evening, sending their avatars to the patch of grass in the birch forest of the NYTimes building, to bring us good words.

 - Judith Benét Richardson

This was a mystifying event. In the enormous atrium of NYU’s Bobst Library, we gathered under purple banners to find that our venue was the side of the lobby and some stacks in which we were to wander. So far, so good. We like books and libraries. But when the mash-up began, the questions started to form. What was going on? My companion said it was exactly like a cocktail party at which you know no one and overhear random bursts of talk.

Actors strode among us, their lines scrolling on ipods taped inside “books.” The three books colliding here were The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury. (The Elevator Repair Service is well-known for their staging of Gatz.)

I have read these books. It mattered not at all. A word from one book seemed to trigger a computer connection with a word or phrase or sentence in another book, but not for meaning. The meaning appeared or didn’t as words and phrases were juxtaposed. At least I think that was the idea.

The three books scrolled above us, at first showing words we were hearing, but not always.

What was this like in practice? Maybe it was like hearing the music of John Cage for the first time. So I began to listen to the “music,” and not try to understand. Emotion ebbed and flowed. For a person attached to words and narrative, this was hard, but maybe I was getting the idea, or an idea. Maybe Fitzgerald was the string section, Hemingway the…brass? The voice of Benjy was clearly a woodwind.

It was fun to follow actors around the stacks, even though they had glasses of “champagne,” and we didn’t. Some of the actors were quite engaging. Yes, and these books were all from the same era, and each had a strong narrative voice. The actors were dressed in 1920’s style, except for the ones who weren’t. It all seemed to give you…some kind of feeling.

That’s the best I can do. It was an Experience.

 - Judith Benét Richardson

In the cavernous auditorium of the 92nd St Y, a large audience hung on every word uttered by the petite Herta Müller. At first soft-spoken, she told more of her personal life, than she had a Deutsches Haus earlier in the week. As the evening progressed, her answers became more impassioned and she appeared like a small eagle - powerful and focused.

Language is nothing without humans, she said, and then it can do anything. Writing is hard work, as life is one thing and language another; it is hard to force words to truly express your meaning.

Her question is always: how does one live?

Writing gave her stability and helped her to endure life; it became her work.

Codes are a way of hiding. They can be the language of fear.

Lies are hideouts. In a dictatorship, you can’t even call them lies, as they are necessary for survival.

Müller described her mother, who was deported after the war to a Soviet labor camp for some years, as speaking of that time in sayings: “thirst is worse than hunger,” “a warm potato is a warm bed” and “wind is colder than snow.”

She insisted Müller peel potatoes with a very thin peel to save every scrap and had other ways left over from the camp, that oppressed Müller as a child. Such experiences as those her mother had, are hard for a child to understand, and in any case they were never discussed.

When Müller began to write her book about a labor camp, she collaborated with her friend Oskar Pastior whose camp experiences she had already written about in Everything I Own I Carry With Me. Müller and Pastior travelled to the camp in the Ukraine in which he had been interned, and so, after Pastior’s sudden death, Müller eventually felt able to go on with their book. Because she had actually seen the place, she was able to continue and even to invent.

Müller’s intense presence and wonderfully expressive eyes, held us spellbound by her story. She was ably assisted by her translator Claudia Steinberg, who might receive the Stamina Award for this week.

The evening had commenced with a lovely reading from The Hunger Angel by Philip Boehm, the translator of that book. Claire Messud was a gracious interviewer; her enthusiasm for Müller’s work was evident and her questions were well-chosen.

 - Judith Benét Richardson