“Resilience” Was the Theme of the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Awards Dinner at the Folger (Pictures)

Resilience. It’s a good word for Washington on this particular day and this particular
week, and for a few reasons—all of which were referenced Monday night at the 24th
annual PEN/Faulkner awards dinner, where “resilience” was the theme. Its definition
is “to spring back into shape after bending.” During the cocktail hour, some guests
expressed that they thought the theme was apt on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary.
At the less somber end of the spectrum, some thought it described the Redskins’ win
against the New Orleans Saints on Sunday. As the late summer/early fall party season
begins, it could also be applied to Washington social life. In the past few years
the event business has faced quite a few challenges, most of them financial, and yet people keep showing
up—maybe not as many as before, but enough keep paying the average $500 to $1,000
for a ticket to back causes that need all the help they can muster.

PEN/Faulkner is a good example. The money raised at the dinner certainly helps to
underwrite a glamorous and intellectual evening for the guests, and to give awards
of $15,000 and $5,000 to winning authors, but it also brings acclaimed writers into
the DC public schools. The writers who spoke at the dinner last night spent the earlier
part of the day with public high school students. At other times, PEN/Faulkner organizes
book groups for teen parents at various DC schools, including Anacostia, Ballou, Cardozo,
and Dunbar. Some authors also visit young people who are incarcerated in city facilities.

Still, the event is in need of more robust support. Last night there were 194 people
in attendance, compared with 254 in 2008, at the beginning of the Great Recession.
The attendees were rewarded with a many-faceted analysis of the meaning of resilience,
by ten authors and one host, who spoke from the evocative Elizabethan stage of the
Folger Shakespeare Library.

The host,
Calvin Trillin, said that “when it is applied to human beings, rather than metal alloys, resilience
means to recover from misfortune.”
Ben Fountain, author of
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, said the routine tests of resilience are marriage, jobs, and parenthood, but he
cited 9/11 and the Haitian earthquake as transcending routine. “The vast majority
of us can go much further than we thought possible,” he said. “When the landscape
of your life is destroyed, what you do is wake up the next day and just keep going.”

Vaddey Ratner certainly knows what it means to keep going. She is a Cambodian refugee who faced
peril at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and who came to the US unable to speak English
but who graduated summa cum laude from Cornell. “When I think of resilience I think
of all those who made it possible for me to survive,” said Ratner, who is the author
of
In The Shadow of The
Banyan. “For writers, words are the means by which we endure.”

Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor to
Vanity Fair and the author of
Blueprints for Building Better Girls, called her fictional story a “palate cleanser” and told a tale of teenage pregnancy
and abortion with an unexpected ending. Poet
Major Jackson put his theory of resilience into a prose poem that ended with a haiku,
Susan Richards Shreve, an author and English professor at George Mason University, told of a childhood accident and the struggle to regain self-assurance. Tijuana native

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of
The Devil’s Highway, recalled a cocky Mexican homeless boy named Felix. He described him as born “standing
up and talking back,” and endlessly inventive about making his sorry life seem positive.
“This guy is my hero,” he said. “No matter how low you are kicked around, there’s
this little nugget of self.”

Another among the featured writers was
Louis Bayard, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University and who grew up in
the Washington suburbs. His talk was humorous, recalling his father’s passion for
detailing his daily commute from Springfield, Virginia, to Chevy Chase, Maryland,
to his job at the B.F. Saul Company. Also amusing, if prescient, was
Hilma Wolitzer, author of
An Available Man. She lamented that “books seem to be on the way out.” She said she’s “not a Luddite”
and uses all the latest technology, but she draws the line at electronic publishing.
“It’s comforting to know I cannot be electrocuted reading a regular book in the bathtub.”

After the readings the guests sat down to a candlelit dinner in the Folger Shakespeare
Library reading room, with its two stories of walls lined with books. The menu, from Design Cuisine,
included pomegranate chicken over wilted arugula and a dessert of banana sticky pudding.
The talk at our table was about resilience, again with references to 9/11 and the
Redskins, but also a lot about one particular book—not a novel, but rather
No Easy
Day, the account by Navy SEAL
Mark Owen of the killing of Osama bin Laden, who proved, after all, to be not all that resilient.