Travel is, for a foreign correspondent as essential a tool as pen and paper, as well as these days a recording device and laptop. In order to work, we have to travel to a story and that involves a journey but that journey is rarely a pleasure. More often than not, we are spliced between holidaymakers also surviving economy on the way out, collapsing on the way home, and in between darting in and out of a cheap hotel to meet specific people only to find they may stubbornly refuse to talk.

For many years, the unorthodoxy of work of the writer, Sophie Calle, (b. 1953) has intrigued me especially on the issue of creativity and identity. In formal journalism, however, I have always been unequivocal that the artificial constructs she uses have no place. That is, unless like Calle you work for a open-minded, voyeuristic newspaper with a very progressive readership like 'Liberation' and I probably never will. The hallmark of her work, however, has been to impose an entirely arbitrary set of constraints to produce a work of creative non-fiction, the most famous being her Suite Venitienne (1979), The Hotel (1981, now in The Tate Collection) and Address Book (1983).

In the last of these works, she found a lost address book and constructed a narrative adopting the techniques more usually applied by a private investigator than by a journalist. The work caused enormous controversy for Liberation, and was saved only from a thorough damning because it is considered 'conceptual'. The consensus eventually concluded that the creative emphasis of this piece lies in the artistic idea itself, as opposed to just the finished artefact and its content. Calle is associated with the  Oulipo School (Mathews & Brotchie, 1998), the 'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle'. British poet, writer and academic Ian Monk is both an adherent and authority on the school. Classic Oulipo traits are clear in the work produced when Calle persuaded her mother to hire someone who would be invisible to her, yet photograph and note her every movement, she says, just 'to provide photographic evidence of (her) own existence'. .

In my personal opinion, Calle without fail always went too far for me but Intellectually and creatively, there was something worth emulating. The factor that has most influenced me here came from reading the 1988 essay of the late Jean Baudrillard (Leach, 2002, p 52). In this, he describes 'Suite Venitienne' in terms of a reciprocal loss of will on the part of both the pursued and the pursuer. This ruse would perhaps allow me to tease my non-fiction work into greater creativity and so I decided to apply this to a journey I was to take in October of last year. I would interview people entirely at random to produce a piece of creative non-fiction from a 10-day thousand-mile car trip that my husband and I took through the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (Should you wish to read the full Critical Commentary, it is available at this link)

Alberto Fujimori, the former Peruvian president who is now 70 years old, has finally been convicted of kidnapping and murder. He has been sentenced to 25 years in jail in what was described as a landmark ruling for human rights cases in Latin America.

A three-judge panel found the 70-year-old guilty of authorizing a military death squad during the state's "dirty war" against Maoist rebels in the 1990s.

Maria McFarland, a Human Rights Watch researcher who attended the trial said. "After years of evading justice, Fujimori is finally being held to account for some of his crimes,"

"With this ruling, and its exemplary performance during the trial, the Peruvian court has shown the world that even former heads of state cannot expect to get away with serious crimes."

Argentina, Chile and Colombia may also be watching this day as they come to terms with their own dark deeds of past history.

Fujimori during the trial repeatedly protested his innocence and said he deserved credit for saving Peru from anarchy.

He told the court, "I governed from hell, not the palace," and blamed his former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, for any counter-insurgency excesses.

Fujimori's daughter, Keiko, is a congresswoman and a leading contender for the 2011 presidential race and says that she plans to pardon her father just as soon as she can.

In this interview held at the beginning of Fujimori's trial more than 15 months ago, one of his victims - Gisela Ortiz who lost her brother, a student, as Fujimori waged the La Cantuta massacre - explained why she thought Fujimori should be brought to justice.

(N.B. this interview is with Gisela Ortiz, speaking in Spanish, with translation of her words by peace and human rights activist, Hayden Gore).

My younger son has just finished reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and commented that it was not only an extraordinary literary work but also, of course, a source for rare insight into the complications of mental illness. This reminded me  of a conversation (not so much a formal interview, you understand) I had a few years ago with the fabulous and extraordinary author, Joanne Greenberg, who as Hannah Green wrote I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

This work is a fictionalized depiction of Joanne Greenberg’s own treatment experience decades ago at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, during which she was in psychoanalytic treatment with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The book takes place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a time when Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson were establishing the basis for the interpersonal school of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, focusing specifically, though by no means exclusively, on the treatment of schizophrenia.

Greenberg has written that :-

"I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticisation that it underwent in the sixties and seventies when people were taking LSD to simulate what they thought was a liberating experience. During those days, people often confused creativity with insanity. There is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill."

(From the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy website)

At the time of recording, Joanne Greenberg's just published novel was 'Appearances'. In this conversation, she also discussed not just mental illness, but also creativity, the role of 'Underwood', how she creates her stories, how she writes 'sex', personal memories of a vicarious brush with Sylvia Plath, and a great deal more.

Claudia Cragg speaks here with 'Six-Word Memoirs' editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser who have once again brought readers a memorable collection that’s a diverse grab bag of writers—famous, obscure, gay, straight, single, married, divorced, and polyandrous, hailing from Mississippi to New York to California, Australia to Vietnam. This time, though, the subject is 'Love and Heartbreak'. One entry from sex-columnist Dan Savage sits alongside one by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hass. Supermodel Janice Dickinson dishes out six words in the brazen spirits she’s known for, while Chip Rowe—aka The Playboy Advisor—makes a surprising revelation to his millions of readers. The world's most famous divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, tells us, in six words, "Love almost always leads to heartbreak."

Since hitting the mainstream, the six-word form has been re-imagined countless times. From kindergarten through graduate school, teachers have brought the six-word storytelling exercise into their classrooms. A young girl in California ended her eulogy for her poker-loving grandma with a six-word summation of her life: “Look, I have a royal flush!” 

Six-word memoirs continue to pour into SMITH Magazine’s website every day and themes have emerged, from faith to hair to sex to food. By far the most common thread, however, is love. Passionate love, parental love, platonic love—it seems to be the most universally life-changing factor for storytellers of every age, background and worldview.

Josh Rushing is a former U.S. Marine captain and current Al-Jazeera English correspondent. He is familiar to many as the point man who helped sell the Iraq war to the American public as spokesman for United States Central Command (CENTCOM) during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He became famous for his appearance in the documentary Control Room, which documented his conversation with Al Jazeera correspondent Hassan Ibrahim.

In 2007, Palgrave Macmillan published Mission: Al-Jazeera, Rushing's memoir of his journey from a small town in Texas to the Marines to Al Jazeera English.

Nowadays, Rushing works as a correspondent and military analyst out of Al-Jazeera English's Washington, D.C., bureau. He covers a wide variety of international issues for Al-Jazeera English, but focuses primarily on U.S.-Middle Eastern relations about which he spoke with Claudia Cragg.

'Philanthrocapitalism', by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green is an examination of how today's leading philanthropists are revolutionizing the field, using, they believe,  new methods to have a vastly greater impact on the world.
In this book, you read that to philanthropists of the past, charity was often a matter of simply giving money away. For the philanthrocapitalists - the new generation of billionaires who are reshaping the way they give - it's like business. These "social investors", who are largely trained in the corporate world, are using big-business-style strategies and expecting results and accountability to match.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is leading the way: he has promised his entire fortune to finding a cure for the diseases that kill millions of children in the poorest countries in the world.

In this book, the authors examine this new movement and its implications. Proceeding from interviews with some of the most powerful people on the planet - including Gates, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, among others - they show how a web of wealthy, motivated donors has set out to change the world. Their results will have huge implications: In a climate resistant to government spending on social causes, their focused donations may be the greatest force for societal change in our world, and a source of political controversy.

Combining on-the-ground anecdotes, expert analysis, and up-close profiles of the wealthy and powerful, this is a fascinating look at a small group of people who will change an enormous number of lives.

I recently spoke with Matthew Bishop who, before joining 'The Economist', was on the faculty of London Business School, where he co-authored three books for Oxford University Press. He has served as a member of the Sykes Commission on the investment system in the 21st Century. He was also on the Advisors Group of the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005. He has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is a graduate of Oxford University.

More By Matthew
 
"I Want to Lose a Fortune"
 
"Fighting Global Poverty: Who'll be Relevant in 2020?"
 
"View from Davos: Bono Marketing His Red Badge of Virtue"
 

One privilege of being a journalist - and it IS a privilege - is the opportunity to ask questions when you meet really fascinating people. Recently we drove in convoy with a group of others from one end of Jordan to the other - from Aqaba, to The Red Sea, Jerash, The Dead Sea, Kerak, Bethany and Amman and more. It is a fabulous, hospitable country, full of warm lovely people with hugely interesting stories some of which will be brought to you here as well as broadcast over the air.

In the first of these, we came across a New Zealand-born woman, Marguerite van Geldermalsen, who was selling souvenirs among the lost boys and camels. She turned out to be a nurse who had travelled with a friend to Jordan in 1978 only to end up falling in love with a Bedouin and living in a cave, yes a cave, with him in Petra. She is now the author of a wildly successful book, 'Married to a Bedouin' and this is a taste of her story.

Marguerite's book is published by Virago Press and is widely available in paperback. Visit www.marriedtoabedouin.com for more info.

Diane Wilson is a 60-year old mother of five children, one of whom is autistic, as well as a fifth-generation shrimp fisher out of Seadrift, Texas. As an environmental activist, she has successfully taken on companies like Formosa Plastics and Alcoa, for their pollution of Lavaca Bay in the Gulf of Texas, as well as Union Carbide for its polluting plant in Bhopal, India. She is also a co-founder of 'Code Pink'.

In her first very successful memoir, 'An Unreasonable Woman', she explained how she was led into activism. Now she talks to KGNU's Claudia Cragg about her latest memoir, 'Holy Roller' published by Chelsea Green out of Vermont. This retells Wilson's life as a 9 year old child brought up in fundamental Evangelism, a religion which she then completely shunned, but which combined with her Grandfather's Cherokee mysticism made her, she says, the activist she is today.




Poet and Activist Anne Waldman has been a vocal proponent for feminist, environmental, and human rights causes since the 1960s. She also established The Naropa School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, with the late Allen Ginsberg.

In the US Presidential Campaign, some of those who say they espouse feminism seem to now embrace the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate, Gov Sarah Palin from Alaska who is running alongside Senator John McCain. Claudia Cragg recently spoke with Ms Waldman about her new highly political CD, 'Matching Half' and a book to be published soon by Penguin, 'Manatee Humanity' and also on the meaning of feminism in US politics as she sees it (and whether or not Palin matches up to that standard). She also explores how she, as a feminist and activist, thinks people must contribute to the election and its successful outcome.

In this September 2009 interview, author Francine Prose talks with Claudia Cragg about 'Goldengrove', an emotionally powerful novel about adolescent love and loss. Focusing on a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister, this masterful coming-of-age work is radiant with the possibility of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life. At the center of Francine Prose's profoundly moving new novel is a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister. As her parents drift toward their own risky consolations, thirteen-year-old Nico is left alone to grope toward understanding and clarity, falling into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's enigmatic boyfriend.

Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them. She learns about the power of art, of time and place, the mystery of loss and recovery. But for all the darkness at the novel's heart, the narrative itself is radiant with the lightness of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life

The New York Times bestselling Prose is author also of a number of other works including Reading Like a Writer and A Changed Man. Prose was born April 1, 1947, Brooklyn, New York) and, since March 2007, she has been the president of PEN American Center. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991.

She sat on the board of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own Award. Her novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on collegecampuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

She is a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for the cinema by Nancy Savoca. Another, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.