This is the archive page for Otium, Volume 2, Number 1.

Welcome to a new volume of Otium. In this month’s issue we showcase Emerging Writers: participants in a University of Chicago initiative meant to showcase up and coming authors. As part of the program, “professional” visiting writers also select one student from the university community to participate with them in a campus reading of their work.

When Elif Shafak, a Turkish author, visited the University this past March to read from her novel, The Saint of Incipient Insanities, she selected a work of nonfiction by Emina Tuzlak, a graduate student who emigrated from Bosnia. For this issue, staff members Alison MacDonald and Sarah Frank talked at length with Ms. Shafak about writing, language, music, and the difficult yet often humorous experience of being a foreign writer in the States.

In Spring 2004, Fiction Lecturer Achy Obejas invited Bayo Ojikutu, the Chicago-born author of 47th Street Black, to read on campus. Otium is proud to publish an excerpt from Mr. Ojikutu's next novel, Free Burning, slated to be published in 2006.

Lastly we present the photography of Dennis Fiser, an undergraduate student at the University. Though his images feature Chicago and the University community, we feel that that they echo greater themes of our prose: structure, belonging, and the idea of home.

We hope that you enjoy their contributions, and will return to Otium in May for another issue of new and exciting art and prose.

Yours,
Deanna Day and Sarah Frank, Volume Two Coordinators
on Behalf of The Otium Staff

Vol. 2 No. 1 Articles

  • A Conversation with Elif Shafak

    by Sarah Adair Frank
    Alison Macdonald
    11 April 2005

    When I came to this country it was like a relief. Here you hear the word chutzpah from someone who is not Jewish. I love that. I love that the word has traveled to another community. Or I learned this word that was perhaps read by the Irish four hundred years ago and no one is saying "this word is old, let’s take it out." So that multi-layered aspect of the English language is fascinating for me. And in that sense maybe Borges was right in saying that English is the language of precision. If you’re looking for the precise word, with this vocabulary, it is amazing.

    (read more)

  • Excerpts from Free Burning

    by Bayo Ojikutu
    11 April 2005

    “Ten years you known me.” I only recognize that I’m yelling watching Ta’s face cringe at every third syllable. “Shoulda come to figure I ain’t the type to be about no half-ass bullshit. I look like a blue collar factory nigga? Ain’t bout to be one to pay your rent.”

    (read more)

  • The Holiness of Fear

    by Emina Tuzlak
    11 April 2005

    Westernization. What is happening to us? We are changing and nobody’s noticing. As long as we work hard and live like all those other people who have houses and families, we should be OK. But we’re not. We are nervous. Tremendously nervous. We are on shuttles such as these and we wear the latest in European fashions and American sneakers with any article of clothing; we insert German and English words in our own language, and as we speak a foreign tongue, we add a genitive or a dative ending that corresponds to Bosnian language only, yet we make it our own and “improve” the grammar. We don’t want to be flagged as Bosnians so we try hard to forget and substitute the soul of one people for tangible things. But faces in airplanes and shuttles reveal that deep down we cannot forget and we cannot forgive.

    (read more)

  • Photos

    by Dennis Fiser
    11 April 2005

    (view)

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