All the World's Onstage at PEN

Imagine bringing Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, and eight other writers together for an hour and a half in front of a full house. Then imagine that instead of hearing them read from their own works or inciting discussion-although it's hard to think of three contemporary fiction writers with less in common-you instead invited them to read excerpts by other novelists and poets. About "the natural world." Welcome to the opening event of the PEN World Voices festival.

The event's environmental focus, Salman Rushdie explained in a brief introduction, was chosen to reflect the festival's theme, "Home & Away", since our planet is the only place universally called home. In light of the evening's global aspirations, it was puzzling that seven out of the 11 writers who spoke were from the United States. Most of the Americans also chose to read American writing, with the notable exception of Roxana Robinson. She delivered several passages from Chekhov's The Steppe, including one-perhaps selected as a subtle commentary on current affairs-about two men who senselessly kill a grass snake, with one man performing the deed out of sheer stupidity and the other one standing by and noting that he "ought to have stopped him."

Unsurprisingly, many of the most interesting and personal portions of the evening were the writers' own thoughts. Geert Mak, a Dutch nonfiction writer, spoke movingly about the foreseeable end of the dykes, the Netherlands' centuries-old barriers between cities and the sea. Colson Whitehead, a novelist and New Yorker, humorously introduced a passage from Cormac McCarthy's The Road (he noted that his first public tear occurred while reading the apocalyptic novel in a downtown BBQ joint) and he concluded ironically that, "I just don't find the end of the world as fun as I used to." And Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, read her own austere essay on the foolishness of focusing too much energy on individual environmental disasters when the whole world is threatened. As she eloquently noted, it's as futile as "quarreling over which shadow brings evening."

Other opening speeches were less well-received. Jonathan Franzen, the American writer infamous for snubbing Oprah's stamp of approval on his novel The Corrections, made a few flat attempts at humor as he shifted uncomfortably in front of the podium. Then he launched into a pronouncement about humanity's duty to consider other animals' difficulties in adapting to global warming. The audience remained in awkward silence until he abruptly shifted gears, reading an apt parable about the irrevocable gap between civilization and the wild.

Despite the somber nature of any discussion of our planet's woes, several readings induced rueful laughter. Billy Collins, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, read one of his own poems, a riff on the absurd trend of naming gated communities after natural phenomena. Collins noted sardonically that names like "Deer Run" and "Twin Falls" "strike me as epitaphs."

Although it was sometimes superfluous for every writer to read someone else's words on "the natural world"-because really, what literary work doesn't contain some description of nature?-the briefer personal meditations on human engagement with the environment were well worth hearing. While not strictly literature, these little in-between moments of personal reflection came closer to the original spirit of the event: to hear different perspectives on the gorgeous, mysterious, and imperiled planet that we all call home.