Gift Will Fund UCI Writer’s Summer in a Rural ‘Paradise’

UC Irvine student Daniel Voll may undergo culture shock when he spends six weeks living in a remote, rural community in Northern California working with a tribe of Pueblo Indians, courtesy of a new National Endowment for the Arts-sponsored program.

Then again, Voll has lots of experience with culture shock. Reared in suburban Illinois, Voll has lived in small New Mexico villages to research writing projects. In 1984, he abandoned his middle-class lifestyle to study and work in Cape Town, South Africa, witnessing firsthand the severe strife of apartheid.

And for his summer vacation this year, Voll, who is pursuing a graduate degree in fiction writing at UCI, will live and work in Quincy, Calif. He’s a participant in a $250,000 NEA pilot program called Arts Corps, in which the NEA pays each student $6,700 to cover the cost of the residency and living expenses.

The program pays for 25 graduate students to live with local families in rural communities around the country where they’ll share their artistic talents with community members. Voll plans to create an oral history project with the Maidu Indians, a Pueblo tribe living just outside Quincy.

A small town in the Sierra foothills in Plumas County, Quincy doesn’t have a single stoplight or fast-food restaurant. That just about defines “paradise” to Voll, who went to Cape Town as a 22-year-old aspiring writer groping to understand the human condition.

“It was one of those embattled places, that was helping us, as in the human race, to see ourselves, to see starkness, to see our struggle,” he said.

As a South Africa correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, he profiled controversial poets and novelists who also were political activists at a time “when the forces of the liberation movement were beginning to strongly assert their hope and claim of a democratic future for South Africa.”

Most of his subjects, including Nobel laureates Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and writer Nadine Gordimer, had been barred by the government from speaking to journalists, Voll said. Because he was studying African culture at the University of Cape Town, he snagged interviews while wearing his student hat.

“I spent a lot of time walking into places that I should have had no right walking into as a novice writer, but the experience pretty much set the course of my life.”

Now 32, Voll was recommended for the Arts Corps program by UC Irvine.

He hopes to “work with the old Maidu storytellers, and people from the (nearby) Anglo community as well, and see if we can put together something which reflects the mythology of the region.

“The stories of people who are different from me have something to teach me. I hope it’s the beginning of a long-term relationship.”