July 1, 2009
Washington, DC
Just wanted to take a moment to send a big old THANK YOU to everyone who’s been submitting photos to the blog. You make it easy to show off The Big Read!
Stay tuned . . .
Gracias, merci, and THANKS!
FROM THE DESK OF PAULETTE
June 30, 2009
Washington, DC
I admit it: I have a huge crush on Ray Bradbury. Not only is he a superfan of the public library system, but I hear he’s written a classic book or two (or nearly 100 and counting!), like Fahrenheit 451, one of the four novels that helped us launch The Big Read back in 2006.
Maestro Bradbury’s on my mind for a few reasons: I recently saw a vintage episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on Bradbury’s short story ”The Life and Work of Juan Diaz” (Note to self: There’s a reason you don’t go to scary movies, remember?), the NEA and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs just announced that Bradbury is one of the featured authors for the 2009 Guadalajara International Book Fair, and Jennifer Steinhauer just wrote a great piece about Bradbury and his support of the Ventura County Public Libraries in the June 20 issue of The New York Times.
More than two dozen fan clubs—better known around here as Big Read projects—will be launching on Fahrenheit 451 between this September and next June. Can’t wait till then to get your Bradbury fix? Stop by The Big Read Web site to check out the great man himself in our Big Read Conversation with Ray Bradbury before heading to your local library to frontload your summer reading list with a Bradbury book or two or 100!
The Big Read Gets Bigger!
Congratulations to the 269 organizations that have just received a grant for The Big Read.
Here’s my panoramic view of the 655 Big Read representatives who converged in Minneapolis to dish all Big Read all the time, well at least for two days.
All Muses on Deck
June 22, 2009
Washington, DC
In case you missed it during the runup to Big Read Orientation, the NEA released highlights from the Census Bureau’s first survey of public participation in the arts since 2002, and the news isn’t good. A smaller percentage of Americans are enjoying the arts than six years ago. All but one of the arts surveyed showed considerable declines. Theater? Down. Opera? Down. Ballet, or other forms of dance? Down. Classical music or jazz? Down. According to another study, arts education is down, too. But literature?Here’s where things get extra interesting, because literature is up. Not stratospherically up, but up. Any kind of up is actually kind of a miracle, when you consider that literature was fading faster than all the other arts until recently. The NEA jumped at the chance to break this uplifting news six months ago, in a report called Reading on the Rise — which a lot of people took with a grain of salt because it seemed to come out of nowhere, without all these other arts statistics to accompany them.
When you look at all the arts together, though, one conclusion looks pretty incontestable: All the arts are careening downhill on a runaway train – all except literature, which had looked like the absolute caboose until about five minutes ago, when a mystery engineer somehow lifted her bolt, veered her off onto a siding, and started to loop her back in the exact opposite direction.
WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?
Happy Birthday to Tobias Wolff!
Here’s a quote from Old School in honor of the day, “Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”
(Thanks to John Sherffius for the great caricature)
FROM PAULETTE’S DESK
June 17, 2009
Minneapolis, MN
It’s about 7 a.m. and a steady stream of Big Read grantees are making their way to the Hilton’s front desk to check out and store luggage before day two of orientation. We’re going nonstop from 7:45 to about 3 with only a quick break to grab a boxed lunch and keep on moving to the next session. I’ll be staying put and moderating a panel on public relations x 5.
About 670 grantees plus staff from IMLS, NEA, and, of course, Arts Midwest gathered in the Hilton’s ballroom last night to swap strategies and talk books. After welcome remarks by Arts Midwest’s David Fraher and a shout-out — especially for the Big Read librarians — from IMLS’s Abby Swetz, David Kipen gave a six-degrees-of-separation tour of The Big Read writers. Louise Erdrich and Tim O’Brien are native Minnesotans, for example, while Marilynne Robinson and Tobias Wolff both had roughly two decades between their first and second novels. My favorite “connection” — Mark Twain and Henry James by way of Twain’s quote on James’s work, which goes something like, “I never read a Henry James novel I couldn’t wait to put down.”
The highlight of the evening was Tim O’Brien’s humorous, poignant, utterly spellbinding keynote on the art and craft of fiction. My pen couldn’t quite keep up, but here are a few of the quotes that really struck me:
“Trust your own story. Above all that means to tell it…to conquer the fear of plunging headfirst into choices and the consequences of human choices.”
“In a story miracles happen.”
“To trust a story means, at least in this writer’s view and probably most writers on The Big Read list, to avoid editing your own imagination. You don’t edit what you want to think…Give it the freedom to be.”
And finally, this bit of advice for writers, “Read widely. Toughen up your psyches. Ration out the booze. And don’t forget to write a little.”
WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?
June 16, 2009
Washington, DC
As you read this, I’m in Minneapolis for The Big Read orientation. I can’t as yet divulge who’s getting a grant in this round*, but I can tell you that I’m here with nearly 800 people who are gearing up to read big starting this September.
Tim O’Brien, author of Big Read new addition The Things They Carried, is giving the keynote address at tonight’s welcome dinner. I’m reading the book for the first time, and what I find extremely interesting is the mix of storytelling about the Vietnam War and storytelling about the writing of the book, that is telling the story about writing the story. Here is a snippet from the novel’s narrator on the craft of writing:
“You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present…As a writer all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That’s the real obsession. All those stories.”
*We’ll be announcing The Big Read grants for 2009-2010 on June 23rd. Start the countdown…
WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?
June 15, 2009
Washington, DC
The Big Read enters new territory with the addition of Thornton Wilder to The Big Read library. Big Readers of Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey are also encouraged to contemplate his play Our Town. (Did you know that, to date, Wilder is the only writer to have received a Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and drama?) In his intro for the Reader’s Guide, Tappan Wilder — Thornton’s nephew — has this to say:
“As different as these two works are in form and setting, they pose the same enduring questions that Wilder explored throughout his writing career — often employing death as the window to life. He could well have written of The Bridge of San Luis Rey as he wrote of Our Town: ‘It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life.’”
WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?
June 12, 2009
Washington, DC
Today’s sneak peek is at poet and novelist Louise Erdrich who joins The Big Read with Love Medicine, her first novel published in 1984. In a 2009 interview, excerpted in the soon-to-be-released Reader’s Guide, Erdrich told the NEA, “The Big Read is a huge opportunity for people to look further into the existence of Native American people . . . . .If anything, I just hope someone goes and opens up another book by another native writer after this.”
Here are a few suggestions for further reading, also courtesy of the Reader’s Guide:
Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
Perma Red by Deborah Magpie Earling
How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems by Joy Harjo
Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?
June 11, 2009
Washington, DC
Warning: I’m currently reading The Things They Carried, so you’re probably going to be seeing more than a few related posts over the next few weeks. I am already completely gobsmacked by the opening section, not just the story, but the skillful use of rhythm and repetition to drive the narrative, a technique that has the poet in me quite envious.
Speaking of poetry, after reading the novel’s opening section, I found myself grabbing Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam-themed poetry collection Dien Cai Dau off my shelf. According to the jacket copy, the future Pulitzer Prize winner served in Vietnam as correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross and received the Bronze Star. (Komunyakaa received NEA Literature fellowships in 1981 and 1988.)
Here are the closing lines of Komunyakaa’s poem “Tunnels,” which echoes O’Brien’s narrative around tunnel missions in “The Things They Carried.”
“. . . he goes, the good soldier,/on hands & knees, tunneling past/death sacked into a blind corner, loving the weight of the shotgun/that will someday dig his grave.”
Check out some other poems from Dien Cai Dau (and other works by Komunyakaa) at the University of North Carolina’s Internet Poetry Archive.