When Mockingbird Meets Milwaukee

February 3, 2012

By Ann Waller Curtis

Atticus and Scout
Lee E. Ernst as Atticus and Mallorey Wallace as Scout in Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s production of Harper Lee’s and Christopher Sergel’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Photo by Michael Brosilow

This week, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater kicked off its production of To Kill A Mockingbird, directed by Aaron Posner. Based on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the play runs through March 4th, and serves as the centerpiece of the theater’s Big Read grant. As part of the “Rep in Depth” program, a dialogue with actor Jonathan Gillard Daly, who plays Heck Tate in the production, will take place 45 minutes before the start of each show, and talkbacks with the cast and creative team will take place after select performances. The Rep has partnered with other local organizations, including the Next Door Foundation and the Milwaukee Public Library, to host events related to To Kill A Mockingbird throughout the city this spring. On February 13, don’t miss the program’s keynote speech from Mary Murphy, author of Scout, Atticus, and Boo, followed by a screening of her documentary, Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird, which explores the sustained success and impact of Harper Lee’s only novel. (You can check out our interview with Murphy here.)

Below, listen to a clip of Mark Clements, artistic director of Milwaukee Rep, as he discusses the impact of To Kill A Mockingbird and the theater’s Big Read program. [1:19]

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[transcript]

Please visit Milwaukee Rep’s blog for more information about their Big Read program, or learn more about the novel from The Big Read website.

Posted by admin at 1:39 pm | Category: To Kill A Mockingbird
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Hurston’s Voice Is A Folk Voice

February 1, 2012

By Adam Kampe

Hurston_Zora_Neale_smilingwithhaton_LOC

Public domain image of Zora Neale Hurston from the Library of Congress.

Zora Neale Hurston: Anthropologist. Storyteller. Playwright. Writer Alice Walker notes on this Big Read audio guide that Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “takes a black community, because that’s what she grew up in, and she helps you to understand and see the people whose voices that are in the novel.”

Biographer Robert Hemenway leads off the following audio excerpt, which deals with Hurston’s folk roots. Stick around until the end to hear 83-year-old award-winning actress and activist Ruby Dee read a gripping passage from the novel. Oh, and you also get to hear Zora Neale sing and talk. Seriously. She talks and sings! It’s like an icicle to the spine.

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(Remarkable archival audio is thanks to Victoria Sanders and Associates.)

[transcript]

Other contributors include current and former NEA National Council on the Arts members, Bret Lott and Jerry Pinkney.

Posted by Adam Kampe at 3:38 pm | Category: Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Literary House Hunting

January 30, 2012

By Rebecca Gross

Ernest Hemingway’s study in Key West, Florida. Photo by A.N. Devers

My freshman year dorm was nothing special. It was old and musty (moldy might actually be a better word), and I lived in a too-small space with two other girls. But there was one feature that mitigated every annoyance, and imbued the must and dust with a sense of magic: before it was converted to a dormitory, Mark Twain supposedly once lived in the building. In my mind, this bit of literary lore made my dorm the most enviable building on campus. But why? What is it about writers’ residences—sanctuaries of personal space and domestic habits—that we find so intriguing?

A.N. Devers has given this question a lot of thought. A writer living in Brooklyn, Devers is behind the website WritersHouses.com. For armchair travelers, the site profiles authors’ houses; for those plotting a literary pilgrimage of their own, the site’s database contains addresses and visiting information for dozens of historic literary homes. Devers answered a few questions by e-mail about her travels, as well as the influence a few Big Read authors have had on her life and work.

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Posted by Rebecca Gross at 2:57 pm | Category: General
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Pop-Up Theater!

January 27, 2012

By Kelli Rogowski

GatsbyAloud performance at the Tempe Marketplace, Arizona. Photo by Ian Christiansen, courtesy of the Arizona Theatre Company

This year, the West Valley Arts Council in Surprise, Arizona, has chosen F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as their Big Read selection. To help bring this beloved classic to life, they’ve partnered with the Arizona Theatre Company (ATC) for some exciting pop-up performances. Over the next couple of months, a local actor in period costume will appear in shopping malls and other public spaces to read aloud excerpts from the novel. These readings will also lead up to another part of their partnership, a production of Simon Levy’s theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby—the first performance of this adaptation since 1926! I was recently lucky enough to chat with Jennifer Bazzell, ATC’s literary manager, about these pop-up performances called GatsbyAloud.

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Posted by Kelli Rogowski at 2:34 pm | Category: The Great Gatsby
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The Two Faces of Washington Square

January 25, 2012

By Adam Kampe

Weathered_Red and Yellow_and_Green__James_Washington_Square_cover

An old cover to Henry James’s Washington Square, courtesy of Wikimedia

According to author Cynthia Ozick, “Washington Square is a novel about imposture, about people who pretend to be what they are not.” Take a listen, she’ll tell you. Her insight is reinforced by two remarkable Oscar winners, actresses Olivia de Havilland and Annette Bening, who reads excerpts throughout the Washington Square Big Read audio documentary.

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[transcript]

Posted by Adam Kampe at 4:34 pm | Category: Washington Square
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Book Sharing Gets a Makeover

January 23, 2011

By Rebecca Gross

Libraries are Creepy by flickr user Paul Lowry

Although reading itself is a solitary pursuit, the love of reading manifests itself in innumerable social ways. We like to discuss particulars of plot or character, and we’ll push our favorite books on anyone and everyone. We like to lend and borrow, and finding someone with kindred literary taste is like finding a special type of soul mate. While traditional libraries and book clubs have always existed, the past few years have introduced all sorts of new ways to share, discuss, and find new reads. The Internet of course is behind many of these developments, but others rely on nothing more than community spirit. Below are a few of my favorite new book sharing sites or concepts that I’ve come across.

BookCrossing: I like to describe BookCrossing as a feral library. The idea is to leave a book in a public place—on a park bench, in a coffee shop, at the hair salon—in hopes that someone will pick it up, read it, and then leave it elsewhere for another reader. Those who find books can log their discovery on BookCrossing.com, providing something of a paper trail as books travel around the world.

Little Free Library: As a true library fanatic, I find this idea unbelievably appealing. This project encourages community reading by helping to establish teeny, tiny libraries in front yards or on public property. The libraries themselves are adorable—most are made from refurbished cranberry crates—and function in the traditional sense of borrow and return. “Stewards” curate the book collection and maintain the library.

Corner Libraries: Like Little Free Libraries, Corner Libraries are stationary and maintained by a member of the community. However, Corner Libraries are meant to encourage alternative presses, and might hold anything from a handmade book to a photocopied ‘zine.

Goodreads: This site is a great example of how social media can encourage reading. Goodreads members can see what their friends are reading, rate or recommend books, and hopefully discover a great new book for their queue. Maybe you’ll find your literary soul mate amongst your Facebook friends or Gmail contacts (both lists can be imported to the site), or maybe you’ll stumble upon an unknown user whose virtual bookshelf is the perfect fit.

Newspaper book clubs: Book clubs run by newspapers have two distinct advantages: they are moderated and they have resources. This can include people to do background research on a book or its themes, relevant articles penned by experts, and enough pull to bring in the authors themselves. Last August, The Guardian introduced its interactive online Reading Group—we wholeheartedly approved of their first book choice, Fahrenheit 451. Guardian readers can help choose the book, bring up questions to discuss, comment on issues, and tune into live webcasts with authors. Soon after, The New York Times followed suit with its Big City Book Club, though its selection is limited to books about the Big Apple.

Posted by Rebecca Gross at 3:16 pm | Category: Fahrenheit 451, General
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Under the Influence: Edgar Allan Poe edition

January 20, 2012

by Josephine Reed

This week, we marked the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe who was born on January 19,  1809. We tend to think of Poe as a master of gothic fiction creaky with horror or as a poet mourning a lost love in language that is lushly beautiful. These descriptions are accurate, as far as they go, but that’s only part of the story.  Edgar Allan Poe also invented the detective novel: it’s intriguing to speculate that Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t exist without Poe. He was also an early contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction and influential in creating what would become the modern short story.  An astute and widely read critic,  Poe wrote with a pen dipped in acid and had a genius for making enemies.  He was also the first well-known American author to try to earn a living through writing alone, which resulted in a life that always teetered on the brink of financial ruin.  His influence on American literature is profound. Indeed, many writers have recognized Edgar Allan Poe’s genius from Baudelaire to Vladimir Nabokov, while other authors acknowledge their debt to him like Daniel Handler, whom readers might know by the name of Lemony Snicket.  In fact, in Handler’s darkly funny books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, he named  a pivotal character “Poe.”

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[transcript]

Posted by Josephine Reed at 5:57 pm | Category: Edgar Allan Poe
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Owner of a Lonely Heart

January 18, 2012

By Adam Kampe

CarsonMcCullersoncoverofbook_in_a_field

Book cover used courtesy of Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin, New York.

Though The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is set in a small mill town in the late 1930s, it could have been written today. The ambitious book touches on a wide range of issues and social ills that still plague present-day America. Racism. Inequality. Struggle. Though the town McCullers portrays is based on her hometown of Columbus, Georgia in the rural South, there’s a universal feel to the experience described which is why readers all over the world have identified with the novel and why it’s still read in 2012.

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[transcript]

To hear the entire half-hour audio documentary about McCullers and Lonely Hunter, please go The Big Read website.

Posted by Adam Kampe at 11:20 am | Category: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
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Inspiration for (Already Faltering) Resolutions

January 13, 2012

by Kelli Rogowski

Firework final display!, by claudmey via sxc.hu

It’s almost two weeks into the New Year! For some of us (okay, most of us), that means our resolutions have already begun to weaken. Mark Twain said, “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” Oscar Wilde shared this sentiment when he said, “Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” Fortunately, not every author is so cynical! For those of us still trying to keep our resolutions and are in need of an extra bit of encouragement, here are some quotations to get 2012 off to a great start!

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors and let every new year find you a better man.”
—Benjamin Franklin

“The past is but the beginning of a beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”
—H. G. Wells

“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.”
—John Burroughs

“Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
—Lord Alfred Tennyson

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
—Albert Einstein

“New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.”
—Charles Lamb

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
—T.S. Eliot

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”
—Edith Lovejoy Pierce

“You have done what you could—some blunders and absurdities have crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posted by Kelli Rogowski at 12:31 pm | Category: General, Uncategorized
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Immigrants in the Heartland

January 11, 2012

By Adam Kampe

Cather's_AtticRoom_RedCloud_Nebraska

Willa Cather’s attic room in Red Cloud, Nebraska. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Archives & Special Collections, used by permission of Lucia Woods.

When Cather published My Ántonia in 1918, the book was a major departure from the literary trends of the day. She not only strayed from the urban settings and themes that were fashionable at the time, but her characters were also new to contemporary American fiction—they were common folks and, even rarer for the time, many of them were immigrants, all presented with genuine dignity. There are many characters in the novel that are based on people Cather knew from Red Cloud, including, most importantly, Ántonia. Take a listen to the granddaughter of Ántonia.

For more information about Cather and The Big Read, check out the entire Big Read audio documentary on The Big Read website.

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[transcript]

Posted by Adam Kampe at 2:50 pm | Category: My Antonia
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