October 30, 2009
Washington, DC
Happy Birthday Rudolfo Anaya! To celebrate, why not grab a slice of birthday cake and settle in to watch A Conversation with Rudolfo Anaya. Here’s the short version of the film—by Lawrence Bridges—to get you started.
Check out the long version of the film (and captioned versions of both films) at The Big Read website.
October 16, 2009
Washington, DC
In Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya wrote, “There are so many dreams to be fulfilled, but Ultima says a man’s destiny must unfold itself like a flower, with only the sun and the earth and water making it blossom.” In this interview excerpt, Anaya shares how he himself blossomed not just into a writer, but—as fellow author Tony HIllerman has dubbed him—”the godfather and guru of Chicano literature.”
Becoming a writer is an evolutionary process. There is no one certain point or occurrence or experience. I loved to read when I was in grade school. I used to write great book reports [and] book reviews and illustrate them. I also liked art. I noticed that when I was in high school I kind of quit reading and was not too motivated. And then I went up to the university and began to read literature, and that was it.
I think that whole idea of loving literature. . .starts that spark of, well I want to express myself also. I have these things, these emotions, and this beautiful past that I’ve known and people. I want to write about them and preserve them, and so I started writing poetry and short stories and novels.
I had had a very serious spinal cord injury accident when I was in high school, and that also figures a great deal into my life. Somehow that time of being in the hospital and dealing with recovery and seeing other kids my age really suffering a lot, seeing death, and then coming out of that experience was very important, informative. Again, that’s one of the experiences that told me you have to write, you have to record, not only what happened to me but what happened to people around me.
Somehow I always thought that there’s so much beauty in people, the people especially that I knew as a child. The town drunk was a hero to me. The ranchers that would come in and visit with my dad told fantastic stories, and I’d sit there and listen. And sometimes we’d sit around the dinner table or in the summers we’d go out and make a little fire near the house and tell stories and all of that. The whole idea of that oral tradition sparks the imagination.
Want to hear more from Anaya about his seminal novel? Check out The Big Read video guide on Bless Me, Ultima. (And don’t forget to visit The Big Read calendar to find out about Big Read activities taking place near you.)
July 15, 2009
Washington, DC
The University of Texas Pan American (UTPA) serves the state’s Rio Grande Valley, a largely Mexican-American region in south Texas. With a student body of approximately 18,000, many of whom are first-generation collegians, UTPA was one of the 208 organizations participating in The Big Read for the 2008-2009 grant cycle. The university’s Big Read of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima comprised the four southernmost counties in Texas–Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, and Willacy–home to 1.2 million potential Big Readers. By e-mail I spoke with Big Read organizer Dr. Steven Schneider, director of new programs and special projects for UTPA’s College of Arts and Humanities.
TBR: Why did UTPA choose to read Bless Me, Ultima?
Schneider: I selected Bless Me, Ultima for our 2008-2009 Big Read because it is a book that is “culturally relevant” for our community. Joan Parker Webster, in her book Teaching Through Culture, defines culturally relevant literature as literature in which “students can see themselves…represented accurately and respectfully.” With [the text in both] English and Spanish and its themes that focus around competing family values of the priesthood and the vaquero tradition, we thought this text would have great appeal to readers in the Rio Grande Valley. Our Big Read book selection had a tremendous response from our community and was widely read both in the public high schools and in community book discussion groups.
TBR: Why do you think Bless Me, Ultima is worth reading?
Schneider: Bless Me, Ultima is a “signal” text; it was written and published at the beginning of a new wave of Latino literature. It’s an important book for that reason and [because it] provides a window into Latino culture in the Southwest. It is also a universal story about a young boy, Antonio, who learns that the world is full of paradoxes and that he must take good from all his experiences.
TBR: What are some of the highlights from your Big Read of Bless Me, Ultima?
Schneider: There were several highlights, including teen discussion groups, mariachi performances, and a themed art exhibit based upon symbols and characters in the novel. The most impressive event though was our keynote panel at which three renowned scholars–Professors R.C. Davis, Mark Glazer, and Eliseo Torres–presented their critical perspectives on the novel. Professor Davis addressed the place of Bless Me, Ultima in American literature, Professor Glazer examined Mexican-American folklore references in the novel, and Professor Torres presented a rich discussion of the tradition of curanderas and the portrayal of Ultima in the novel.
TBR: Why did you choose Sun, Stone, and Shadows as the focus for your 2009-2010 Big Read grant?
Schneider: We selected Sun, Stone, and Shadows for several reasons. Because of our location on the Texas-Mexico border, there is great interest in Mexican cultural affairs. We wanted a book that would engage high school and college students, as well as families, lapsed readers and/or reluctant readers, and members of the Rio Grande Valley who may live in colonias or other underserved areas. We feel this collection of short stories will have great appeal to these groups and the availability of a Spanish-language translation is another important asset. We hope it will focus attention on U.S.-Mexico relations and serve as a unifying force.
TBR: Why should people in the U.S. be interested in a book of short stories by writers from Mexico?
Schneider: The year 2010 is the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, which had a great impact in the Southwest and on the U.S. border with Mexico. We will be tying our Big Read programming to the annual UTPA celebration of books and arts called FESTIBA and to the commemoration of the Mexican Revolution. Several of the authors who composed the stories in Sun, Stone, and Shadows were impacted in one way or another by the Mexican Revolution. Readers on this side of the border will be interested in these stories because of the insights they share about our neighbors to the South.
TBR: What can we expect from your new Big Read?
Schneider: Our Big Read program begins in the fall with outreach to the public schools. Our kickoff will take place in late February with the greatest concentration of activities taking place in March 2010. We are planning our keynote panel and art exhibit for the last week of March to coincide with FESTIBA. We will be expanding our partnerships this time to include more museums and libraries. This year we will also be working with the Mexican Consulate to promote programs on both sides of the border.
NEA: What effect do you think The Big Read has had on your university?
Schneider: The Big Read has had a very positive impact on our university. The tie-in with FESTIBA has been phenomenal, and we have had strong support from our university administration. It has also created energy and enthusiasm in the English Department, where many faculty members adopted our book selection. The Big Read has also been an excellent vehicle for building bridges between the campus and the community as evidenced by our outreach and partnerships.
NEA: What was it like being at The Big Read orientation?
Schneider: The Orientation in Minneapolis was terrific! I was especially moved by the keynote speech given by Tim O’Brien and the newly released film of Rudolfo Anaya. I wish we had the video available last year. I especially enjoyed the session on community partnerships and culled some valuable lessons from the panel. Most importantly, I left inspired about the Big Read program and our continued participation in it.
NEA: What do you think is the importance of a program like The Big Read?
Schneider: The Big Read is a vital program, especially in a community like ours, where literacy rates are below the national average. It’s critical to find innovative ways to make reading exciting and important, and the Big Read accomplishes that!
(All photos by Tony Casas. From top: A Bless Me, Ultima display at the Edinburg, Texas-based Dustin Michael Sekula Memorial Library, UTPA’s library partner for The Big Read; Dr. Steven Schneider at the spring kick-off event; Mariachi Juvenil performing at the Bless Me, Ultima kickoff.)
May 15, 2009
Washington, DC
Yesterday, the Arts Endowment announced 11 new NEA National Heritage Fellows , the best of the best of the nation’s artists working in the folk and traditional arts. Tradition is at the heart of many of the Big Read titles, from the rigid etiquette of “Old New York” in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Henry James’s Washington Square to the immigrant traditions that permeate Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. In the following literary moment, 2006 NEA National Heritage Fellow Charles M. Carrillo, a New Mexican anthropologist and santero (a carver and painter of images of saints), discusses one of the many traditional beliefs at the heart of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.
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April 17, 2009
Washington, DC
If you value your right to check out a library copy of Fahrenheit 451, or Huck Finn, or Bless Me, Ultima, you owe the late Judith Krug big-time. Krug, who died Saturday, led the fight against censorship for the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom for over forty years. While there, she succeeded in consecrating the last week of every September as Banned Books Week.
I never met her, but Krug’s many battles over our right to read what we please were legend. The best tribute I’ve seen so far came in her hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. At the height of the controversy over Madonna’s book “Sex,” they once quoted Krug as saying, “The book is sleazy trash, but it should be in every medium-sized library in the United States.”
Not just trash, mind you, but “sleazy trash.” Krug was a First-Amendment absolutist with taste. The neverending struggle for freedom of expression always needs new champions. To replace Judith Krug, it will need a country full of them.
April 11, 2009
Washington, DC
Through May, Denver-based theater company El Centro Su Teatro is celebrating a Big Read of Rudolfo Anaya’s coming-of-age novel Bless Me, Ultima. Fortuitously, Su Teatro’s celebration coincided with Anaya’s completion of a stage treatment of his seminal novel, which the theater is presenting as one of its Big Read activities.
John Kuebler, the theater’s media coordinator, filled me in on the details:
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Antonio (Carlo Rincon) and Ultima (Yolanda Ortega) share a tender moment in El Centro Su Teatro’s production of Rudolfo Anaya’s classic coming-of-age story Bless Me, Ultima. Photo courtesy of El Centro Su Teatro. |
“Su Teatro had previously produced two of Anaya’s plays: Ay Compadre and Who Killed Don Jose? Artistic Director Tony Garcia had been talking to Rudolfo Anaya for some time about the possibility of staging Bless Me, Ultima. When we applied for Big Read project funding last spring and decided to revolve the project around Bless Me, Ultima, we envisioned utilizing our theater company to present some dramatic readings from the novel. As fate would have it, we learned that Anaya had completed a stage adaptation of his novel over the summer, and he agreed to let Su Teatro present a workshop production to coincide with our Big Read project.
“The response has been overwhelming. The original and extended productions (six weeks total) sold out entirely in advance, and we have almost sold out our latest four-date extension. The play Bless Me, Ultima has been a great catalyst for our Big Read project, allowing us to draw in a large audience, put materials into their hands, and engage them in further participation.”
El Centro Su Teatro still has plenty more programming, and you can learn all about it on the Big Read Web site .
February 5, 2009
Washington, DC
From the February 9 edition of California’s Modesto Bee comes this headline: “School trustees in Newman ban book from classrooms.”
The opening paragraph explains, “Orestimba High School sophomores who want to read Bless Me, Ultima, will have to check it out from the library after trustees voted to remove it from English classes.”
It’s so easy to make fun of people who ban books. “We’re better-educated than they are. We probably make more money than they do,” we might say. Everybody we know agrees with us. So why does it feel so unsatisfying?
On reflection, my new instinct is less to score points off some touchy parent than to get a Big Read into Stanislaus County as soon as possible. (This might get tricky, of course, considering that the local librarian voted with the majority.)
Fahrenheit 451 might make a timelier book choice than Anaya, but I can’t help thinking that Newman needs books in the worst way right now. That’s probably condescending and patronizing and superior of me, but I believe it.
If there were an NEA strike force that could roll into a town and put on impromptu uninvited Big Reads overnight, Stanislaus would top my target list. The key, I think, would be to do more listening than talking, at least at first, more joking than preaching. Maybe somebody would even take a swing at us, and help out with the sympathy vote. In the end, I can’t help thinking that the book-banners and the civil libertarians might fight our way to a companionable draw. I saw it happen in Oklahoma — where at first they were about ready to run me out of town for defending Steinbeck — and I can see it happening in Stanislaus, too.
We have sensitivity training for racists. We have anger-management classes for bullies. Can’t we at least imagine a way to engage book-banners that doesn’t treat them like they’re like moronic philistines instead of concerned parents? We’re sure not making any converts by humiliating them.
Call me greedy, but a bunch of teenagers reading Anaya to scandalize their folks isn’t enough for me. I want their parents, too. I want just one book-banner to stand up in a public forum and say, “My son wasn’t reading before and now he is, so maybe this book can’t be all bad.” Never gonna happen? I don’t buy it. Bring me that success story, and I’ll shout it from the housetops.
March 27, 2008
Norman, OK
Oklahoma librarian Susan Gregory writes,
The Big Read continues with enthusiasm in Norman. We held a wonderful program in a former Roman Catholic church, now home to a brilliant photographer and his wife who works for the OKC Animal shelter, on the edge of the campus. Robert Ruiz, whom you met, brought his mariachi band and they sang portions of the mass in Spanish after the group of about fifty heard presentations from an art history professor and a scholar from the English department. Candles illuminated the icons and crucifixes on the walls while the dogs howled and three cats prowled. I think that [Bless Me, Ultima author] Señor [Rudolfo] Anaya — and St. Francis — would be pleased. Next week, we’re hosting a program in Norman’s new organic grocery downtown. We’ve actually found a curandera in OKC and a Norman police officer whose grandmother was a curandera, so the evening should be fascinating, if not mystical.
We’re beginning a serious fight down here to get people to vote for a new library on May 13th. I know why reading is the core of my life. The challenge will be to find adequate words to help those who don’t — or won’t — read understand the power that a strong public library gives to a community. If you have any thoughts to share on the subject that I could purloin for presentations, please do…
Susan is already doing one of the smartest things a library can do to pass a ballot initiative, which is to run a Big Read during the campaign. My Hammett-reading Big Read friends in Spokane, whom I shamefully haven’t blogged about quite yet, are doing the same thing. The Big Read sure worked in Peoria, Illinois, where library funding had to win the support of a two-thirds supermajority, and managed it with percentage points to spare. Interestingly, there are two schools of thought about library bond campaigns. One is to synchronize them with major elections, so that every last library supporter will already be voting. The other is to put a bond issue on the ballot all by itself in a special election, so that only a few diehard library supporters can put it over the top.
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Big Read participants listened spellbound to Mariachi Orgullos sing portions of the Mass in Spanish during a celebration of the book, Bless Me, Ultima, at The Chouse, formerly St. Thomas More Catholic Church, on March 14th. Photo by David Kipen. |
Me, I can scarcely understand why anybody in their right minds wouldn’t support library funding in May or November. Here’s what I’d say to anyone on the fence in Norman, Spokane, or anywhere else:
Name me a great man or woman who never owned a public library card. I defy you. On the off chance they don’t use the card much anymore, it’s because they’ve parlayed early library use into the kind of success that buys you any book you need, or earns you access to a great university library.
The only reason I can think of not to support a library bond issue is if you’ve been so burned by the dumb things government sometimes does that you don’t trust it anymore to do a smart one. I can understand that. I can understand it better than a G-man like me ought to admit. But I promise you this: If you think your government wastes your money now, just wait till your local library cuts its hours, or closes completely. Just wait till people without library cards start casting the deciding vote — the few of them who bother to vote at all — to elect your leaders. Then you’ll see what governmental incompetence really looks like.
But if I can’t convince you to support your library, just make me this one promise in return. After the library bond passes without you, do me a favor and pay a visit to your new library. Look around you. See a librarian, who could be making triple the salary in a law firm across town, helping somebody who just lost a job find work. See a librarian connecting patrons with novels that somehow make them feel just a little less alone. See a librarian reading to kids whose parents don’t make the time to. See all this — and then see if you don’t, like me, find yourself supporting library funding every chance you get.”
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Does Auburn, Ind., have the most breathtaking small-town public library in America? Photo by David Kipen. |
March 21, 2008
Washington, DC
Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.
Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.
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Cynthia Ozick. Photo |
But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.
Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.
Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.
In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.
Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.
How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.
My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
March 4, 2008
Worcester, MA
When I first heard about The Big Read sponsored by UMass Memorial Healthcare, I have to admit I pictured a couple of candystripers pushing a book cart down a hospital corridor. What I discovered when I fetched up in Worcester the other day was something altogether different, and leagues better. More about this soon I hope, but for now have a look at this shot of the sisters Labeeby and Irma Servatius.
Irma heard about Worcester’s Read of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and volunteered to play for the kickoff last month. That went so well that Sharon and Rosa of UMass invited her to come back to play for the finale I attended over the weekend. Out of her and her sister’s fiddles poured Telemann, Britten, and Mozart, accompanied by an extemporaneous interweaving of musical and literary commentary from Irma that would have done Leonard Bernstein proud.
I bring this up not just because it knocked my eye out, or because Irma’s new chamber orchestra deserves all the encouragement and support it can get, but also because of what ran in the L.A. Times last Monday. Under the headline “Big Read or Big Waste?”, some freelance blogger got off an op-ed piece at the expense of a certain nationwide reading program dear to us all.
This shouldn’t have bothered me so much. Time was, I’d have written most anything for a byline in my hometown paper, so I can’t really begrudge some other guy for coveting the same platform. But anybody who knows me knows how much I believe in The Big Read. The thought that we’re all going to have to work even harder to dispel a few misperceptions created by this piece, just set my ordinarily tepid blood to boiling. I fired off a letter to the editor, the gist of which the Times obligingly ran as follows:
Last week, a woman in St. Helens, Ore., thanked a nationwide program called the Big Read for getting her teenage son to dive into Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon – - thanks I keep hearing, in different words, all across the country. But this Op-Ed article called the one-city, one-book initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts silly and sentimental, and asked incredulously, “Who could be inspired?”
Don’t take my word for its effectiveness. Ask any of the roughly 500 people who jammed a Big Read event last April in Santa Clarita to cheer for Ray Bradbury; or see for yourself, by attending any of dozens of Eastside events this spring celebrating Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Bless Me, Ultima.
Who could be inspired by such “unobjectionable” writers as Hammett, Bradbury, Anaya and Cynthia Ozick? Everybody from poor kids in East St. Louis to a Los Angeles now reeling from the impending closure of Dutton’s Books, to a cynical Angeleno ex-book critic like me. The NEA encourages all people to help arrest and, ideally, reverse the American reading decline in any way they choose, but the Big Read is working.”
And so it is. The Big Read worked in Worcester, and here in Owensboro, Kentucky, last night, and I daresay it’ll work in Terre Haute tomorrow. My thanks again to everybody who makes it work. Literacy coordinator Sharon Lindgren of UMass has statistics proving that readers live longer, and you are exactly the people I want living the longest…