August 27, 2008
Washington, DC

25 states. 15 days. 8 novels. 2 countries. 1 Ford Escape Hybrid. 1 seriously saddle-sore G-man.

The Big Read initiative will hit the highway Sept. 12-27 for the Big Ride, a fortnight of events around the country designed to stitch together more than a dozen of the two hundred cities and towns hosting NEA-sponsored one-city-one-book programs during the 2008-2009 school year. As project director, I’ll have a ringside seat behind the wheel as all these communities come together for monthlong celebrations of great literature.

The tentative waypoints of the Big Ride loop, with this caveat: I brake for historical markers.

Among other pit stops on the trip, I’ll meet up with residents of Winston-Salem reading The Grapes of Wrath, help unveil an NEA-midwifed anthology of Mexican literature in El Paso, celebrate The Great Gatsby on a phantom pub-crawl of San Francisco’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, watch Coloradoans learn how to mush a dogsled team in tribute to The Call of the Wild, and just generally make a spectacle of myself in service of The Big Read.

Envisioned as the first of several such road trips, September’s Ride marks a sort of national debut for The Big Read. Developed three years ago in response to the 2004’s alarming Reading at Risk report ( http://www.arts.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php ) — which found that fewer than half of Americans today read for pleasure — The Big Read has given people in hundreds of cities and towns something in common to talk about more interesting than the weather. Never before, though, have consecutive events across the country communicated the ambitious scope of the project.

Since 2005, organizations ranging from libraries to zoos have received grants to create calendars of events around books they choose from a growing NEA list. The roster of more than 20 books includes stories as beloved as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and as new as Tobias Wolff’s Old School — a book I had the honor of reviewing in the San Francisco Chronicle just five years ago as the Chron’s book critic.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ford Motor Company, my colleagues and I at The Big Read now have an eye-catching, borscht-red, fuel-efficient pair of wheels to tool around the country in. Nicknamed Rosie — for the paint job, but also for Don Quixote’s old mount Rocinante — this hybrid gives the initiative a kitschy sense of adventure too rarely associated with reading nowadays. Here at the NEA, we avail ourselves of Rosie for transportation to keynote speeches, event introductions, even appearances in the occasional holiday parade. But Rosie’s trips have always been short hops — until now.

The whole idea of The Big Read has always been to remove from great books any taint of the medicinal, and restore the freshness that gave them their staying power in the first place. Cities and towns that participate report substantial upticks in library circulation, book sales, and general civic involvement. In other words, all indicators tell us that The Big Read is onto something. If a cross-country road trip in a hybrid can help rope lapsed readers into picking up a book, nobody should be above this kind of showmanship.

So watch this space for dispatches leading up to, and especially during, The Big Ride. Please bombard me at bigreadblog@arts.gov with any questions or suggestions about road food, deep-pocketed and/or philanthropy-minded gas or motel chains, audiobooks for company, mobile voice-recognition systems for dictation, literary sidetracks along the way, techniques for averting deep-vein thrombosis, and anything else that seems even tenuously relevant.

And please take a look at the tentative route map above. From the starting line here on Pennsylvania Ave. Sept. 12, to the breakers beyond Pacific Coast Highway Sept. 20, to the checkered flag back here on Sept. 27 at the National Book Festival, the Big Ride will help create readers from coast to coast and back again. If you find yourself anywhere along Rosie’s itinerary, or if you just see a red hybrid festooned with Big Read signage speeding by, by all means wave me down…

February 6, 2008
Omaha, Nebraska

As the mother of an aspiring zoologist, I spend more time in zoos than most children do.

My 9-year-old son never races through a zoo. He actually looks at every animal and even reads the plaque about every animal. He can explain interesting facts to anyone who will listen, such as: why snakes are not poisonous, why gorillas are not monkeys, or why bats are mammals. He wishes he could attend school at the zoo.

In Nebraska, some students actually do attend school at the zoo, thanks to the innovative leadership of Elizabeth Mulkerrin, the Education Director of Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo. In addition to boasting the world’s largest indoor rainforest, indoor desert, and nocturnal exhibit, the Omaha Zoo can now enjoy another claim: it is the first zoo to partner with a library and sponsor a Big Read. Elizabeth and her partners at the Omaha Public Library — Sarah English and Linda Trout — have created a successful and unique collaboration that I hope other cities might pursue.

Celebrating Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, the Omaha Big Read launched its kick-off on January 4, 2008, featuring Iditarod competitor Matt Anderson, talking before an audience of more than 225 adults and children at the Zoo’s auditorium. Their program of events includes book clubs, story-time with dogs, and film showings. The grand finale will be the Zoo’s annual “Read Around the World” on March 15. I was invited to help lead a teacher’s workshop — the first time that science teachers joined English teachers and librarians at one of the Zoo’s regularly scheduled educator workshops.

For me, this workshop spoke to an issue often on my mind: that English and science are more connected than curriculum sometimes reflects. After all, does it really matter that snakes are venomous, not poisonous? Does it matter that a gorilla is not a monkey? Absolutely. Because science, like poetry, teaches us to be precise in our choice of words. I fear the current decline in reading will cause Americans to lose the ability to use language conscientiously, and with it, our ability to articulate our thoughts clearly.

Such a decline also impedes our ability to describe the world around us vividly, so we are reduced to exclaiming, “Look at that green snake!,” instead of “Look at that beautiful Emerald Tree Boa.” Certainly the snake is still itself, whether identified by its given species name or not. But if we cannot name the things around us — flowers, birds, animals, trees — we are impoverished. And I wonder — to what extent is one’s view of the animal kingdom analogous to one’s view of people? If we consider apes and monkeys interchangeable, might we be more inclined to stereotype human beings? Is the failure to notice an Egyptian Fruit Bat’s five fingers comparable to the way we walk past those we don’t understand?

Bats — like wolves — have received a bad reputation from literature and film. Fear is sometimes based on misunderstanding, and novels don’t claim to teach science. In this way, a conversation can begin by asking what any particular literary work implies about the natural world, about ecology and conservation. In the workshop, we learned that the reintroduction of wolves in Wyoming has led to a healthy resurgence of rainbow trout. Who would have thought the trout would return with the wolves? But scientists have noticed that — without the fear of a wolf attack — caribou were taking their time to drink, thereby defecating in the clean water rainbow trout need to survive. This, my son would remind me, is a good example of the circle of life.

Jack London was also misunderstood, criticized both during his life and after for merely writing “dog stories.” Of course he did write several popular dog tales, but he also told other partly autobiographical stories—of his travels across America as a hobo (The Road), of his experiences living as a homeless man in the streets of England (The People of the Abyss), of his fight for success in the literary world (Martin Eden). He endured more physical ailments than I can name, and he kept writing despite hundreds of rejection slips before his 1903 success with The Call of the Wild. Like his canine protagonist, Jack London was a survivor. And since he educated himself at the Oakland Public Library, it seems especially fitting that a zoo and a library would unite to celebrate reading and science, community and conservation. As London himself said in a 1900 letter: “Never a night (whether I have gone out or not), but the last several hours are spent in bed with my books. All things interest me — the world is so very good.”

My son’s love for animals and zoos has taken me down an exciting road of discovery that I would never have traveled otherwise. I hope other parents and children might experience a similar pleasure together through The Big Read — and through the other books, animals, and humans they’ll meet along the way.

January 28, 2008
Auburn, Indiana

What if they held a Big Read and nobody came? I never expected to be asking myself that question when I reset my watch to match the dashboard clock in my rented PT Cruiser outside the Ft. Wayne, Indiana, airport. I’d had only the highest hopes as I tooled up the highway to Auburn, site of the first Big Read I’d ever attended for The Call of the Wild, Jack London’s indestructible story of the stouthearted sled dog Buck. Terra Firma, the education initiative of the DeKalb County Community Foundation, had pulled together a strong application. A nearby radio station was slated to cover the 1 p.m. kickoff festivities at the Eckhart Park Pavilion. The local constabulary was sending out their K-9 Unit. Stacks of mass-market paperback copies reposed on a card table by the door.

But there at the stroke of one stood TerraFirma director Judy Sorg, spruce in her January-weight jacket under the unheated pavilion’s drafty rafters, surveying a turnout consisting of two co-organizers — one of whom was turning around to leave. Worse, Judy seemed oblivious to the whole debacle. Was she deluded? One of those blithe Pollyannas whose façade of chipper optimism never permits a crack?

She’d seemed normal enough, even engaging, when I met her in Minneapolis at orientation in November. Then again, I was hardly one to talk. Here I was, about to preside over my first clunker after two years of unfailingly innovative local celebrations of American literature, and I was playing along, humoring poor Judy in her desperate charade.

I forget how exactly I realized that the PT Cruiser’s clock had been off by an hour. But you could safely color me relieved — maybe a bluish shade of relieved, since warm for Auburn can nevertheless feel a tad nippy to a fugitive Californian. Suffice to say that an hour later, all 151 souls allowed by the fire marshal, and perhaps a couple extra, had warmed matters up considerably. There were dog-safety demonstrations for kids, dog-sled demonstrations for would-be mushers, and a fascinating talk from Gail, the wolf expert at nearby Wolf Park, whose lupine howls had canines fooled for versts around.

The kickoff hosted at least the allowable 151 Auburnians; several live, stuffed and balloon animals; and one sociable 6-foot plush mascot frog, who probably qualifies as both. Photo by David Kipen.

Kids abounded, painting soup bowls and each other, nervously eyeing dogs up for adoption and parents who might or might not be. Each clutched a newly bestowed copy of The Call of the Wild in one hand and a Klondike bar in the other, unsure which to devour first.

Later, chowing down on cheese curds and other delicacies indigenous but far from indigestible, I congratulated Judy, her husband David (soon to appear in a much-anticipated local production of Much Ado About Nothing), Gail the uber-zoologist of the Midwest, Wendy Oberlin of the community foundation, and so many delightful others I’d rather omit here than misspell. As Buck and his teammates in the traces could have told you, it’s amazing what you can pull together when you pull together.

August 28, 2007
Washington, DC

Did you see that piece in the New York Times last week about JT Leroy, the abused-kid-turned-truck-stop-hooker who transformed himself into an acclaimed writer of literary fiction — until he turned out to be a female freelance writer who’d transformed herself into the totally fictitious JT Leroy? It’s a bottomlessly interesting story, one I may return to for the ideas it shakes loose about the pernicious practice of reviewing author’s bios instead of their books.

For now, though, I’m curious to look at literary fame and its possible effects on productivity and talent. The 21 Big Read authors describe a pretty broad spread on the spectrum of literary celebrity, from Harper Lee at one end — so retiring that she effectively retired at 35 — to Leo Tolstoy at the other, of whom it was once said that Russia had two tsars, and that Tolstoy was the more illustrious of the two.

Somewhere in between is Ernest J. Gaines, who scribbled in obscurity until Tracy Keenan Wynn adapted The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman for CBS, maybe even until Oprah Winfrey anointed A Lesson Before Dying with the gilded halo of her first initial. In a recent conference call with our inhouse NEA book group, Gaines sounded like a remarkably modest man, unimpressed by his accolades and — maybe for that reason — one of very few writers whose later books surpass their precursors.

Then there’s Marilynne Robinson, who takes her sweet time. In 1980 she published Housekeeping (which also recently joined the Big Read list) to rapturous reviews. She didn’t come out with another novel till 2004’s Gilead, which won her the wide readership that had previously eluded her — and the attention that she in turn had eluded.

Four famous writers, four different reactions to fame. Harper Lee ignores it and falls silent. Tolstoy revels in it as a younger man, then walks away. Gaines works hard, succeeds, then works even harder. And Marilynne Robinson gets it right the first time, raises a family, teaches, and then comes back as if she’d never been away.

Why does success paralyze some writers, help others by giving them time to write more carefully, and leave others almost unscathed? When all else fails, look at the books:

1) At the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, the sheriff argues that “taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight — to me that’s a sin.” Should we be entirely surprised that Harper Lee shares Boo Radley’s aversion to the limelight?

2) In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the title character enjoys the trappings of bourgeois success until he finds himself entrapped. Is it any wonder that Tolstoy reveled in his own fame until at midlife, like Ivan, he finally heard the soft, crunching tread of the one reader nobody ever snows?
3) Or look at Gaines. The protagonist of A Lesson Before Dying works at a thankless job until he finds a way to love it. Is that so different from his creator, who plugged away at fiction for years until success, when it came, was almost beside the point?

4) One more and I’ll stop: Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead consists of letters from an elderly, ailing father to the young son he won’t see grow up. You don’t have to be obsessed with the lineaments of literary reputation (in other words, you don’t have to be me) to read that novel as a meditation on what it’s like to write a book as wonderful as Housekeeping and then wait, in vain, for the childlike gratitude such an achievement deserves.

Okay, I’ll stop. There’s an entire branch of voguish pseudo-French criticism waiting to be christened that would read each new book as a writer’s further rumination on his or her own flickering renown — careerisme? — but I’ll not christen it today. Just know that good writing, whether pseudonymous, anonymous or just unsung, is always synonymous with hard, selfish, lonely work…

July 19, 2007
Washington, DC

“Mom, which one of us do you love best?” It’s a question my mother would never answer, but each of us had our suspicions — depending on which of us had just pitched marbles into her demitasse set (oldest brother), taken the pinking shears to her hand-sewn curtains to see the zig-zag pattern (me), or scratched his name backward — to avoid detection — into the hallway wall (older brother). Still, despite moments of being in or out of favor, none of us ever earned a declared status of favorite.

I don’t have children. I do, however, at middle age, have a child’s habit of secretly personifying inanimate objects — such as books. My husband has caught on to this, and while not suggesting therapy outright, he has hinted that this is something I should have gotten over somewhere between Barbie and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

It’s not as if I stand in the stacks and have conversations with Louisa May Alcott. But I have been known to look at a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and whisper, “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum,” by way of a greeting. To the book.

And yet, I am able to drive a car and hold a responsible job. Go figure.

I am the Director of Communications here at the National Endowment for the Arts, and it’s my department that tells the world about the Big Read, among our many other worthy NEA endeavors.

To me, while a book, a song, a painting, or a — wait for it — Broadway musical may not have a beating heart or knowing brain, it has a life. One that affects my life. Unlike my mother, I am able to pick favorites. (But keep this to yourselves. I don’t want The Wizard of Earthsea to feel bad that I like The Age of Innocence better.) I spend as much time with novels as I do with friends. And when I put one down, I need a day or two before I’m ready to pick up another. I need some time to reflect on our conversation. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye.

Of all our Big Read books, I do have a favorite. It’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve read and reread it. I’ve watched and rewatched the movie. I named my cat Atticus. (I said I don’t have children.)

I’ve read some of the learned arguments about why it doesn’t really deserve its vaunted position in the American literary cannon. From Tom Mallon’s 2006 New Yorker essay: “More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound…”, to Truman Capote’s alleged, “I, frankly, don’t see what all the fuss is about.” Although I’m a fan of both Mallon and Capote, I don’t care what they say. To Kill a Mockingbird is my sentimental favorite.

It’s a book I first read somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade. It’s the book that took me from The Hardy Boys (I just never could get into Nancy Drew — even if Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene were the same person) and Little Women into the world of grown up literature — a trip I wasn’t that eager to make.

I confess fully and ashamedly to being a lazy child. Always doing what was required and no more, and if there were a way I could do less, I would–including reading. I was happy to read — I just didn’t want to work at it. (Embarrassing disclosure: the first time I read Call of the Wild was in a Classic Comic Book.) And I was happier to watch I Love Lucy reruns than I was to read.

It was my marble-pitching oldest brother — one of those so-smart-he-skipped-a-grade overachievers who handed me his paperback copy of Mockingbird and said, “Read this.” I did. Then he gave me The Yearling. I read that. Then The Member of the Wedding. Then A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then 0 Pioneers! Then Country of the Pointed Firs. Then The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Then eventually Tom Jones and all of Jane Austen. (Okay, I also read Valley of the Dolls and Love Story but I swear I never picked up Jonathan Livingston Seagull.) I expanded into plays reading all of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams.

And yes, I talk to them all. Including in dialects, where appropriate. I can’t help it. And to be honest, I don’t want to. The characters in these books are as real to me as my childhood imaginary friend, Judy.

With the Big Read, our goal may not be a nation of readers conversing with their little friends from literature, but it is bringing the joy of discovery of good books — and good friends — to people who either have forgotten that simple pleasure or who never have had the pleasure. We are eager to have people experience the possibilities of language and storytelling, the fun of discussing, agreeing and disagreeing, the power of broadened perspective and of new conversations and conversions.

Reading moved Montag from being a “fire man” to a thinking man. If I lived in Ray Bradbury’s world of Fahrenheit 451, I would go into the woods and memorize To Kill a Mockingbird. From “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow…,” to “…and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.” And then Scout, Judy, and I would go talk about it some more….