May 31, 2007
Washington, DC

As you’ve probably guessed from David’s previous blogs, there’s a whole battalion of us at the NEA working furiously to get folks reading again. I work in communications, which means I do everything from helping Big Read communities develop their own publicity programs to sternly admonishing Messr. Kipen that he’d better get me a new blog or else…Although I love my job, as an avid reader, there is one thing I find utterly confusing about the Big Read: Why are we doing this? I mean, how can people not want to read? Full disclosure: I’m a poet, so, to a great degree, my career depends on readers. But even if I hadn’t grown up to be a writer, if I’d instead become a teacher or an actress or a singer, I can’t imagine my life still being my life if I wasn’t also a reader.

Twenty years ago Paulette Beete (St. Francis Prep, Class of 1987) became a poet because she decided writing her own poetry during English class was way better than actually reading Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Donne. Favorite books included anything by S.E. Hinton and Victoria Holt, Jane Eyre, and the Matt Dillon Quiz Book.

Having started my education in the West Indies, I started reading when I was four, and haven’t stopped. Everything’s been fair game — from all four volumes of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series to the book on satellites my first grade teacher caught me reading in the closet cum library when I was most likely supposed to be doing something else to the Harlequin Romances I pilfered from my mother’s library (also in a closet, it turns out). As I spooned sugar-soaked cornflakes into my mouth each morning, I read the cereal box and the hot chocolate box and the coffee label and any other words within reach. On car trips, my sister and I loved to read out loud the various road signs that populated Merrick Road, the Belt Parkway, the Van Wyck Expressway…(Yes, we still do this!) I’m fairly certain I’m the only high schooler who, to this day, proudly attributes my high verbal score on the SATs to the litter of polysyllabic words — ethereal, ephemeral — I ingested from my steady diet of bodice-rippers.

Last week I asked uberlibrarian Nancy Pearl, “What’s the harm if people stop reading?” Her reply? “Through books and reading, we can have any number of lives, and we can go anywhere, and we can do anything. And we can be anyone.” While I wholeheartedly agree that books can take us outside of ourselves, one of the joys of reading for me, is the fact that books take me INSIDE of myself. Though navel gazing gets a bad rap in this age of made-up memoirs and TMI web sites, I believe that we can’t connect passionately and profitably with another person unless we have some understanding of our own spiritual and mental innards.

For example, in high school — Mr. Castellano’s senior honors English class — we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I was outraged not at the use of the n-word, but at the fact that there were people who wanted it stricken from the novel. “But that’s the way people spoke then — what else was Twain supposed to say?” I couldn’t comprehend it as an issue of race or sensitivity — it was a crystalline case of foolish censorship. Nearly 20 years later — although I still think the n-word is necessary to Twain’s novel — I’m much more sensitive to its appearance in literature, questioning if the author has a right to use that word, if it’s really necessary to the story, or is the author perhaps just a lazy storyteller. Whether or not these questions are just, my reaction to the n-word in literature today is markedly different than it was 20 years ago when I was 17, a marked reflection of how my own thoughts on race are no longer so clear cut and how I’m no longer so oblivious to such resonances.

Need another example of how reading has helped me understand who I am, who I’ve become? Twenty years ago, I would have been highly uncomfortable with the dialect in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. A fairly new American, I was mortified by my parent’s accents and vocabulary — the way my Guyanese father pronounced Sharon with a long a, the way my Trinidadian mother said “zaboca” and “sive” instead of “avocado” and “scallion.” I remember being embarrassed after Mrs. Gallari corrected me in second grade when I said “zed” instead of “z”. I thought I’d already become thoroughly American. Yet reading Hurston two decades later, I found myself seduced in large part by her effortless use of dialect — something I’d now like to emulate in my poems about my family’s early lives in Trinidad. For the children of immigrants — especially when one is an immigrant oneself as I am — getting to the place where you are comfortably both American and “other” is momentous, an unequalled rite of passage peculiar only to new immigrants. If I hadn’t found Hurston, if I hadn’t read The Joy Luck Club or Bless Me, Ultima, I wouldn’t have become so clearly conscious of the shift I’d made, the fact that I now celebrated the “other” and valued the rhythms and peculiarities of my West Indian culture as highly as my American culture in my work and in my life.

These are only two examples of the ways I’ve met and measured myself over the years as I’ve read my way through literary novels and genre novels and everything in between. My encounters with literature are not the only reason I’ve made, at least I hope I’ve made, a minor success of my life, but neither are those encounters, those opportunities for self reflection and knowledge least among the many reasons. So, that’s why we’re doing the Big Read — because I am 100% certain that every reader has similar stories of how literature has enhanced, changed, challenged, or affirmed her life, time and time again. In her memoir Journal of a Solitude poet-novelist May Sarton wrote, “I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.” I read — and encourage you to read — to do both.

May 25, 2007
Washington, DC

Calling all junior-high and high-school teachers: What are your students’ favorite books? Not necessarily their favorite assigned books — though if somebody says The Great Gatsby, nobody’s going to try and talk ‘em out of it — but their favorite books, assigned or not, fiction or not, with word balloons or not. Whichever book gets the most votes, I’ll see that the Big Read staff reads it, and I’ll blog about it as soon as we’re done. I’ll also make some unsolicited suggestions about how to build lesson plans around the top vote-getters.�

Partly this is atonement for a conversation I had with a Miami-Dade College kid I met on the bus ride to Key West last month. His teacher had assigned him A Farewell to Arms for the Big Read, and he wasn’t crazy about it. Few uninitiated teenagers cotton to the great books right away. Superficial differences in age and priorities can get in the way — besides which, the fellow-feeling across cultures that a reading life instills hasn’t taken root yet. This is precisely why non-readers need a book even more than the somebody who’s already got one. The benefits of reading accrue faster than they dissipate; folks acquire the habit quicker than they break it.

The students of Stillwater High may have liked The Grapes of Wrath, but what were they reading on their own time? Photo by David Kipen

So I asked this kid, I hope not too desperately, what his idea of a good book was. I forget the title, but the author was Danielle Steele — whom he called Daniel, by the way. Having been thoroughly conditioned to look down on Steele’s work, I nodded politely and tried hard to think of something nonjudgmental to say. Pretty soon he went across the street for an Egg McMuffin.

What I should have done, of course, was press him, ask him what he liked about Danielle Steele’s book. Not so I could convince him that my novel could lick his novel, but just to find out what this kid likes when, hallelujah, he likes a book.

So teachers, please email me (use the “Email us” link at right) with the names of your students’ favorite books. Nominations from students themselves would be delightful too, but this whole thing idea cropped up because Molly here started fulminating about teachers. She’s got nothing against them, doesn’t even rule out going back into the classroom herself someday. But she fears that too many teachers try so hard to develop their kids’ reading tastes that they forget to ask which books students “already like”.

Before teachers pour out of the woodwork to rebut this scurrilous libel on their entire profession, I hasten to point out that this is Molly’s idea, all Molly’s, not mine, and if it belongs on anybody’s permanent record, pick on her. (This is called having your staff’s back.) But even if there probably isn’t a scintilla of truth to what Molly says, I’d very much like to know what books teenagers are enjoying — either in school or, better yet, on their own, just for grins.

So please, if only so I can make secret amends to that kid in Miami, bring on those emails. Because I’ve heard that some freakish people work better with a deadline, let’s set one of Monday, June 4. Teachers, that question again: What are your students’ favorite books? Maybe ask ‘em two books they might read this summer, since Harry Potter may be a gimme. (No fair censoring the answers, either.) Daniel Steele, the nightstands of the Big Read staff await you…

May 11, 2007
Petoskey, Michigan

Just when I think the Big Reads I’m seeing can’t be improved on, I read about one that sounds even better. The link isn’t up anymore, but you should have seen the picture and accompanying article that ran in the Petoskey News-Review on April 17, 2007. That’s Petoskey, Michigan, for those of you without an encyclopedic knowledge of American cities blessed with more than one post office. And just because I can’t get there in person is no reason for this blog to ignore what sounds like Petoskey’s absolutely corking Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird.

I especially like the way tribal chairman Frank Ettawageshik’s quote — reading is “very much akin to climbing in someone else’s skin” — echoes Harper Lee herself. Once read, the book hasn’t just taken up residence on his bookshelf. No, the very language of the novel has lodged itself in Frank’s vocabulary, reaffirming, of course, Atticus’ deathless line, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view–until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Ettawageshik leads the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, the only Big Read in the country so far sponsored by an Indian tribe. Public libraries tend to rank first among equals in most Big Read applications, and that’s perhaps as it should be. Libraries are where the books are, and heaven knows where the program would be without the lavish support of the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

But whenever we get an application where the library is a partner but the principal is somebody else — a university, a museum, a radio or TV station — that’s a treat, too. It reminds us around the office that literature isn’t just for the professionals. As Rodney Dangerfield says in Back to School, breaking out his checkbook at the student store as if the drinks are on him: “Shakespeare for everybody!” Would a library make the connection that Frank Ettawageshik does between the Jim Crow laws of Depression Alabama and the “No Indians” signs he remembers from his Michigan childhood? A good one, probably. But I’m glad Frank was around to make sure.

I also love the way the Little Traverse Bay Bands have spent some of their Big Read grant to commission an original composition, based on the book, for the Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra to premiere. With so many cities and towns picking Mockingbird for their first Big Read, I’m guessing this is one world premiere that may actually notch that all-important second performance before too long.

So many small-town orchestras have to play it safe in their programming just to stay afloat, just like so many small newspapers only go through the motions of covering any kind of cultural news. It would have been great to meet them in person, but my consolations are knowing that the Big Read is giving the composer James Grant a chance to write for orchestra, and that reporter-photographer Kristina Hughes is getting the opportunity to show what she can do. All that, plus seeing that picture of not just one, but two generations of the Martell family beating their tribal drum at a Big Read event. Kind of makes you wonder if there’s a tomtom duet anywhere in James Grant’s score…