June 26, 2008
Washington, DC

I suppose it had to happen. After our pilot-phase Big Read orientation here in Washington in 2006, a four-city orientation tour around the country the following year, and now three Minneapolis orientations, The Big Read has been discovered. Claire Kirch, ace Midwest correspondent for Publishers Weekly, saw NEA research and analysis director Sunil Iyengar and me on a panel at the annual book convention in LA a couple of weeks back. In a weak moment, I mentioned our then-upcoming orientation in Minneapolis. Next thing I knew, our modest little 500-grantee kaffeeklatsch was news.

I bring this up because our grantees are so conscientious about sending us their clippings, it seems only fair that we at the national level should pony up with ours. Claire wrote a nice story and took a photo of me and Big Read publicity honcha Paulette Beete flanking our new Big Read map with 208 little flags marked the locales of our new grantees. Every one of those flags represents another city or town embracing a terrific novel for a month or so at a time.

But there’s an underlying sadness in this for me, and it may help explain why I’ve been suffering from a pronounced case of blogger’s block ever since orientation: In a word, no more Big Reads till September.

The Big Read lays low over the summer, not to rev up again until school’s back in session. The office still hums, maybe faster than ever, since we have a slew of Big Read materials to turn out. But the subtle thrum of Big Reads by the dozens, all putting on programs and convening discussions and staging events — the nationwide shuffle of tens of thousands of pages all turning at once — that all falls quiet. Rosie the Big Ride, just donated to us by Ford, sits idle down in the Old Post Office building parking lot, slightly looking reproachful when I can even bring myself to look at it in the mornings.

This fall, Rosie and I will take to the open road again. Just the thought of it lifts my spirits. We’ve already got four site visit requests, and it’s not even July. In the meantime, though, I’m up on blocks, racing my engines and waiting for a starting gun that isn’t even loaded yet.

The logical thing to do, for me of all people, is read. I’m embarrassed to say which, but I’ve never even read one of the new Big Read novels. I’ve got biographies of Thornton Wilder and Edgar Allan Poe piled up on my nightstand, and a new review-model Kindle from Amazon to fool around with. I’ve got a commencement address to write, too, which won’t be easy in my current frame of mind.

Come the fall, I’ll probably look back on this brief interval of stasis and wonder how I could ever have taken it for granted. I’ll have too much to blog about, instead of not enough. I’ll file right away, instead of letting events blur before I blog them. Could this be what it’s like not to have literature in your life? To face each day without the consolation and stimulation of an evening’s reading ahead of you?
What an ingrate I am! Five hundred Big Read organizers have just converged on one overtaxed Midwestern hotel to learn how to share a great book with their neighbors, and all I can think about is September?

That tears it. I’m filing this blog, scoring some lunch, and coming back to my desk on a mission. The Big Read may be hibernating for the summer, but The Big Read staff is working harder than ever. It’s a privilege to work alongside them on a project I believe in, and I owe them my full commitment. September may be two months off, but there are people out there not reading, and preparation for the fall push is all. Come back Tuesday for another post, forgive me my punchiness in the meantime, and read yourself silly until we meet again…

June 22, 2008
Washington, DC

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his Hollywood days, when alcohol withdrawal reduced him to drinking Cokes by the crate Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress

For a commencement address I’m giving this weekend, I’ve been roughing out nine or so practical rules for better, more prolific writing. A tenth one just occurred to me, and it’s especially relevant to The Big Read’s writers: If drinking helps you write better, write fast.

I can almost forgive F. Scott Fitzgerald his drinking, since he fought the hardest against it. Drinking also gave Fitzgerald the opportunity to write about alcoholism as eloquently as almost anyone ever has. The scene of Nicole Diver holed up in the bathroom in Tender Is the Night, her childhood trauma sloshed up into the present by one highball too many, gives me the shakes even misremembering all these years later.

At least four Big Read writers shortened their careers by drinking: Fitzgerald, Hammett, London, and a newcomer to the list, Edgar Allan Poe. All but Hammett probably shortened their lives, too, and Hammett’s later life without writing was not a pretty one. He’d written well about drinking in a completely different way from Fitzgerald, making it uncomplicatedly glamorous in The Thin Man. Only a scold would begrudge Hammett the breezy comedy of Nick and Nora Charles’ liquid, lubricious rapport. But as his body lost its ability to metabolize the stuff, he kept coming back to the same half-written serious novel over and over, each time with diminishing returns. Alcohol became a way to assuage his guilt over success – if only by drinking away the proceeds.

London’s drinking rarely interfered with his 1,500-word-a-day quota, but it may have played hob with his choice and execution of material. Unlike Fitzgerald’s, London’s writing about dipsomania – principally the novel John Barleycorn – was not his best. Even though scholars have effectively ruled out biographer Irving Stone’s suicide scenario from Sailor on Horseback, it’s still hard to deny that a quarter century of drink had given his internal organs a good pickling.

Poe I know the least about, since work on his Readers Guide won’t start up in earnest around here until the most recent batch of guides is out the door. (I do have an eminently bloggable road trip coming up in a couple of weeks to prowl around Poe’s Richmond, and maybe his Baltimore.) But you don’t have to be a Poe scholar to know that he was no teetotaler, and died at 40 of murky causes possibly including “cooping” – the practice of keeping someone cooped up before election day, dosing him with alcohol, and then trotting him out under various identities to vote early and often. Even if unscrupulous campaigners indeed “cooped” Poe, they did nothing to him that he hadn’t done to himself on more than one occasion.

Women on the Big Read list seem to have dodged this particular bullet, with the possible exception of Carson McCullers, who certainly had more demonstrable physical pain to kill than any of the men. Why our women writers should be spared, I can’t guess, unless it’s that women like Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston had hurdles enough in cracking the boys’ literature establishment without booze to worry about. If Dorothy Parker ever follows Poe onto the list for short fiction and poetry, you can consider the omission corrected.

So — as I plan to rain on a good graduation party or two this weekend by saying — if drinking helps you write better, write fast. It’s not my place to go telling writers, least of all dead ones, how to live their lives. But what wouldn’t you have given for another few productive decades out of Fitzgerald, Hammett, London, or Poe?

June 10, 2008
Minneapolis, MN

He looked like a fourth Pep Boy. He wore a pencil moustache, a crew cut, and owlish black glasses. The cigar, I’m probably making up. And that voice! Brooklyn or the Bronx, whichever one’s thicker. He used it to talk about books the way a great sports-talk host talks about sports: volubly, without repetition, as if nothing else in the world could matter. He was Matthew J. Bruccoli, and he was one of the best friends American literature and The Big Read, and any of his friends, ever had.

I first encountered Matt Bruccoli years before I met him, as the author of the Fitzgerald biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Leave it to Matt, with his encyclopedic, even Googolic knowledge of Fitzgerald’s every word, to pick out from that treasurehouse the perfect, emblematic, unforgettable title.

Matthew Bruccoli. Photo courtesy of the University of South Carolina.

Meeting him had to wait until years later, not long after I arrived from the San Francisco Chronicle to become program director of The Big Read. Dan in audio was putting together one of our first Big Read CDs, about The Great Gatsby, and I just knew we had to get Bruccoli. It wasn’t easy. Arch-bibliophile that he is, Matt had taken to email like a duck to buckshot. Somehow, though, through a forest of intermediaries, I got through to him and, with a nervousness that looks absurd in retrospect, finally winkled him out of South Carolina and into the Big Read office.

My first impression was that he had walked up all seven flights. Bruccoli came in breathless, perspiring in suit and tie, carrying a plump satchel. After a few minutes of careening conversation that was like a table of contents for every conversation we would ever have, Dan ushered him into the audio booth, a notorious sweatbox.

In impassioned but scholarly, extemporaneous yet diagrammable paragraphs — not just on Fitzgerald, but on Hemingway and Hammett besides — Prof. Bruccoli held us spellbound for an hour easy, never once loosening his foulard, while all around him swigged water by the nalgene.

“Strivers!”, he cried, nailing for legions of Big Read listeners in one emphatically flung word the generation of ambitious dreamers for whom Gatsby stood in. Around the office even now, at the mention of Matt’s name, it’s a contest between Dan and me to see who can pronounce it with a more faithful New York honk. “Strivers!” The merest hint of an audible “r” is grounds for immediate disqualification.

Bruccoli was a striver too. Like the teenager in the stacks that Salinger and Updike used to fantasize about, Bruccoli was a bookish kid from an unbookish household. One day he wandered sweatily from a stickball game into a candystore, recognized Fitzgerald’s name on a paperback spinner from a radio play the week before, picked up Gatsby, and he was off to the races. If young Matt was anywhere near as good at stickball as he was at reading, the loss to American sport was incalculable.

Sixty years later, in the home he and Arlyn finally made in Columbia, S.C., he was still that same book-drunk Katzenjammer Kid, only all grown up, and living in the best candystore any kid with a sweet tooth for books ever had. People natter on a lot about book-filled houses, and they go on a lot about light-filled houses, too. Thanks probably more to Arlyn, their house is the only one I’ve ever visited that was both.

I’m sorry I’ll never see Matt lunging across his study to show me yet another association copy he’d picked up for a song. I’m sorry we’ll never put on the screenwriters conference we brainstormed about for the last year. And, maybe more than anything, I’m sorry for all the Big Read cities full of teenagers he won’t get to visit now, and contaminate with his enthusiasm for Fitzgerald in particular and life in general.

It wasn’t easy, but I had to smile when I saw in his local paper’s obituary that Matt had died “at his Heathwood Circle home.” That only made sense. Matt could never have died in a hospital room. Not enough books in it.

If I forced myself to sum up in a word this man so congenitally besotted with the American language, that word would be “bookman.” Matt Bruccoli was a bookman the way old wharf rats talk about “watermen,” men who, whether navigating the sea, fishing it or just looking out longingly at it, are unimaginable away from the their chosen element. Matt Bruccoli’s element was books, and I can’t even write about him without using the technology he so disdained to set this remembrance of him in the only possible font for it: Bookman Old Style.

June 3, 2008
Washington, DC

Last week in Los Angeles, thousands of publishing professionals descended on BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual four-day orgy of gladhanding and handwringing. If you’re reading this, the prospect of everybody from our Readers Circle member Azar Nafisi to Andre Dubus III converging just down the street from L.A.’s Original Pantry (”We Never Close”) might have had you calling friends in town for spare couch space.

But if you prefer not to read, especially novels or poetry — in common with more than half of America at the moment–then you probably don’t give a flying Wallenda. But, as it turns out, this nonreading cohort’s days may be numbered. If unemployment, prison, or early death don’t get them, as they disproportionately do with folks who know how to read but don’t, The Big Read is gunning for them too.

I need not to tell readers of this blog (recently recognized for excellence by the National Association of Government Communicators — which may explain why nobody’s heard anything about this ) that The Big Read is getting more and more Americans to pick up and devour good, meaty novels alongside their neighbors. What’s news is that, in addition to Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Rudy Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, The Big Read and its Readers Circle have just added four new titles to our growing list:

• A special selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s surreal short fiction and brooding poetry will acquaint cities and towns with this short-lived titan of American literature, whose dread-soaked dreams pioneered both the horror story and detective fiction. His verse marks the first appearance of poetry on the national Big Read list and, after The Maltese Falcon, the second appearance of a black bird.
• Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, will join the list and introduce readers to the agile, compassionate storytelling of a modern master, Her novels of immigrant and Native American families on the Great Plains have drawn accolades as recently as this year for her new novel, The Plague of Doves.
• Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey investigates the lives of five pilgrims killed in a bridge collapse, and deepens over scarcely a hundred pages to explore the question — sadly more contemporary than ever — of why violent, untimely death spares most of us, yet searches out an unlucky few. Also, for the first time among the now-twenty Big Read novels, students and theater companies will be encouraged to enrich their local celebrations of Wilder’s work with a production of his most enduring play: Our Town.
• The connected short fiction of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried follows a platoon of young soldiers into the jungles of Vietnam, where the brutality of war, the joys of camaraderie, and death’s fateful lottery await them all — and where even a fresh-faced American girl, visiting her sweetheart, can go frighteningly native.

Coming up in the blog: Posts on each of these books and writers, a Great Gatsby cruise, Big Read orientation in Minneapolis, and scads more…

May 19, 2008
Weatherford, TX

Whenever somebody tells me a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes me so mad I want to spit. This bastard canard has more than a thousand fathers, but the most interesting share of the blame lands on two men who should’ve known better. A sentence reading “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book” appears in the novel Fathers and Sons by, of all people, the great writer Ivan Turgenev. But we owe the first appearance of the foul phrase in its present form to one Arthur Brisbane. A newspaper editor from Buffalo, Brisbane worked for yellow journalism tycoon William Randolph Hearst, which already explains a lot. In March of 1911, in a speech before the Syracuse Advertising Men’s Club, Brisbane advised his listeners to “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”

Katie Richardson’s Big Read poster for Weatherford, Texas., has a majesty almost, but not quite, beyond words.

Let’s take a minute here to consider this publisher’s audience: namely, a room full of admen. He’s exhorting them to emphasize pictures over words in their advertising. Could it possibly have escaped this newshound’s attention that pictures, in addition to their putative thousand words’ worth, also tend to require more column inches to do them justice than print ads do? I’m inclined to doubt it. As a newspaperman, in other words, Brisbane had every reason — except the truth, that is — to want a room full of advertisers to go tell their clients that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” What he really meant, though, was “a picture is worth a thousand dollars.”

I bring all this up not just because I no longer have a newspaper editor of my own urging me to get to the point quicker, but also because I’ve just returned from Weatherford, Texas, where the poster art by local designer Katie Richardson accompanied all materials for a stylish, just-concluded Big Read of Cather’s My Ántonia. Is that gorgeous or what?

But it all would have gone for naught, save for the Herculean efforts of principal grantee Weatherford College’s Linda Bagwell. From the look of her, Linda couldn’t decide whether to celebrate, cry, or pass out from happy exhaustion at Wednesday’s finale, and she more or less split the difference among the three.

Linda didn’t pull off a successful Big Read alone; no grantee ever does. Spirited volunteers had spent the afternoon squiring me through the Doss Heritage and Cultural Center, an impressive, appropriately barnlike new museum of the West, lately hosting Cather expert Betty Kort’s traveling photo show “Willa Cather and Material Culture.”

I also lucked into a tour of the Douglas Chandor Gardens, a botanical wonderland landscaped by a 20th-century British portraitist to both the great — Roosevelt, Churchill — and the merely solvent. As I understand it, Chandor had followed his Titian-haired socialite bride home to her native Weatherford to settle, right after the necessary divorces became final. My only regret is that I had just missed The Big Read party there, and with it the shade of Cather presiding silently under the wisteria arbor.

Dozens more partners had pitched in all month, including everybody from the Weatherford Independent School District to Tesky Western Wear — all to make Linda’s job a little easier. By the dozens she invited them up on the stage of the college’s capacious Alkek Fine Arts Center for a commemorative final picture, until it almost might’ve seemed more sensible to leave them in the audience after all, and invite the photographer on stage instead.

Practically last but nowhere near least was Katie Richardson, shyly accepting a deserved and unreserved ovation for her spectacular poster. It wasn’t worth a thousand words, but it had helped rope most of Parker County into an unforgettable April and May with My Ántonia. That’s a miracle beyond counting.

May 12 , 2008
Boston, MA

William Faulkner wrote a screenplay for the Joan Crawford movie of James M. Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce. Other hands eventually worked it over, but a copy survives. In it there’s a moment — and by the way, if any publisher were ever fool enough to collect my book reviews, There’s a Moment is the only title I ever wanted to give it — there’s a moment when Mildred’s African-American housekeeper consoles her over a lover’s death by singing the traditional spiritual “Steal Away.” In the margin of this never-shot scene Faulkner scrawled, “God damn! How’s that for a scene?”

I’ve always loved this story, because it gives the lie to the old canard that Faulkner hated screenwriting. Idiot producers he most assuredly despised, and he missed Mississippi something fierce, but he plainly took pride in the writing he did for the screen. He liked director Howard Hawks, for whom he co-adapted both Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (famously, the only picture to feature the talents of two, count ‘em, two Nobel-winning writers). And he loved Hawks script supervisor, Meta Carpenter, almost enough to leave his wife - - a tidbit that makes Faulkner’s great infidelity story, “Golden Land,” his only fiction set in Hollywood, Meta-fictional in more ways than one.

All of which would be a lot of ink to waste on a (so far, sadly) non-Big Read author, except that a) blogs don’t waste anything save, on an off day, time, and b) I finally got to hear “Steal Away” at Saturday’s triumphal finale to international folk-radio juggernaut WUMB’s Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird in Boston and Eastern Massachusetts. The renowned a cappella combo The LoveTones sang a whole medley of stirring, Mockingbird-appropriate spirituals. This set capped an inspiring morning that started with Janis Pryor asking me astute interview questions for WUMB’s award-winning public affairs show, and then adjourned to the University of Massachusetts-Boston’s large student union lounge for a morning of storytelling, Mockingbird-themed art, a short but sharp high-school theatrical adaptation of the novel, notably smart book discussions — e.g., Is Barack Obama the son Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell could’ve had in a saner world? — more chinwagging from me, and a special guest appearance by a convalescing raven from the Audubon Society. I guess mockingbirds are too intelligent to get themselves into any scrape that warrants much in the way of rehabilitation.

But all that was only the half of it. After an already full morning, resourceful founding WUMB general manager Pat Monteith and project director Mac McLanahan led a good 170 of the 230 assembled revelers down to the university’s Snowden Auditorium for the final judging round of the station’s contest for outstanding Mockingbird-related song. Though professional singer-songwriter Erik Balkey wound up winning for his heartfelt “Atticus Taught Me,” both Terry Kitchen’s happily political “Rainbow” and Mark Stepakoff’s Randy Newman-esque “String Him Up” had vocal partisans. My fellow jurors and I finally pronounced all five finalists worthy of inclusion on an upcoming CD, alongside Mockingbird-related offerings by professional troubadours including my co-judge Kate Campbell, who sang a too-short set filled with her witty, bittersweet songs of Alabam’ — especially my favorite, “The New South.”

So ended a day of good music, good radio, good fellowship, and better-than-average popcorn in Boston. Beantown doesn’t exactly have an illustrious history of interracial comity, but then neither does Topeka, where the first Big Read I ever saw brought the literature of Zora Neale Hurston into the very schoolhouse in which Brown v. Board of Education began. WUMB wants back in on The Big Read next year with Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I hope they make it in and I make it back. As the strains of WUMB’s signature “auterntic music” died away, I wished pooped but proud organizers Pat and Mac good luck. Then it was my turn to steal away…

May 7, 2008
Delaware Valley, PA

Do you know the term “run of show”? It’s performers’ lingo for the printed rundown of every segment in any given revue, vaudeville bill, or other raree show. Submitted below, with abiding gratitude and wonderment, is an annotated run of show for last Friday’s kickoff of Pike County’s The Grapes of Wrath Big Read at the Delaware Valley High School auditorium, just inside the jagged Pennsylvania slice of the Penn-New York-New Jersey border pie. . .

“JAZZ BAND playing as audience enters under the direction of Lance Rauh

1. WELCOME REMARKS by Jeffrey Stocker”

A word here about Jeff Stocker’s American Readers Theatre, the principal grantee for this Pike County Big Read of Steinbeck: Beats me why more theater companies don’t apply for Big Read grants. To go by this troupe, rep companies have the showmanship, the elbow grease, and the chutzpah to round up partners all over town and put a Big Read out where everybody can see it. One instance of this is the terrific school participation that A.R.T. has lined up…

“2. GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY” performed by DVHS Band And Chorus under the direction of Gordon Pauling.

I have to confess, I was a mite skeptical of that “GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY.” Stocker introduced it by recounting how Steinbeck asked to have the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” printed on the endpapers to the hardcover edition of The Grapes of Wrath. The novel’s title comes from the song’s lyrics — written just a couple-three blocks from here, by Julia Ward Howe in the Willard Hotel, as all of us with bumper stickers reading “I Brake for Historical Markers” will tell you. But if the lyrics come from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” why not sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Still, any misgivings about the musical offerings were allayed in short order by the return of the high-school Jazz Band, and by some glorious musical surprises farther down the bill…

3. Introduction of DVHS Administration and Faculty by Dr. Candice Finan

4. Art Show on screen projections while Jazz Band plays

5. RED RIVER VALLEY performed by Dingman/Delaware Middle School Chorus under the direction of Brian Krauss”

Here’s where some real thought had obviously gone into the program. Up on a scrim behind the singers passed a montage of carefully chosen New Deal images by Dorothea Lange and other photographers for the Farm Security Administration. “Red River Valley” made the perfect followup to this medley, since it crops up not just in the John Ford and Nunnally Johnson’s classic movie of The Grapes of Wrath, but in just about every other picture Ford ever directed.

As you might expect of a Big Read ringmastered by a theatrical company, the film component of the Delaware Valley’s Big Read is especially strong. They’re showing The Grapes of Wrath, of course, but whose inspired idea was it to show Robert Riskin’s It Happened One Night, or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo? Great ideas both, the first for its pure screwball 1930s escapism, the second for its loving evocation of what movies and moviehouses meant to a country sandbagged by the Depression. Speaking of which, the vintage unrestored Milford Theatre in town is a real bijou in the rough. Anybody out there looking for a treasure is hereby enjoined to follow the neon glow to on Catherine Street in Milford, PA..

“6. Introduction of FILM FESTIVAL with showing of original trailer for THE GRAPES OF WRATH by Greg Giblin

7. “SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW” sung by Natasha Paolucci, DVHS student

8. “THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES” sung by Ray Weeks, Pike County HS”

There’s nothing like an old standard, belted out for all its worth by a teenager born around the time its copyright expired. Natasha Paolucci fairly sang the stuffing out of Yip Harburg’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” followed by music teacher Ray Weeks plangently crooning “Thanks for The Memories.” Just the thing for a Big Read wayfarer like me, pining from the road for the Jonathan Schwartz-programmed High Standards channel of our sainted Big Read partner XM Satellite Radio…

“9. AMERICAN READERS THEATRE read from THE GRAPES OF WRATH screenplay with Jared Feldman

10. JOFFREY BALLET SCHOOL presents “THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD,” performed by Danny Ryan and Nicole Padilla, choreography by John Magnus”

By this point, I was discreetly weeping. The whole kickoff was turning into a perfect distillation of the month to come, a sampler of the kind of meal I regrettably never get to stick around for. American Readers Theatre finally got to shine with one early and then one late scene from Nunnally Johnson’s Grapes of Wrath screenplay. The latter was Tom Joad’s climactic “Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat” speech, which producer Darryl Zanuck used to take credit for with unwary interviewers — who didn’t that know it comes straight from the book.

Then came a mindblower. Turns out the choreographer John Magnus has a place in the area, so he corralled a couple of Joffrey dancers in from Chicago to perform a original pas de deux, set to Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Lovely, simply lovely.

“11. HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN,” performed by Sandy Stalter

12. CLOSING REMARKS by David Kipen, NEA Director of Literature, National Reading Initiatives

13. THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND,” performed by Natasha and Jared, with sing-along”

In between Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign song “Happy Days Are Here Again” and America’s shadow national anthem, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land “– in its true uncensored version, no small mercy — I took the microphone and snorfled out my lachrymose thanks for about double the allotted five minutes. Why had I never heard of Milford, Pennsylvania, before? Why haven’t you? All I know is, I wouldn’t have traded my aisle seat in the Delaware Valley High School Auditorium for Joel Cairo’s own orchestra seats at the Geary Theater in San Francisco.

There followed wine, cheese, and a whole lot of grapes, and at last a sorrowful look at the American flag bunting that became Abraham Lincoln’s impromptu death shroud, which reposes at, of all places, the Milford Historical Society. Then a festive wrap party hosted by Jeff Stocker and A.R.T. trouper Greg Giblin — who, I suspect, did a lot more of the heavy lifting for this thriving Big Read than he was letting on — and, belatedly, back to the nearby Port Jervis Comfort Inn for a warm bed and a too-early wake-up call. . .

April 23, 2008
Massilon, OH

As with umbrellas and rain, so with photographic equipment and spectacle. If you want to make something photogenic happen, just lose your camera. That’s how I found myself sitting Saturday night in the newly consecrated Fairless Middle School Auditorium in Western Stark County, Ohio, trying not to notice the astronomical adorability quotient of the father and son a couple of seats away. Since I got a voice-recognition device to do my blogging for me from Monroe, Michigan, last week, let’s see if I can do a camera’s work today:

Picture a small boy, too young to read but old enough to want to. He’s parked on his dad’s lap front row center, both of them listening to the Canton Symphony Orchestra String Quartet play, beautifully, a regrettably stingy three out of four movements of Dvorak’s American Quartet.

The kid and his dad have been sitting there since the program began an hour and a half ago with the same poised string quartet playing “Heliotrope Bouquet” as if Scott Joplin had arranged it for this very band. Some thought obviously went into both selections, since The Call of the Wild was written in 1903, three years before Joplin’s rag and ten years after the Dvorak.

Anyway, the pair then sat raptly through a cheerful welcome from Massillon Museum executive director Christine Fowler Shearer, who’s heroically shepherded this whole Big Read to the starting line, despite both staff turnover and the distraction of an ballot issue on which her budget depended. (The good guys won; did the Big Read help? Who can say?)

Next up onstage was me, drawing strenuous parallels between sled teams, string quarterts, four-partnered Big Reads and, so help me, quadrupeds in general. From the podium, I pointed out the kid as an example of the program’s indirect but maybe most important beneficiaries. Graciously, he didn’t squirm.

Then state representative Scott Oelslager stepped up to introduce the keynote speaker. Oelslager’s a jovial sort whose dad taught social studies thereabouts, and he still narrates with almost explicable pride the day he saw Roberto Clemente throw out Willie Mays trying to stretch a triple at Forbes Field. No fidgeting from the kid about that.

Then came Prof. Jeanne Campbell Reesman of the University of Texas San Antonio, author of several books about Jack London, with two more on the way later this year. She delivered a university-grade keynote about “The Call of the Wild as a Slave Narrative” that made believers of the whole crowd. Think about it: Buck is lured away from his idyllic life in California, made captive to a massive enterprise, but winds up free to tell the tale. If it isn’t impolitic to suggest, maybe The Call of the Wild isn’t the only such narrative here at the NEA.

The kid was politeness itself through Dr. Reesman’s talk. How much of the nuances he caught, I can’t vouch for, but he had manners to burn.

Then the string quartet came back for the Dvorak, and I got my Kodak moment, albeit — cursed be it — without my Kodak. This kid, his feet swaying gently to the music, his eye contact unrequired by musicians focused purely on each other, finally lets his attention stray to…the NEA’s Readers Guide to The Call of the Wild. Arms around him, his father is reading it too.

That’s how I want to remember them. Volunteer Margy Vogt snapped a nice picture of them afterward, but it doesn’t do the pair justice. The image of these two, dad reading about Jack London, his son looking at pictures of the Klondike Gold Rush and maps of the Yukon, is The Big Read I know, and only wish everybody could see. . . .

April 19, 2008
Washington, DC

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.”

While scholars debate the historical veracity of the poem that begins with these lines, no one can deny the power of its galloping musicality, evocative imagery, and memorable lines. Since his death in 1882, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may have lost some of his appeal, but in the 19th century, he was undoubtedly America’s most popular poet. From ballads such as “A Psalm of Life” to sonnets such as “Mezzo Cammin” — and especially for his longer narrative poems Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha — Longfellow’s work remains a vital part of American literature and American history.

Inspired by the continued success of Poetry Out Loud, the NEA and the Poetry Foundation unite once again — this time in a pilot off-shoot of The Big Read, to celebrate great American poets and the nation’s historic poetry locales.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was chosen as the first poet in this newly expanding part of The Big Read. We created and produced educational materials on the poetry and life of Longfellow, which were given to all three Literary Landmarks that celebrate Longfellow’s legacy: Longfellow’s birthplace in Portland, Maine; Longfellow’s long-time residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn was the first grant recipient for these new poetry Big Reads. The public programming for The Big Read: The Poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began on Longfellow’s birthday, February 27, when NEA Chairman Dana Gioia gave an inspiring speech on Longfellow’s life and works at the Martha-Mary Chapel near the Wayside Inn. Steve Young, Program Director at the Poetry Foundation, attended this opening event, along with NEA staff — Felicia Knight, Shana Chase, and Erika Koss.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn is located on the Old Post Road in Sudbury, MA. Photo by Erika Koss

After dinner, Steve and I joined our fellow travelers Charles Calhoun (Longfellow biographer), Jane Wald (Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum), and Cindy Hall Kouré (Project Director for the Longfellow Big Read) in the oldest room of the Inn, where the Howe family’s tavern started in 1716. As the fire burned low and snow fell outside, we enjoyed a late night of camaraderie and poetry-reading. As we five had all travelled that day from four different parts of America –Maine, Illinois, Washington, DC, and Massachusetts — we inadvertently re-created the ambiance of Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn. (You can listen to the poems we read, as well as lectures by Chairman Gioia and Charles Calhoun, at http://longfellow.wayside.org/html/listen.htm.)

The next day, Charles and I spoke to several classes at Sudbury’s Lincoln High School, highlighting several poems by Longfellow — “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” “The Cross of Snow,” and “The Children’s Hour” — and shedding light on several important moments in Longfellow’s life, especially the tragic death by fire of Fanny Appleton, the poet’s second wife. Charles and I were impressed by the many insightful comments made by students. We were grateful to the teachers who welcomed us into their classrooms and who included Longfellow as part of their curriculum because of The Big Read.

Through March and April, events were scheduled at the Wayside Inn as well as at the Goodnow Library, the Sudbury Public Schools, and the Sudbury Senior Center. Highlights included talks by Christopher Bing, who engraved and illustrated the children’s book The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere , and Colleen Boggs, a Dartmouth College professor who discussed how Longfellow’s work as a translator introduced modern European languages into American higher education. In addition, the thirteen singers of The Longfellow Chamber Chorus from Portland, Maine, presented an international selection of 19th, 20th, and 21st century vocal settings of Longfellow poems.

The Wayside Inn will conclude its Big Read programming on Patriot’s Day, April 19, by hosting a community read of “Paul Revere’s Ride.” During brunch at the Inn, members of the Sudbury Ancient Fyfe and Drum Companie will provide music.

It seems most fitting to end this blog with the words of Cindy Hall Kouré, whose dedication, creativity, and hard work made the Wayside Inn’s Big Read such a success. She summarized their experience with these words:

“The past six weeks have been wonderful, with friends and neighbors coming out not only to express their appreciation of Longfellow’s poetry but also their affection for the old Inn. The staff at the Wayside Inn have enjoyed the book discussions — our participants have shown that they are both literature and history enthusiasts. Longfellow lends himself well to discussions of topics important in New England history: the Transcendentalists, slavery and the Abolitionist movement, and maritime History — not to mention the history of people’s houses! Thanks to the NEA for a great community experience.”

April 16, 2008
Washington, DC

“Writing is power.” If I were a school teacher for a day, that’s the first thing I’d tell my students. “Don’t be afraid of a blank page of paper,” I’d declare. “With paper and a pen, you can create an entire universe. You might even change our world.” But would students believe me?

I got the chance to find out last week in Waukee, Iowa, when talking with middle and high school students. Seventh graders studying poetry at Waukee’s Middle School laughed at me when I claimed to be able to “control the space/time continuum.” That is, until I wrote two sentences on the board.

Dan went to bed at nine o’clock.

The next morning, he ate oatmeal for breakfast.

It’s a simplistic example but, between those two sentences we jump forward in time at least nine hours.

“Authors,” I told the students, “make time-travelers of us all.” Great writing can take us from the sublime garden of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Peonies,” to Ray Bradbury’s futuristic world of Fahrenheit 451, to Edith Wharton’s old New York in The Age of Innocence. What do these works of art have in common? They each began with a blank sheet of paper.

Cynthia Ozick transports us ahead three decades between the opening short story of The Shawl, which takes place during the Holocaust , and the book’s second section, set in the 1970s. As readers we accept this without reservation. The author has grasped us with her capable hand. We follow her without hesitation.

Waukee High School English teacher Ann Hanigan’s honors tenth graders stunned me with their insightful comments about the similarity between Rosa Lublin’s personality before the horrors of the Holocaust changed her life forever and that of her niece, Stella, thirty years later — after the pair had settled in the United States. They saw how each woman cared for the other, finding strength when the other was weak. In their eyes, The Shawl is as much a love story between these two women as it is “Holocaust fiction.”

I wish Cynthia Ozick could have been a fly on the wall of that classroom! The night before, she had graciously appeared at the Waukee Public Library via an internet conference, answering questions for more than an hour and a half. Charming and witty, Ozick immediately put everyone in the room at ease despite the book’s somber subject matter. The Big Read participants adored her.

The Waukee community benefited from the hard work of four fabulous women. Assistant Library Director Devon Murphy-Peterson and Rebecca Johnson, the President of the Waukee Library Board of Trustees, applied for The Big Read grant and plotted every aspect of programming. They recruited Ann Hanigan, the phenomenal high school English teacher, to encourage local middle and high school students to get involved. Jane Olson of the Waukee Area Arts Council added a wealth of knowledge about how to get local residents to attend events. “People come out to support their kids,” she told me. “Getting young people involved is so important.”

Perhaps nothing illustrates Waukee’s commitment to reaching young people better than The Big Read’s final event, a party at the library celebrating six weeks of reading and discussing The Shawl. Middle and high school students read their winning essays about the importance of literature in their lives. The Attic Door Theatre Company, a troop of teenage girls, performed a choral stage adaptation of the novel. Waukee High School culinary students baked truly tasty treats. Julie Kaufman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines surprised everyone by presenting the Waukee High School with funding for two teachers to travel to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

During all of these festivities the music of Eastern Europe was performed with zest by a local klezmer band, the Java Jews. Small children (and some not-so-small adults) were dancing the polka between the stacks. By the end of the evening, I was so moved that I could barely speak. Literature came alive that night — changing, transporting, and empowering us all.