March 26, 2007
Galesburg, Illinois

Reading a book with your neighbors, as the Big Read encourages people to do, is like seeing a movie with a live audience. It’s the exception. More people will always read alone than in a group, just as more people nowadays watch movies by themselves than with a crowd. But, as any fogey will tell you — there’s nothing like watching a movie in a theater. And there’s nothing like reading a book with company, whether it’s your family, your English class, or, as in this photo, 600 citizens of Galesburg, Illinois.

That’s roughly how many readers packed the beautiful 1916 Galesburg Orpheum for a free kickoff screening of The Grapes of Wrath last week, which I had the honor of introducing. There’s a protocol to these introductions: You thank your hosts, you explain why you’re there, and you talk about the book until folks start to fidget. In my case, I also like to snap a photo of the audience, to remind my office — especially myself — of the Big Read’s ultimate constituency.

As with anything done more than once, these little talks can start to feel insincere even when they aren’t. As I pressed Galesburg Big Read calendars into departing moviegoers’ hands after the show, I had my doubts about whether the Big Read had accomplished anything that night beyond just showing a great Henry Fonda picture and, just maybe, whetting people’s appetite for the book.

So imagine my surprise when right there in the lobby, beside the piles of bagged canned goods donated by the crowd as the price of admission, easily half a dozen Galesburgers came up and made me promise to thank the entire NEA Big Read office for bringing them the Big Read. Of course, this also reflects all the hard work put in on the local level by dogged organizer Gary Tomlin and his selfless volunteers. Just as much, though, I think it bespeaks the audience’s happy astonishment that somebody in DC actually worries and cares about them between elections. As with moviegoing, as with reading, citizenship itself is something best practiced not just alone, but with a few hundred friends and neighbors.

March 16, 2007
Baltimore, Maryland

As if it weren’t challenging enough to remember which Big Read city I’m in from one whistle stop to the next, I’m about to write up my impressions of Maryland from here in Galesburg, Illinois. So if I start rhapsodizing about the lonesome whippoorwills and waving wheatfields of Baltimore, you’ll know I’ve finally gone over the double yellow line for good.

Baltimore was a blast, but I’ll skip lightly over the funky charms of its Hampden neighborhood — where most of this tightly focused Big Read is based — the better to zoom in on David’s Restaurant and the good-naturedly contentious book talk I found there. Things began innocently enough, with principal sponsor Maryland Public Television’s Allen Hicks welcoming a busload of lunchers from Pat Chalfant’s local senior center. I fought back a smile at the center’s name, Action in Maturity, but shortly I came to recognize it as simple truth in advertising.

The Deputy Mayor got things rolling with a proclamation declaring this Big Read Day in Baltimore, and soon we all tucked into a pyramid of sandwiches. Local eighth-grader Robert K. Berger got up and delivered a heartening essay about how several of his classmates reading To Kill a Mockingbird went from “When is there going to be some action?” to pronouncing it their “new favorite book.” After that, on a break from promoting his book about incompetent medicine’s role in the death of President Garfield, writer Bill Schroeder took a more historical look at the writing and reception of Mockingbird.

And then, the fireworks. Professor Siobhan Wright, named for the great Irish stage and screen actress Siobhan McKenna and therefore perhaps fated to teach film, showed a couple of scenes from the movie of Mockingbird and proceeded to fault it — and, to a lesser extent, the book — for borderline racist attitudes toward its black characters.

Let me just say that if you ever really want to get a rise out of an audience, calling a book and movie they’ve loved for 45 years racist is an excellent way to start. One by one the seniors, black and white alike, took this unassuming junior professor to task for “superimposing” contemporary hindsight on mid-20th-century Southern liberalism.

Diplomatically Washingtonian to a fault, I sought consensus. I tried to placate the combatants by allowing as how the character of Calpurnia, the black domestic who’s a virtual mother to the Finch children, didn’t offend me, but that having the black gallery stand as Atticus left the courtroom was maybe a little much. Paternalism? “It was a sign of respect!”, one woman shot back, and, chastened, I sank back into watchful federal bemusement.

Later, admiring vintage Mockingbird-era chiffarobes in a local thrift shop, I marveled at the capacity of a half-century-old story to get forty senior citizens and an associate professor of English and film — each previously secure in their ideas of it as a classic and a chestnut, respectively — talking to each other. And all the while, there sat Robert K. Berger next to his proud teacher, Ms. Gallagher, listening to a bunch of adults argue over a book because it’s something important, and raising his hand to get in on the action…

March 1, 2007
Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta, capital city, in Chattahoochee R. Valley among Blue Ridge foothills, is an almost aggressively modern metropolis…Despite its strong ties with Eastern capital & atmosphere of commercialism & efficiency, it is still fundamentally a Southern city, & as in rural Ga., entertainment & sociability are largely home affairs…
–The WPA’s Georgia: A Guide to Its Towns and Countryside, abridged

To Atlanta, then. To AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference, the annual kaffeeklatsch for thousands of scribblers enrolled in, hundreds teaching in, and a few actually studied in, America’s creative-writing industrial complex. As director of the NEA’s literature grantmaking programs, my position here is roughly analogous to my old status as the San Francisco Chronicle’s book critic at Book Expo America, the annual trade convention of the book business. Essentially, the rigamarole goes like this: Everybody is nice to me, many under the largely misguided impression that I personally can do them some good. My role here is really to keep learning as much as I can about the state of the field these days, to reassure people that readers and writers have a friend in Washington, and, to a lesser extent, to get the word out about the other half of my day job, the Big Read.

As the NEA’s initiative to help restore reading to its rightful place at the heart of American life, the Big Read has lasting consequences for everybody penned onto the show floor at the Atlanta Hilton between now and Sunday. If reading numbers in America keep tanking, we’re all kidding ourselves. We’re headed toward a society where not just all the writers, but all the serious readers in the country could fit into Centennial Park. And when that happens, you can pretty much kiss this sweet little experiment in representative democracy goodbye.

Cheered up yet? Me, either. The good news is, I’m about to spend a long weekend with a few thousand people materially invested in making sure that doesn’t happen. I only know a fraction of them yet, but that’s sure to change in the hours and years ahead. If there’d been an AWP half a century ago, just think of all the writers on the Big Read’s ever-growing list who would’ve flown into Atlanta with me this morning. Maybe not Ray Bradbury, who doesn’t fly, or Harper Lee, who’s not much of a joiner, but surely Zora Neale Hurston, or Ernest Hemingway — possibly carpooling together from Florida, flouting open-container laws across multiple states. Despite themselves, writers can be a sociable tribe. To be sure, plenty of great writers are sitting this weekend out, or don’t even know about it. But the sheer value of talent and patience here — when not inversely proportioned — gives me hope, or at least tides me over.