2012 Southern Festival of Books, Third Day: YA Panel and "I just love listening to them read"

The weather Sunday was very blustery, with wind gusts approaching 30 mph.  When I arrived in Nashville from the west, I was worried that the strong rain that was falling when I left would greet me soon after my arrival.  Luckily, the rain did not fall, although the strong winds did force several organizations to move their materials inside the War Memorial building.

I only attended two 90 minute sessions, the 12-1:30 PM panel discussion on Middle Grades Fantasy (featuring Kelly Barnhill, A.J. Hartley, and Catherynne M. Valente) and the 2-3:30 reading featuring 2012 National Book Award-nominated author Ben Fountain, debut novelist Jennifer duBois, and recent NYT Bestselling writer Peter Heller.  Despite this relative lack of sessions, overall the two Sunday were the best out of the three days, high praise considering the excellent quality of the sessions I attended Friday and Saturday.

The YA/Middle Grades Fantasy panel intrigued me as much because of my work over the past thirteen years as a middle school and high school English and social studies teacher as for my occasional reading of YA fiction, realist and speculative alike.  The audience was a mixture of mothers, children, and other interested adults such as myself.  The moderator I thought did a good job of creating a mood for active audience participation and there were some excellent questions asked about why the authors chose to write YA fiction (each also is known for their "adult" fictions), how they had to learn how to write for YA audiences, the challenges involved in crafting the stories, and the primal emotions (in particular, fear) that were a featured part of their fictions.  Each of the three did an excellent job answering these questions, as they shared how their lives as former children and, in the case of Barnhill and Hartley, parents helped them shape their approaches to writing YA fiction.  I find myself wishing I had taken notes during the panel, because there were so many interesting points made that I am failing to recall the specifics here.

After the session ended, I went to the signing, where during the queue I struck up a conversation with a YA blogger about reviewing.  I regret that I did not get her name and blog, as it was a good but somewhat brief conversation.  I then got the chance to talk with Barnhill and Valente, talking a bit about their short fictions that I liked and about a few friends we had in common.  It was a pleasure getting to talk with each of them and I will probably be reviewing their recently-released YA books here in the near future.

The 2-3:30 reading/discussion with Fountain, duBois, and Heller was equally excellent.  Fountain and duBois were very good readers, so good in fact that when it was time for Heller to speak, he said that he just "love listening to them read" before talking briefly about the power of auditory reading for him and many other readers.  There were questions regarding influences and each of the three noted authors that were among my favorites:  García Márquez (Fountain), Nabokov (duBois), and various poets from around the world (Heller).  Each made their works (I had read Fountain's and 1/3 of Heller's before the session) sound even more intriguing when they talked about what led to them writing their works.

Again, the signing time led to some interesting conversations, first with a woman who also knew some in the industry (her name I failed to catch, alas) and then with the authors.  With Heller, I talked a bit about poetry and asked him if he had read Forrest Gander's National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated book (he hadn't, but was interested in it).  Fountain and I talked briefly about García Márquez and how he read in both translation and in Spanish.  After he expressed regret about not being able to read some of the emerging Latin American writers in Spanish, I did note there were a few starting to come out, which somehow led into talking about translation, where I did mention my freelance work as a translator, which interested him a lot (I should note that I didn't make myself out to be a big-time translator, but someone who was lucky enough to be offered the chance to translate two short stories). 

Two things came to mind when I left:  the first is that often even the most successful of writers are fans of literature (the homages paid throughout the three days is testimony to this) and secondly, so many of the writers were humble, perhaps because of the difficulties involved in becoming a writer.  It was fun hearing (and briefly, chatting with them) these authors, both on Sunday and the other two days, talking about their love of literature in its many forms.  The word "festival" does a much better job in describing this communal sense than the "convention" term I often hear associated with SF/F gatherings.  Here there were poets, short fiction writers, novelists, historians, social activists, and singers (I did get to hear a snippet of the TSU theatre group singing a musical version of Alice Walker's The Color Purple; it was excellent) scattered across three buildings in downtown Nashville.  There was no real artificial division between the "literary" and the "genre" writers, nor were there any that I saw among the audience members (I did see several at multiple sessions).  Sometimes, readers (and some writers, I'll admit) get too caught up in the "us" vs. "them" categorizations that they fail to see the broadness of the spectrum of literature being produced today.  That is why the inclusiveness of the Southern Festival of Books appeals to me so much, as there was so much there for so many that my biggest regret was not getting to see another dozen or so authors who also intrigued me.  With luck, I'll be in attendance next year.  But for now, I have a lot of reading to do, as I bought over a dozen books over the three days.

2012 Southern Festival of Books: Books Bought/Signed

I didn't arrive home until late tonight (few other stops besides the Festival today), so it will be either tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday before I compose a write-up of the third and final day of the 2012 Southern Festival of Books (two outstanding sessions and very good signing/talks in the queue moments to share in detail then).  But what I thought I'd highlight were the books that I bought there (and a few that I owned prior that were signed), as well as list a few writers whose works I will buy shortly, as I didn't have the money to spare for all the ones I wanted:

Bought/Signed: (in chronological order)

Friday:

Padgett Powell, You & Me; Edisto (You & Me was excellent; might review in near future)

Mark Jarman, Bone Fires (poetry)

Joseph B. Ingle, The Inferno:  A Southern Morality Tale (non-fiction; deals with the last years of Phillip Workman and Ingle's advocacy for him)

Will D. Campbell and Richard C. Goode (eds.), And the Criminals with HIm:  Essays in Honor of Will D. Campbell and All the Reconciled (non-fiction; religious activists against capital punishment/abuses in the justice system)


Saturday:

Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

Junot Díaz, This is How You Lose Her (story collection revolving around a singular theme; read it as an e-book, but wanted a print, signed edition to go with the other two books of his I got signed)


Sunday:

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (YA)

Kelly Barnhill, Iron Hearted Violet (YA)

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (although I bought, read, and loved the e-book edition a few days ago, couldn't pass up the chance to have a print edition personalized to me)

Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes (curious about this debut novel after listening to her speak)


Bought/Received as Review Copy Prior to Festival/Signed

Saturday:

Tupelo Hassman, Girlchild  (highly recommend this debut novel)

Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet (solid work, verging to very good)

Junot Díaz, Drown (excellent story collection); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (outstanding)


Sunday:

Catherynne M. Valente, Yume No Hon:  The Book of Dreams (highly recommended)

Peter Heller, The Dog Stars (received this recently as a review copy; only 1/3 into it, but it's very good so far)


Books I Will Purchase in Very Near Future (obviously not signed)

Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine (her reading from the novel intrigued me)

Adam Wilson, Flatscreen (if you ever get the chance to hear him read, take it.  His reading was that good and the scenes he read were enough for me to add it to the to-buy list)

A.J. Hartley, Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact (YA novel from a Shakespearean studies professor.  Interesting panel he was on with Barnhill and Valente)


Book I Read in the Past but Didn't Get Signed Due to Gifting it to Another

Saturday:

Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles (very good)

So yes, I want/bought at least one book from each of the authors whose sessions I attended over the past three days.  Considering that two were just named finalists for this year's National Book Awards in Fiction, another two (at least) were selected this year in Amazon's Best Books of the Month, and others are either writers whose works I've enjoyed greatly in the past or have received prior acclamations for their prose/poetry, I think it's safe to say most, if not all, of the works listed above will be worth my time and perhaps yours.

Let me know which ones, if any, you'd like to see me review in the future.

2012 Southern Festival of Books, Day Two: Mark Helprin gives a sort of anti-reading, family novels, and Junot Díaz on privilege and biculturalism

Today was an even busier day than yesterday.  I attended two full sessions and caught parts of two others (I had to head out of the festival area for an hour for a personal matter) and since I did not record any of the sessions (and for the latter sessions, no suitable photos were taken), fragile, flawed memory will have to suffice.

Mark Helprin in the midst of his non-reading reading session

The first session I attended was the 12:30-1:30 PM session in the Nashville Public Library's Grand Reading Room with acclaimed writer Mark Helprin, who ostensibly was there to promote his just-released novel In Sunlight and in Shadow (I read the first 110 pages while waiting in various lines and the prose is gorgeous), set in post-WWII New York.  But in an entertaining 65 minute session that went beyond its allotted time, Helprin talked about memory, the weaknesses involved in reading aloud, eidetic memory, the shortcomings of reducing humanity to desires and not acknowledging that individually we can construct grander personal meanings out of those near and dear to us.  And yet despite his near-total avoidance of reading aloud from the book, I got the sense (which the pages I read later supported to a degree) that he did more to talk about a possible "what the book is" than if he had just sat down and read selected passages.  Not too bad for an author who said in his first years as a novelist that a TV host/interviewer threw him off the set of a Cleveland morning show for being "the most difficult interviewee" she had ever had (the punch line then being that in the 1930s this host, an American Jewess, had even managed due to a freak of accident to get an interview with Hitler).

While I was waiting in a long line (about 15-20 minutes, or long enough for me to be a few minutes late to my next session), I read the following passage and got Helprin to write a comment on it:

Helprin's 100 Shades of Gray, twice as good (at least) than the original.

 I was about five minutes late for the 2-3:30 session on family lives in novels, featuring debut novelists Adam Wilson, Tupelo Hassman's (whose Girlchild I had read and thought was very strong), and Lydia Netzer.  Due to a conflict with a personal appointment elsewhere in town, I only managed to hear the authors' read before I had to leave for an hour just when they had begun to take questions from the audience.  I will note that Wilson is a very strong, emotional reader and Netzer and Hassman read passages that were poignant (I will be buying Wilson and Netzer's works in the very near future; alas, I couldn't today and thus no signed copies).

Wilson, Hassman, and Netzer at the reading.

I was able to get back to the Festival site around 3:45, with just enough time to get my copy of Girlchild signed before I caught the last five minutes of Ben Marcus and Karen Thompson Walker's joint reading.  All I caught was a question for both about editing and Walker talking about how her experiences as an editor did inform some of her own writing choices, but that it wasn't necessarily an ideal situation.  I had already given my copy of Walker's book to a friend, so I only was able to get Marcus' latest, The Flame Alphabet.  While in line, chatted briefly with him about how I had read some of his stories in Conjunctions and other pubs, which led to a very brief convo about anthologies and cross-genre fiction.  Wish I could have heard their full talks, as both Marcus and Walker sounded impressive for the five minutes I got to listen to them.

But the highlight of the day has to be the hilariously profane and yet profound talk/Q&A with Pulitzer Prize-winning (and just nominated National Book Award finalist) Junot Díaz from 4-5 PM.  Díaz used humor to highlight some very uncomfortable truths that writers and readers in various genres often try to push under the rug:  the issue of racial epithets and when nigger/nigga is used, by whom, and how it is decoded; the issue of being of two cultures, neither of which is fully comfortable with those of the Dominican Diaspora who embrace both (in the case of Díaz and his friends/family/characters) "Jersey" and "Santo Domingo"; and the privileges that prevent certain writers, usually white males, from understanding just how poorly they understand women and how that is reflected in the works they write and the books that they read and promote.  There were some in the audience who applauded loudly at this, while others looked sheepish.  However, no one tried to gainsay this.  Perhaps this is because the audience was not primarily white male, but I like to think it is because most members recognized the truth in his statements.  He also had this funny line regarding a question of those who might criticize him for saying something wrong in either English or Spanish (my paraphrase):  "Yeah, I sometimes hear it when I misconjugate a verb or say something wrong, but shit, my negro, I know my fucking Quenya!"

Due to the good 100-150 people waiting to get their books signed, I didn't get to talk with Díaz more than a minute or so while he signed my copies of his three books.  But I did ask him if he had read the recent Salon piece criticizing the National Book Award for not recognizing "genre" writers.  He said that he had and that the piece was poorly-argued (he didn't say it was because a lot of his writings can be construed as "genre" and that he is working on a SF novel, Monstro, currently scheduled for 2013 publication, but that was my first thought when I saw that piece and the jackdaw piece on io9) and that he had seen similar things argued, with similar flaws, when it came to the British Booker Prize.  Would have loved to have asked him more on this, but he truly was busy, perhaps the busiest of any of the authors I had seen this year (even Helprin had a line that was only 1/3 or so of Díaz's and Helprin's was easiest the second-largest I saw).  Now many of the opinions Díaz expressed in this talk and in response to me can be found online in various recent interviews, so I would suggest searching those out.

I know this summary is a bit brief, but feel free to ask for more details if you want.  Tomorrow, I plan on attending a noon session on middle grades fantasy that will include Kelly Barnhill and Catherynne M. Valente on the panel.  Then there is a 2-3 PM session with debut novelist Peter Heller (The Dog Stars) before I finish with a 3:30-4:30 session involving journalist/columnist Leonard Pitts.  More on those sometime tomorrow evening.

2012 Southern Festival of Books, Day One: Things "Serious Fiction" should do, Poetry, and Anti-Capital Punishment

This year, I decided to attend all three days of the 2012 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, TN, one of the oldest American book/literary festivals.  The lineup this year contained several appealing authors (there are roughly 200 listed for the three days) covering a wide range of genres, from Southern literature, general non-fiction, religious fiction, poetry, cooking, and other literary genres.  Friday (and Sunday) was only a half-day of activity, beginning at 12 PM and with activities, panels, and signings lasting a bit past 5 PM.  Unlike most conventions/festivals, attendance here is free (although parking around the Capitol ranged from $10-20 for the day) and the sessions were spread out from the War Memorial building, Legislative Plaza, and the main branch of the Nashville Public Library.

The first session I attended was the 12 PM reading at the Nashville Public Library done by University of Florida MFA professor Padgett Powell, who was promoting his most recent book, You & Me.  Powell's session was marked with some rather entertaining self-deprecating humor with a near pitch-perfect deadpan delivery, as he read for about 40 minutes from various sections of You & Me before fielding questions from an active audience.  Some of the questions sparked some interesting answers from an audience that I estimate was around 50.  When asked about his experiences with editors, Powell noted that it has been his experience that out of 10 things that an editor might single out, around 8 of them will be spot-on criticisms, 1 will be something that could be quibbled about, and 1 the author has to learn to fight over for the story's best interest.   He also shared some anecdotes about how sometimes the marketing aspect of fiction can sway the editorial, such as the blurb to You & Me referencing Beckett's Waiting for Godot despite Powell noting that he had not read that work in decades and that it has really very little in common with it (having read the first third of it, I would agree with him, although I could see a very vague connection between the two Southern narrators bullshitting and the two characters in Beckett's work).

Another question was a loaded one that Powell deflected succinctly.  The questioner asked that with a growing emphasis in workshops for writers to avoid writing about women if they were men, whites writing about other cultures, or other such examples of cultural appropriation, what would Powell advise.  His response was simply that everything is fair game, provided one is careful with what s/he writes.  A follow-up question emerged regarding science fiction and how a writer of "serious fiction" could go about writing it.  Powell admitted he was not well-read in SF and that he is distrustful of works which were more flights of imagination, yet he said that as long as a work contained "depth of human emotion" that it would be a work of "serious fiction," regardless of whether or not there was science fictional element.  While doubtless some reading this might be imagining a sneer or snarl from him while answering, I would say it was rather acknowledging his own limitations and preferences as a reader while leaving open the possibility of works that are both "serious fiction" and SFnal in nature.

After purchasing copies of You & Me and Powell's earlier work, Edisto, I attended the 1:30-2:30 session at the Nashville Public Library where poet Mark Jarman read from his 2011 collection of new and reprinted poems, Bone Fires.  It was my first poetry reading and Jarman's poems, both the ones in the book and a brand-new one that he tested in front of the audience of about 30, contain a sense of searching for faith and identity that reminded me of my own struggles over the past 20 years.  In turns funny and sad, piercing and deflecting, these poems were very good when I read about 60 pages of them while waiting for the session, but Jarman's delivery made them resonate even more.  Looking forward to reading the rest of them in the near future.

After getting my copy of Bone Fires signed, I headed over to Legislative Plaza to listen to the 3-4 PM talk given by Richard Goode, Joseph Ingle, and three others (including former prosecutor Preston Shipp) who collaborated with Goode on his and Will Campbell's anthology And the Criminals with Him:  Essays in Honor of Will D. Campbell and All the Reconciled talking about prisoners on Tennessee's death row and, in the case of Ingle's contribution, Philip Workman, who was executed in Tennessee in 2007.   Ever since I read Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song in 1999 and perhaps a bit before then, I have been a sometimes vocal opponent of capital punishment.  In the case of Workman, I participated in a 2001 letter-writing campaign by Amnesty International to ask for clemency (a stay was granted at the last minute for new evidence to be heard).

Because of the nature of the work I've done over the past eight years working with troubled teens who ended up in residential treatment centers, I very rarely talk about my experiences working with them.  Knowing that some were already convicted in advance because of their backgrounds, watching some of them later be charged (and in most cases, convicted) of first- and second-degree murder, armed robbery, and other acts of violence, it was a struggle at times to see humanity within them.  Yet working with them taught me to see their struggles, their confusion, their desire to be liked, even if those desires led to horrific acts.  The narratives presented by the five who spoke were poignant, as I found myself remembering several residents who tried to find faith within themselves even when it seemed that others had consigned them to the role of "monster."  Ingle's discussion of his book about working as an advocate for Workman, The Inferno, took Dante's poem as a metaphorical spot, referencing not just Ingle's own crisis pre-Workman (he had worked as a Death Row counselor for several years before needing a break in the early 1980s) as that Dantean "black wood," but also the levels of suffering that Workman went through from the botched robbery that led to a policeman's death (forensic evidence withheld during the original trial seemed to indicate that it was a fellow officer's bullet that killed the other officer) to the appeals, the last-minute stays, and his eventual execution.  It was a moving reading (Ingle asked for pardon that he could not read one planned section, due to his fear that he would not be able to keep his emotions in check) and after the session, I bought both books listed above, in order to remember those we so often dehumanize as "monsters" who deserve to die or at least to rot in jail.

Tomorrow will be a longer day, as I am trying to decide if I will attend the 11 AM session with Dan Chaon or if I'll wait to arrive for the 12:30 session with Mark Helprin.  There will be sessions involving Ben Marcus, Tupelo Hassmann, and Junot Díaz that I will try to attend, although I may miss one or more of the 2-4 PM sessions (the Díaz starts at 4).   I'm curious to see if the audience will be younger tomorrow and Sunday, as over half of the audience at the first two sessions seemed to be at least 50 years or older, while the anti-death penalty session was a mixture of college age to elderly audience members.