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.

April 4, 2008
Staunton, VA

This is either the most revolutionary idea I’ve ever had, or the dumbest. But first let’s just throw up some eye candy, shall we? I always like to put some art up to leaven these otherwise indigestible lozenges of prose, so here is “The Big Read Blues,” courtesy of the Staunton, Va., Big Read — about which more in a minute. So cock an ear at this and then I will be right back.

Cindy’s Big Read Blues (mp3)

I’ve shown you that because I want to make a point about the viability of things other than the printed word as a way to draw attention to, and enthusiasm for, the printed word — because what you are reading right now is, with a little luck, my first-ever dictated post. That is to say, I am enlisting oral culture in the service of written culture. I am going to make this maiden bow slightly hasty, but my rationalization for it is that blogging — which I can now do out loud thanks to a new Web site that transcribes dictation — rewards haste. Blogs are supposed to be spontaneous, and my tendency to bloviate at great length about The Big Read is probably, at bottom, at odds with the medium. It’s like using oil paints to write a novel.

This Web site supposedly makes it possible for you to call a number and speak what’s on your mind, in the same way that Steve Allen used to do, carrying a tape recorder with him at all times to keep track of his stray ideas. Well, if it worked for the man who’s used it to compose “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” then perhaps this is indeed the start of something big.

Because this is a shakedown cruise, I’m going to consume a little of it with a couple of links. I’ll be back in a second, but first I want to show you an example of just how spellbinding the spoken word can be as a means of encouraging folks to discover the written word. Here’s Dr. Edward Scott giving a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird in Staunton, Virginia:

http://www.newsleader.com/assets/mp3/AA102721311.MP3 [50 minutes]

Pretty powerful, eh? Now, so you shouldn’t think I’ve gone over to the dark, antitextual side completely, here’s Cindy Corell, community conversations editor at The News Leader in Staunton, Va., reacting in the paper to what you just heard:

http://www.newsleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080316/NEWS01/
803160323/1002/rss01

The literary essay as a form of daily journalism lives! Cindy followed up the other day with this email:

“We are having a blast! Of course, [our book is] To Kill a Mockingbird, and book clubs have jumped in all over the place.

We even have one here at the newspaper! And it’s mostly made up of folks from other departments! Imagine - a newspaper and its people who love reading aren’t all bunched up in the newsroom!!! That has been an eye-opener for people! And a good one…That’s been my favorite part of this month-long exercise. I’ve made new friends and bonded more closely with close friends — all because of words on a page! Beautiful!

Please know that you and the rest of the NEA Big Read circle have many fans in Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County, Va. Harper Lee got it started, the NEA created the program and people — just regular people from all over — are making it happen.

To all — many thanks!

Cindy”

I’m back, if only for the moment, so that I can dash off to give a keynote address of my own — a situation that will find me speaking aloud in, I hope, far less self-conscious fashion. I will only sign off here by saying I apologize for the rather scattershot nature of this, my first dictated blog post. I assume one gets the hang of it after awhile, and stops starting every sentence with the first person singular. I can only think back to my hero Rob Serling’s flirtation with dictated television drama, about which he wrote a terrific Twilight Zone episode with, I believe, Phyllis Kirk or Phyllis Thaxter, I’m not sure which, as the wife of a writer whose Dictabelts take on a certain supernatural quality. Anyways, wish me luck on this. I hope it will lead not just to more disjointed posts, but also more frequent ones.

Simply put, this is a work-in-progress, and if anybody has any reactions to it, by all means, let me know how it’s shaping up from your end. I’ll leave my email address: bigreadblog@arts.gov. So that’s it for now, and more dictablogs down the big road…

March 27, 2008
Norman, OK

Oklahoma librarian Susan Gregory writes,

The Big Read continues with enthusiasm in Norman. We held a wonderful program in a former Roman Catholic church, now home to a brilliant photographer and his wife who works for the OKC Animal shelter, on the edge of the campus. Robert Ruiz, whom you met, brought his mariachi band and they sang portions of the mass in Spanish after the group of about fifty heard presentations from an art history professor and a scholar from the English department. Candles illuminated the icons and crucifixes on the walls while the dogs howled and three cats prowled. I think that [Bless Me, Ultima author] Señor [Rudolfo] Anaya — and St. Francis — would be pleased. Next week, we’re hosting a program in Norman’s new organic grocery downtown. We’ve actually found a curandera in OKC and a Norman police officer whose grandmother was a curandera, so the evening should be fascinating, if not mystical.

We’re beginning a serious fight down here to get people to vote for a new library on May 13th. I know why reading is the core of my life. The challenge will be to find adequate words to help those who don’t — or won’t — read understand the power that a strong public library gives to a community. If you have any thoughts to share on the subject that I could purloin for presentations, please do…

Susan is already doing one of the smartest things a library can do to pass a ballot initiative, which is to run a Big Read during the campaign. My Hammett-reading Big Read friends in Spokane, whom I shamefully haven’t blogged about quite yet, are doing the same thing. The Big Read sure worked in Peoria, Illinois, where library funding had to win the support of a two-thirds supermajority, and managed it with percentage points to spare. Interestingly, there are two schools of thought about library bond campaigns. One is to synchronize them with major elections, so that every last library supporter will already be voting. The other is to put a bond issue on the ballot all by itself in a special election, so that only a few diehard library supporters can put it over the top.

Big Read participants listened spellbound to Mariachi Orgullos sing portions of the Mass in Spanish during a celebration of the book, Bless Me, Ultima, at The Chouse, formerly St. Thomas More Catholic Church, on March 14th. Photo by David Kipen.

Me, I can scarcely understand why anybody in their right minds wouldn’t support library funding in May or November. Here’s what I’d say to anyone on the fence in Norman, Spokane, or anywhere else:

Name me a great man or woman who never owned a public library card. I defy you. On the off chance they don’t use the card much anymore, it’s because they’ve parlayed early library use into the kind of success that buys you any book you need, or earns you access to a great university library.
The only reason I can think of not to support a library bond issue is if you’ve been so burned by the dumb things government sometimes does that you don’t trust it anymore to do a smart one. I can understand that. I can understand it better than a G-man like me ought to admit. But I promise you this: If you think your government wastes your money now, just wait till your local library cuts its hours, or closes completely. Just wait till people without library cards start casting the deciding vote — the few of them who bother to vote at all — to elect your leaders. Then you’ll see what governmental incompetence really looks like.

But if I can’t convince you to support your library, just make me this one promise in return. After the library bond passes without you, do me a favor and pay a visit to your new library. Look around you. See a librarian, who could be making triple the salary in a law firm across town, helping somebody who just lost a job find work. See a librarian connecting patrons with novels that somehow make them feel just a little less alone. See a librarian reading to kids whose parents don’t make the time to. See all this — and then see if you don’t, like me, find yourself supporting library funding every chance you get.”

Does Auburn, Ind., have the most breathtaking small-town public library in America? Photo by David Kipen.

March 21, 2008
Washington, DC

Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.

Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.

Cynthia Ozick. Photo © Nancy Crampton

But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.

Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.

Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.

How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.

My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

March 18, 2008
Terre Haute, IN

Already they’re talking about disqualifying the Vigo County library from competing in Terre Haute’s annual Tablescapes competition, since they won last year for their Gatsby-themed Big Read table, and again this for the stupendous Falcon entry adjacent. Each place setting this year had crystal stemware and black plate bearing an appetizing prop, such as a pair of brass knuckles or a gun. Photo by David Kipen.

Thank heaven for site-visit reports, because my twice-a-week blogging regimen can’t half cover all the places I go. So when I get back from, say, Terre Haute, Ind., and last week’s eminently postworthy WPA conference takes up the space where I’d otherwise recap my Indiana adventures, I still have a site-visit report where I can write up my impressions. Right there on the form, Uncle Sam asks me to “[p]rovide a brief summary of your overall impression of the implementation of the project…”

In the case of Terre Haute, it’s hard to do this without resorting to superlatives. I fetched up in the Terre Haute Hilton Garden at the “Crossroads of America,” where the old highways 40 and 41 meet, only to find a detectives’ notebook in my room. Airport security later obliged me to relocate this witty spiral-bound notebook somewhere I probably won’t find it until my next trip, but I remember it held all manner of putative clues to the Maltese Falcon’s whereabouts. Appointments with famous no-shows from literature and film abounded in its pages, including one rendezvous apiece with everyone from George Kaplan — the nonentity Cary Grant is mistaken for at the beginning of North by Northwest — to Godot himself. (Perhaps Kaplan got waylaid north of town, where I’m assured Hitchcock filmed that picture’s famous cropduster sequence.)

Next up, the site-visit report form requires me to “[i]nclude any issues you feel may need to be addressed.” Frankly, the only issue that comes to mind is the regrettable brevity of my stay. I adjourned from the hotel to Terre Haute’s main library, where the resourceful librarian who’d ginned up the notebook proceeded to keep an all-ages ESL pizza party spellbound with her storytelling. Afterward we all went out for some convivial, beef-intensive Terre Haute cuisine at a converted stable (!), and next morning I breakfasted with assorted local arts dignitaries, who regaled me with lore of native sons Eugene V. Debs and James Jones, and had me contemplating a return visit at my earliest opportunity.

“Include any appropriate future actions you feel will benefit the organization,” goes the next item on the report form, and the one thing I can think of might be to hold all keynote speakers to an hour. I must’ve talked for two, easy, at my SRO lecture that afternoon. Folks seemed receptive, though, especially to my chaffing of the Mayor for not having read the book yet.

The last injunction on the site-visit form is, ” If you have answered NO to any compliance question above, please explain further.” That refers to the part above where it asks, “Did the organization comply with the stipulations of the agreement?” Well, the main stipulations are 1) to round up strong partners, which in this case included one of very few all-volunteer theaters nationwide whose budget reaches seven figures, 2) to involve the media, which in this case included the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, where my beloved quondam San Francisco Chronicle colleague Stephanie Salter gave us a nice write-up and promptly, alas, skipped town, and 3) to use The Maltese Falcon to get people reading like it’s going out of style. Which, with enough Big Reads like this one, it may just not be.

March 13, 2008
Washington, DC

At least once every 75 years or so, the federal government does something right for American literature.

In 1935, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration recognized that scribblers, no less than stonemasons and bridgebuilders, needed work, and created the Federal Writers Project (FWP) to “hold up a mirror to America.” In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts founded The Big Read, a nationwide initiative using one-city, one-book programs to restore reading to the heart of American life. With luck — and maybe an assist from the modest proposal below — by 2075 there may still be an audience, not just for great books but for newspapers, which taught me how to read.

The Great Depression and the New Deal seem much on people’s minds of late, and for alarmingly more than the predictable anniversary-related reasons. Bookstores this month are making room for Nick Taylor’s American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work. This fall they’ll stock the FWP-inspired State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America by Sean Wilsey and Matt Weiland. And this week several arms of the Library of Congress, including the indispensable Center for the Book and the American Folklife Center, will host a 75th-anniversary celebration and exploration of the New Deal. (For more on this event, go to http://www.loc.gov/folklife/newdeal/index.html)

For any writer, though, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be the American Guides, a series of travel books to all 50 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders. In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck called the American Guides “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.”

I bring all this up because I just got back from a long drive through Big Reads in Worcester, Mass.; Owednsoro, Ky.; and Terre Haute, Ind. Good citizenship and great readership made common cause all along the way. The weather even held up until I got caught in a brainstorm driving through Massachusetts: It suddenly hit me that Mapquest.com is pretty good for getting you from A to B, but, for points between, you might as well be locked in the trunk. There’s no provision for discovering any of America’s inexhaustible shunpike literature and history — precisely the lore in which the American Guides abound.

With that in mind, I’m callingfor the creation of a free, route-based, readily searchable online repository of all the text and photography from every last American Guide, with the Center for the Book’s literary maps to all 50 states thrown in for good measure. Copyright law here should prove less of a headache than usual, considering that the American taxpayer already paid for this priceless treasure house a lifetime ago.

As for the expense of digitization and organization, Mapquest itself is rumored to have a spare shekel or two lying around. Their website’s “Avoid Toll Roads” option has become a boon to motorists everywhere, but a “Seek Out Literary Birthplaces” link would have a charm all its own to advertisers as well as drivers. Readers of Zora Neale Hurston’s indestructible Their Eyes Were Watching God — the focus of thriving Big Reads from Milwaukee to Louisiana, and in 11 other cities and towns around the country just this spring — might possibly enjoy a Florida vacation even more if they had Hurston herself in the back seat, pointing out the sights.

I bring up Hurston especially because this Friday at 5 o’clock, I mean to shake the hand of 91-year-old Stetson Kennedy, who worked with her on the Florida Writers Project back when, as he remembers, lighting one of her ever-present cigarettes could have gotten them both lynched. In my travels for The Big Read, I’ve already shaken the hand of a man one handshake removed from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. I shook the hand of the great American novelist Charles Portis, who hasn’t granted an interview since Big Read author Harper Lee was cheerfully chatting up the press on behalf of her first novel.

Most important, I’ve hugged the Hartford, Conn., librarian who e-mailed me last week about a man in his twenties who “had never read a book, but decided to pick up The Maltese Falcon because everybody else was reading it…’Look how much I read,’ he told [the librarian] proudly. He left work saying that he was going home to finish reading the book tonight.”

That may not quite be the New Deal. But at a time when writers make headlines by lying, but can’t even get reviewed for telling the truth, The Big Read is a sweet deal just the same. I look forward to meeting one of the last survivors of the Federal Writers Project this Friday and shaking on it.

March 4, 2008
Worcester, MA

When I first heard about The Big Read sponsored by UMass Memorial Healthcare, I have to admit I pictured a couple of candystripers pushing a book cart down a hospital corridor. What I discovered when I fetched up in Worcester the other day was something altogether different, and leagues better. More about this soon I hope, but for now have a look at this shot of the sisters Labeeby and Irma Servatius.

Irma heard about Worcester’s Read of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and volunteered to play for the kickoff last month. That went so well that Sharon and Rosa of UMass invited her to come back to play for the finale I attended over the weekend. Out of her and her sister’s fiddles poured Telemann, Britten, and Mozart, accompanied by an extemporaneous interweaving of musical and literary commentary from Irma that would have done Leonard Bernstein proud.

I bring this up not just because it knocked my eye out, or because Irma’s new chamber orchestra deserves all the encouragement and support it can get, but also because of what ran in the L.A. Times last Monday. Under the headline “Big Read or Big Waste?”, some freelance blogger got off an op-ed piece at the expense of a certain nationwide reading program dear to us all.

This shouldn’t have bothered me so much. Time was, I’d have written most anything for a byline in my hometown paper, so I can’t really begrudge some other guy for coveting the same platform. But anybody who knows me knows how much I believe in The Big Read. The thought that we’re all going to have to work even harder to dispel a few misperceptions created by this piece, just set my ordinarily tepid blood to boiling. I fired off a letter to the editor, the gist of which the Times obligingly ran as follows:

Last week, a woman in St. Helens, Ore., thanked a nationwide program called the Big Read for getting her teenage son to dive into Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon - - thanks I keep hearing, in different words, all across the country. But this Op-Ed article called the one-city, one-book initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts silly and sentimental, and asked incredulously, “Who could be inspired?”

Don’t take my word for its effectiveness. Ask any of the roughly 500 people who jammed a Big Read event last April in Santa Clarita to cheer for Ray Bradbury; or see for yourself, by attending any of dozens of Eastside events this spring celebrating Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Bless Me, Ultima.

Who could be inspired by such “unobjectionable” writers as Hammett, Bradbury, Anaya and Cynthia Ozick? Everybody from poor kids in East St. Louis to a Los Angeles now reeling from the impending closure of Dutton’s Books, to a cynical Angeleno ex-book critic like me. The NEA encourages all people to help arrest and, ideally, reverse the American reading decline in any way they choose, but the Big Read is working.”

And so it is. The Big Read worked in Worcester, and here in Owensboro, Kentucky, last night, and I daresay it’ll work in Terre Haute tomorrow. My thanks again to everybody who makes it work. Literacy coordinator Sharon Lindgren of UMass has statistics proving that readers live longer, and you are exactly the people I want living the longest…