March 11, 2009
Washington, DC

From the opening lines of Their Eyes Were Watching God, it’s clear that Zora Neale Hurston is a singular writer who’s crafted an indelible heroine with a singular voice. Here’s novelist Alice Walker on what made Hurston’s style stand out from her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries.

Want to learn more about Zora Neale Hurston and her works? Check out the Big Read Web site for the calendars of events for these Hurston-centric Big Reads taking place in March: African-American Historical Museum and cultural Center of Iowa (Cedar Rapids, IA); Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (Charlottesville, VA); and WUMB Radio/University of Massachusetts Boston (Boston, MA).

February 8, 2009
Washington, DC

Kansas’s Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library (“TSCPL”) has been part of The Big Read family since the pilot phase. I am always impressed with the great displays the library installs in its rotunda to get everyone psyched about that year’s Big Read. Here’s how they set the scene for Their Eyes Were Watching God, Fahrenheit 451, and their latest Big Read venture To Kill a Mockingbird. (Browse Topeka’s calendar of Big Read events on The Big Read Web site.)

TSCPL was one of the ten brave organizations that helped the NEA to pilot The Big Read from January-June 2007. As the locale for the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic site, the library felt it was important to kick off their participation in The Big Read with a novel that would encourage reflection and conversation on the area’s racial history. As the library noted in its application, “The community is primed for expanded cultural awareness. The past year’s projects have engaged new and diverse audiences attracted by the dedication of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site and the unveiling of a Harlem Renaissance mural honoring Topeka artist Aaron Douglas.”

In a 2007 interview with NEA Arts, TSCPL librarian Marie Pyko talked about the library’s Big Read partnership with the local TV station: “We’ve lined up an exclusive relationship with our local CBS station. This year, WIBW Channel is a full-fledged partner. Their general manager made Fahrenheit 451 required reading for everyone at the station. [The anchors] have been encouraged to banter about the book all month long. It’s very cool. We’re going to be on TV a lot. They’re even doing the weather at the library.”

Here’s Marie on what’s cooking so far for this year’s Big Read “We have had great success so far.  We purchased 1000 copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and all are out in the community.  This book is really resonating with Topeka.  The silhouette image in the rotunda was contracted with a local PR firm that did the work as an in-kind gift to our project.  The design was by Sherry O’Neill from Frye-Allen, Inc and people love it.  We are getting ready for our book discussions where we are having two large discussions of Highland Park students with our regular book club group so that should be a lot of fun.”

Photos courtesy of Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library.

September 19, 2008
From the road

a photo blog from David Kipen’s Big Ride for The Big Read

Reading at Risk found that the more you read, the likelier you are to attend a sporting event. Here, Seymour the Golden agle of Hattiesburg’s University of Southern Mississippi returns the favor. Hattiesburg’s reading Their Eyes Were Watching God through October. Check out their calendar of events at www.neabigread.org. Photo by David Kipen.

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.

February 1, 2008
Washington, DC

We all know Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, redeemer of Zora Neale Hurston’s work, and fine commentator on The Big Read’s CD about Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God – but whatever happened to Margaret Wallace? If not for Walker’s championing in the pages of Ms. magazine, Hurston might still be languishing out of print. We’d have lost not just Their Eyes but Hurston’s wonderful essays, like the unreconstructedly joyful “How It Feel to Be Colored Me,” so bracing in expression, so sad in retrospect, which I read last night in Best American Short Stories of the Century. But without Margaret Wallace, Walker might never have read Hurston in the first place.

Margaret Wallace will be long dead now, and just 13 Googles mark her passing. She apparently reviewed for the New York Times quite a lot in the ’30s and ’40s, including pieces about Thomas Wolfe and Edna Ferber. Maybe she put other important writers on the map too, and we just don’t know it because some publisher credited her review to the Times, but omitted her name. Yet it’s just possible that without her Times rave of Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine on May 6, 1934, datedly but earnestly headlined “Real Negro People,” this early Hurston novel might have sunk without a trace, and Hurston with it. Instead, Margaret Wallace had the discernment to write the following words — hundreds more like them in the same vein too, sadly beyond Googling — and Hurston’s bones were made:

Jonah’s Gourd Vine can be called without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race…Unlike the dialect in most novels about the American Negro, this does not seem to be merely the speech of white men with the spelling distorted. Its essence lies rather in the rhythm and balance of the sentences, in the warm artlessness of the phrasing…Not the least charm of the book, however, is its language: rich, expressive, and lacking in self–conscious artifice. From the rolling and dignified rhythms of John’s last sermon to the humorous aptness of such a word as “shickalacked,” to express the noise and motion of a locomotive, there will be much in it to delight the reader. It is hoped that Miss Hurston will give us other novels in the same colorful idiom.

This is a model of fine, necessary book reviewing. Margaret Wallace states her case, and then she makes it. She says what the book isn’t, and then what it is. She says it well, too. ‘Much in it to delight the reader” is a mite starchy, but “in the rhythm and balance of the sentences, in the warm artlessness of the phrasing’ uses Wallace’s own different rhythm to get at precisely what made Hurston such a revelation. Someone actively “looking to be offended,” in Pynchon’s rueful, useful phrase about political correctness, could take issue with the repetition of the word ‘rhythm’ to describe a black writer’s work, but please. ‘colorful’ is a bit on the cute side, too, the kind of inside joke a working reviewer tosses in occasionally to keep herself amused — not unlike ‘unreconstructedly,’ up above — but who knows how many other books Margaret Wallace was weighing that week?

I can just picture Alice Walker’s mother seeing this notice, or another one assigned by an editor who read this one and then decided to send Jonah’s Gourd Vine out for review after all. I can imagine Mrs. Walker going down to the local department store and buying a copy instead of renting it, which was also an option in those days, and taking it home and enjoying it, and Alice finding it in the attic, and remembering it years later, and finally writing the piece that sent Zora Neale Hurston shickalacking down the track to resurrection.

This is the way that natural selection has usually worked in the swampy ecosystem of literary reputation. What I can’t imagine is where we’ll be now that reviewers like Margaret Wallace, the indicator species in that particular pond, are dying out in most newspapers and magazines. To cite just one example among many, The New Republic lost its book critic, the estimable James Wood, to the New Yorker a few months ago, and he has not been replaced.

This is not news anymore. If editors would just give half the column inches to book reviews that they’re spending on handwringing about the lack of book reviews, we’d be out of the woods already. Instead, like Zora Neale Hurston before Alice Walker found her unmarked grave and paid to put a proper stone over it, Margaret Wallace lies in a potter’s field somewhere, unmourned, unrisen. Whatever happened to Margaret? Will no one lift her up again?

September 14, 2007
Charleston, South Carolina

As program director for the Big Read, I could probably stand to have a little more in common with our target audience. The Big Read welcomes everybody, but it’s got a special soft spot for younger and so-called reluctant or lapsed readers. Well, I’m neither. I’ve only got about 30 reading years left, actuarily speaking — less, if my prescription keeps changing. The old advertising mantra applies here: Get ‘em while they’re young. So I got a particular charge out of last weekend’s youthful kickoff (two kickoffs, actually!) in toasty Charleston, South Carolina.

Peyton Jones next to a photo of Zora Neale Hurston, Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by David Kipen

See that picture of Zora Neale Hurston next door, looking out from Carl Van Vechten’s iconic photo at a sweet-faced young Charlestonian? That’s six-year-old Peyton Jones, fidgeting a bit through her mother Pat’s rip-roaring Gullah/gospel gig with Ann Caldwell and the Magnolia Singers. Peyton may have heard “Move Out the Way and Let Me Shine” once or twice before by now, but the healthy and diverse crowd swayed and clapped like it was Sunday morning instead of Sunday afternoon. Peyton, meanwhile, was resting her head on the seat of her chair when I put her up to this little bit of photogenic clowning. I only wish I’d had my camera hand free a minute later when I gave her my extra copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God. She may be a mite young for it yet, but there was no mistaking the smile of someone who already knows that books are for keeping.

Then it was off to the College of Charleston for a keynote talk by Zora’s indefatigable niece, Lucy Anne Hurston. You know a city’s really outdone itself when one kickoff event isn’t enough. You also know they’ve beaten the bushes for partners when the introductory remarks come not just from the Charleston County Library’s exhilarated manager and chief organizer, Cynthia Bledsoe, but also her board chairman, two college faculty members, a rep from Boeing (who’d helped get Their Eyes Were Watching God into the hands of GIs and their families on local military bases), a gushingly grateful carpetbagger from the NEA, and two members of Zora’s old Howard University sorority, the exuberant Zeta Phi Betas.

Jane Marshall, Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by David Kipen

Any other speaker might have been overmatched, but this was Lucy Anne Hurston. I’d been wowed by her once before, in Topeka last spring, but this afternoon she was even more powerful. She took us through her aunt’s life and her own, drawing unstrained parallels between Zora’s anthropological studies of Caribbean folklore and her own fieldwork with Haitian domestics and prisoners. The audience rode along with every riff and swoop of Lucy’s voice. Especially gratifying this time was the rapt proportion not just of college kids but of high-schoolers — thanks largely to teacher Jane Marshall, seen with one of the Charleston Big Read’s bespoke, indispensable handfans.

Later, Lucy, Cynthia and I adjourned to a local jernt for some shrimp and grits — “They’re like polenta!” we assured the New York-born, initially squeamish Lucy — and tried to worm her new discoveries about the Huston family’s ancestry out of her. She’s a close woman with a secret, so we’ll just have to wait for the contracted sequel to her fine first Hurston book, “Speak So You Can Speak Again,” and try not to drum our fingers too loudly…

February 8, 2007
Hartford, Connecticut

“If books are not good company, where will I find it?”
– Mark Twain, in a letter to M. Fairbanks

“I am reading Zora!”
– lapel buttons visible on coats all over Hartford, Connecticut

The first person to email the blog and tell me who “M. Fairbanks” was will win official bragging rights from the NEA. (Cash value negligible, alas.) Me, I had the still-fresh pleasure of re-reading some Zora Neale Hurston myself Wednesday, in the course of visiting a Big Read masterminded by the all-but-rebuilt Hartford Public Library, and abetted by partners around town including the built-to-last Mark Twain House and Museum.

In between meeting the Library’s sainted deputy chief librarian, Jenny Benedict, at 8:45 yesterday morning — she with the unenviable chore of chaperoning me around the Connecticut capital all day — and getting a magical nighttime tour of the Twain house last night from its abundantly knowledgeable director, Debra Petke, I didn’t exactly sit around in mukluks eating bonbons. First came an interview with Connecticut Public Television’s Ray Hardman (who promised in full view of his TV audience to read Their Eyes Were Watching God!), then storytime at the Sand branch library, with kids eating ambrosia while hearing the folktales Hurston recorded around the South for the WPA and the Library of Congress.

We came back to the main branch for lunch with city librarian Louise Blalock and enough partners to make readers out of all of Greater Hartford and half the Connecticut River watershed besides. Next it was Zora Hour, for which two intrepid librarians played the Big Read CD and led a discussion of the book with an attentive audience of library regulars, complete with juice and snacks. A guy named Winston, warm in a heavy parka, allowed as how Hurston so far was no Kahlil Gibran, but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Then off to the library’s Albany branch, where staffer Michelle McFarland confided that Ruby Dee’s audio book of Hurston was making converts right and left for this brilliant but challengingly dialect-heavy novel. After dinner it was over to Twain’s place for a lecture and reading by sore-throated but singular-voiced young novelist Tayari Jones. And finally, a late-night tour with Debra, Jenny and my gracious cousin/host Clare up towhat’s really the delivery room of the American novel: Mark Twain’s third-floor, triple-balconied, billiard-table-equipped writing study. “If books are not good company, where will I find it?”– in Hartford, for a start. More down the Big Road. . .

January 21, 2007
Fergus Falls, Minnesota

The topography of this ancient lake bed presents a seemingly limitless expanse. The prairie winds sweep across its level surface, turning the propellers of generators that provide electric power for rural homes. — The WPA Guide to Minnesota, 1938

Near as I could find out, the ’30s-era propeller-generators are gone. But the energy around here could light up cities a lot bigger than Fergus Falls, Minnesota, population 9,389 souls circa 1938, and (according to its genial Mayor Russell “Q”. Anderson) a few thousand more today. That may not seem like very many people, but when you consider that fully 550 of them turned out to kick off their Big Read of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the numbers start to look a mite more impressive. (Of course, everyone agreed that the beautiful weather helped, with the mercury shooting up well into the teens.)

The view from Fergus Falls’s Prairie Wetlands Learning Center, where Fergus Falls, A Center for the Arts hosted a kick-off reading for the community’s Big Read celebration of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Photo: David Kipen

Imagine if that same proportion of the population of Washington, DC, where I work, showed up in one place to decorate gingerbread men, go for horsedrawn carriage rides, and read aloud from one of America’s finest novels. Can’t you just picture 23,000 Washingtonians thronging the National Mall (or, as we call it in Minnesota, the “other” Mall of America), circle-dancing to a fiddle combo? Then again, I may have to eat my words this spring, when the Humanities Council of Washington, DC unveils its Big Read of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Washington seemed another world yesterday (1/20) at the Prairie Wetlands Learning Center, a quondam farm transformed into a spectacular compound of exhibits, classrooms, and bluestem grass vistas under mackerel skies that my poor photographic skills can neither do justice to, nor quite ruin. I did a highly extemporaneous 10-15 minutes on the Big Read and the national reading revival the National Endowment for the Arts hopes to help kindle with it, but Fergus Falls was way ahead of me. From the look of things around here, the NEA may have to start a new program next year designed to get people to leave off reading and do something else for a change — if only to ease demand on the Fergus Falls Library and Lundeen’s Books, which moved more than a hundred copies of My Ántonia yesterday, and have been selling out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books and Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah Plain and Tall in between reorders.

Maybe I’ll work in more later about my invigorating whirlwind day in Fergus Falls –capped by an evening performance with the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony by my gracious host Rebecca Petersen of the F.F. Center for the Arts, who’s something of a whirlwind herself — but for now I have to pick up a newspaper and skedaddle for my flight(s) to Wallowa County, Oregon. More down the big road…