Western Book Roundup
Western Literary Festivals and Regional Literature Projects
By Jenny Shank, 3-19-08
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Novelist Kathryn Trueblood’s article in the March/April edition of Poets & Writers, ”Rising in the West: The Festival Circuit in Washington, Montana, and Oregon,” examines three successful literary festivals in the West. Spokane’s Get Lit!, Missoula’s Montana Festival of the Book, and Portland’s Wordstock each have found winning formulas through different approaches. Trueblood attributes the Missoula festival’s success to its focus on regional writers.
“At a time when other book festivals have struggled to stay afloat (Seattle’s Bookfest, for example, closed its doors in 2004), the Montana festival is thriving,” Trueblood writes.
Trueblood interviewed the festival’s associate director, Kim Anderson, who notes:
“We have real funding considerations because there are no large corporations or foundations in Montana.” That’s why the festival founders decided not to spend heavily to bring in outside writers, a point on which other festivals have foundered. “Many festivals pay very large honorariums for big names, and we don’t. We pay what we call an ‘excessively modest honorarium,’ and it’s the same across the board, from first-time author to best-selling household name.”
Next year’s festival will take place a little later than usual, from October 23 to 25, and according to Trueblood, “events will include a celebration of The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology, edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith.”
I recently came across the diverting website Bookpaths, whose motto is “Bringing Together Literature and Place.” The blog, the one-woman project of Donna McIlvaine, catalogs books and authors from around the world by their geographic location.
Clicking on ”Montana” (sandwiched between Missouri and Morocco in the alphabetical listing) yields some quotes from books by Rick Bass and James Lee Burke, and a guide to touring the locations in Missoula that inspired Burke’s 2004 novel In The Moon of Red Ponies. Wyoming‘s page includes a discussion of the 1979 book One Day at Teton Marsh by Sally Carrighar and Mark Spragg’s 2000 memoir, Where Rivers Change Directions.
McIlvaine notes, “Bookpaths is growing slowly. Check weekdays for new entries or browse the archives by place or date to find books, articles, and destinations that inform our sense of place.”
Meanwhile, Melanie Jones of the Columbia Spectator has set herself the task this year of coming up with the best representative book for each of the fifty states, books that “we think capture the essence of each state, all while telling a great story along the way.” So far they’ve featured Alabama (Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird), Michigan (The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides), Alaska (The Man Who Swam With Beavers by Nancy Lord) and Arizona (Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees). It’s a fun project that allows readers to ponder what book they would choose for their own state.
If forced to choose, I think I’d select Kent Haruf’s Plainsong for Colorado. I also like Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, but both of those books are only partially set in Colorado.
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