More authors join Get Lit! 2006
They keep adding authors to the schedule of Get Lit! 2006, the eighth edition of Eastern Washington University’s celebration of all things literary.
It’s not as if the headliners are exactly unknown.
Marilynne Robinson won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Prize for her novel “Gilead.”
Yusef Komunyakaa earned his Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for the poetry collection “Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989.”
Nancy Pearl is a Seattle librarian and author of two books, “Book Lust” and “More Book Lust,” who says she doesn’t quite agree with Logan Pearsall Smith, who supposedly said: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Still, she adds, “I come awfully close.”
Alexander McCall Smith, who by trade is a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, has seen more than 50 of his books published, ranging from academic studies to children’s books to popular fiction, including the best-selling “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.”
Some of the other names (in alphabetical order): Kim Barnes, Christopher Buckley, Tracy Daugherty, Brian Doyle, Julie Gamberg, James Grabill, bell hooks,Melissa Kwasny, Dorianne Laux, Marjorie Sandor, Domenic Stansberry, Wayne Ude, Jess Walter and Robert Wrigley.
Full-event passes to Get Lit!, which runs April 20-23 at The Met, are $77 and are available through TicketsWest (325-SEAT, 800-325-SEAT, www.ticketswest.com).
The official Get Lit! Web site is at www.ewu.edu/getlit.
Words from the heart
Just as last week I read a line of poetry in Willow Springs 57, EWU’s prize-winning literary journal, that stunned me, I went online and found poems of Yusef Komunyakaa that were equally powerful.
As I wrote above, Komunyakaa is one of the keynote speakers at Get Lit! 2006.
The following line, for example, comes from a poem titled “Venus’s Flytrap,” which is told in the voice of a 5-year-old boy who wades into deep grass “unmindful of snakes & yellowjackets,” who can “hurt/ You with questions/ Like silver bullets,” who stands too close to the railroad tracks, who wonders “what death tastes like,” whose mama says he’s a “mistake” and that he “made her a bad girl.”
“I wish I knew why
The music in my head
Makes me scared.”
The rhythms of Komunyakaa’s poetry are likely to make you ask the same.
(By the way, while, yes, you can access several of Komunyakaa’s poems online, that will give you only a taste of what the man has written. Do the right thing and buy a couple of his books.)
News from Nepal
The Washington State University Press has just released an edited version of WSU graduate Kathey-Lee Galvin’s doctoral dissertation about her experiences in Nepal.
“Forbidden Red: Widowhood in Urban Nepal” (176 pages, $18.95), which won the 2003 WSU Outstanding Graduate Author Award, is based on a series of interviews that Galvin did with Nepalese widows of all ages, castes and religions.
“Her manuscript was selected for the award,” says a WSU press release, “because of the interest on the topic, which has few published studies, and because it was very readable and strongly researched.”
The Big One
Those of us who are fascinated by history are always amazed by the differences between “then” and “now.” And the similarities.
Those differences and similarities couldn’t be more explicit than in the book of photographs “After the Ruins: 1906 and 2006, Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire” (University of California Press, 134 pages, $24.95 paper) by Mark Klett, with Michael Lundgren.
The project was designed to photograph spots in San Francisco from the same angles as historical photos made following the destructive 1906 earthquake (thus the term “rephotograph”). It was dreamed up for the centennial of the event, April 18, 2006.
The exhibit is on display at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum through June 4.
Book talk
• Gay & Lesbian Book Group (“Girl Walking Backwards,” by Bett Williams), 7 p.m. Wednesday, Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington (838-0206).
The reader board
• Linda Lael Miller (“One Last Look”), reading, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Auntie’s Bookstore.
• Kristin Henderson (“While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront”), reading, 7:30 p.m. Friday, Auntie’s Bookstore.
• John Gaetano (“America the Beautiful: A New Political Suspense Thriller”), signing, noon to 3 p.m. Saturday, Auntie’s Bookstore.