Mosley’s mystery? Where was the crowd?

Tonight’s Get Lit! event saw 100 or so literary fans visiting Eastern Washington University’s Showalter Hall. That’s where we heard M. L. “Mandy” Smoker read seven of her poems and Walter Mosley give a talk he calls “The Literary Life.”

For argument’s sake, let’s say that Mosley – despite his 28 books, several screenplays and various nonfiction works – doesn’t have the stature of past Get Lit! headliners such as Kurt Vonnegut or Salman Rushdie. Even so, he deserved to speak to more than a mere 100 people.

Maybe the problem involved the event being held on EWU’s Cheney campus. Maybe it was because tickets cost $20. Maybe it was a combination of both. Who can say?

Here’s what was missed: Smoker, a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana, thanked her “biggest influence” James Welch , read a poem dedicated to the late Richard Hugo and read a couple of poems about the numerous children on her reservation who died for one reason or another.

Her writing was, as Christopher Howell said while introducing her, “as clear and strong as Montana’s wind and sky.”

Then Mosley came on the stage, full of apologies. First, he said, he should have remembered never to read after a poet. Second, he said, he wasn’t going to read from his books but give a talk instead. Third, he said, he had a cold and had recently coughed his way through a radio interview.

“What else can I apologize for?” he asked. “The war in Iraq?”

Among the thoughts Mosley shared, both during his talk and during the following question-and-answer period:

“The most important thing we have to do in life is tell the truth. The hardest thing to do in life is tell the truth.”

“One of the great things about literature is that this is a whole life. And in that life, there are parts of the truth.”

“I want you to ask the writers you meet this weekend who their influences are. I promise they will lie to you.” When asked who his influences were, he listed, among others, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Camus, Langston Hughes – and his father.

“The older you get, the more you live in the past. … The more you’re mired in the past. … Young people live in the present. And they know a lot more about the world that we live in than we do.”

Every day, he said, you need to tell at least one truth. And then, he said, “Our leaders are corrupt. We all know that. More than half of us don’t vote, and we know why. It’s because we know that it doesn’t make any difference.”

Then it was over, and the audience applauded. All 100 of us.