The Festival’s appeal is broad, covering topics everywhere from jazz music, to sports writing, to cooking demonstrations. The Festival draws presenters who have reached worldwide acclaim and although the Festival brings in these varied talents and does not generally operate on a central “theme,” when I attended the Festival on Friday, March 25 I seemed to fall into events that centered on the distinct Southern-ness of the works of the Festival’s presenters.
The first panel I attended was all about rising talents in Southern literature. I took a seat in the nearly-full grand ballroom of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, which occupies a block of Bourbon Street between Bienville and Conti. The room, a large rectangle, had three double-door entrances at the rear and was filled with chairs laid out in long, neat rows. Large, ornate chandeliers hung from the high ceilings, decorative trim lined the walls, and intricate plaster patterns adorned the bases of fixtures. In the front of the room was a modest stage with a skirted table, just high enough that anyone seated in the audience could see. Flanking the table on one side was a large podium bearing the hotel’s insignia. A modest banner hung in the center of the stage above the table which read: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS/NEW ORLEANS LITERARY FESTIVAL—a simple reminder.
Proclaimed as the voices of the New South, authors Josh Russell, Skip Horack, and Minrose Gwin discussed, in the context of their latest works, how they differ from Southern writers in that they don’t fall into archetypal stories of the Old, antebellum South. Their stories, were mostly about outsiders, immigrants or indentured servants who were brought here—sometimes by force—and their respective characters had to adapt to a life that we would find typical, ordinary—and their stories prove that life in the New South is anything but conventional.
I had met Skip a couple years ago at the last Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge and I was eager to catch up with him. Skip spent a number of years in Baton Rouge, so he was well acquainted with the region, and in talking to him I learned that he was glad to be back in New Orleans. Because last year’s Louisiana Book Festival was cancelled due to State Library budget cuts, Skip wasn’t able to come down and promote his newest novel. But luckily, next year’s festival is back on, so Skip and other writers who want to come back to South Louisiana will have the chance in 2011.
After the New Southern Voices panel I came out of the ballroom and wandered up the corridor of the hotel, stretching my legs and fiddling with my cell phone. I paused when I noticed Robert Olen Butler coming off the elevator. He held a sleek leather portfolio under his arm. His feet moved briskly on the shiny floor. His eyes were focused on the half-dozen people crowding the doorway of the Regal Suite—the room where he would read from several typed pages that were the first chapter from his forthcoming novel. His concentration and stride broke and he swung himself in my direction when I stepped up to him and said: “Mr. Butler, Would you sign my book?”
He took the paperback copy of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain—which earned him a Pulitzer—from my hands and said he’d love to autograph it. We found a spot for him to set the book down and he folded back the cover, found the title page. As he inscribed a little note and his signature he said, “You know, if this is the only copy you’ve read then you haven’t read the entire book.”
I told him I didn’t understand and he responded: “Well, when Penguin’s rights to the book expired, Grove Press picked it up and I added two Vietnam stories.” With a slight smirk on his face, as if he loved telling this story, he continued, “There are two bonus tracks on the Grove Press edition.” I told him that I was looking forward to getting that edition so I could read the new stories. We chatted for a few minutes more, mostly about a former creative writing teach of mine whom Butler had instructed in the MFA program at McNeese back in the 90s. Before heading into the room for the reading, Robert Olen Butler—affectionately known to the other authors as Bob—told me that New Orleans was a great city to be in, especially for a writer. It was made apparent that Butler, as many writers do, holds a deep affection for our city when he read that first chapter—about a woman taking a room at familiar hotel in the French Quarter.
Later in the day I attended the Southern Humor panel, and it did not disappoint. Authors James Wilcox, Mark Childress, and Dorothy Allison spoke to the notion that we as southerners have a humor that is distinct to this region and, oftentimes, leaves those not familiar with our way of life both confused and uncomfortable. Wilcox attributed the distinctness in southern humor to the fact that many of us are born into bizarre circumstances, entrenched in the absurd at a very early age. He recounted that when he was born in Hammond he and another baby were switched at the hospital and sent home with the wrong parents, the error having been found out days later! Dorothy Allison upped the ante when she told her story. She was an illegitimate child to two fifteen year olds. Allison was, her parents being children themselves, raised largely by her aunts. One day, not long after her birth, her young father came to the house to claim her and take her with him. The aunts stood by as he picked up Allison, and those aunts were hurled into a fit of laughter when Allison—the bastard child of this fifteen year old boy—relieved herself all over him, after which he let her down and ran away. The panel knew that this story was certainly peculiar to the South, and that if it were told to the wrong crowd, the reactions would be so different than the roaring laughter that exploded from the ballroom.
I truly didn’t know what to expect when I headed back into the ballroom for the Conversation with Winston Groom. I am unfamiliar with his work, but my girlfriend is fan so, trusting her judgment, I knew it would be worthwhile. He was larger than I had expected. Well over six feet tall—built like the former University of Alabama football player he is. He sat comfortably in his chair with his hands perched in his lap, fingers interlocked the way a storyteller would do. His voice, deep and certain and unmistakably southern, resounds with life experience. He had been to rigorous military school as a young boy, played collegiate sports, served in the United States Army in Vietnam. Groom had lived and worked in major American cities like New York and Washington. He spent his days with famous literary figures, speaking of people like Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut the way any of us would tell stories about our college roommates.
Groom told anecdotes about being a fiction writer. He said when he had finally decided that’s what he wanted to do with his life he was working at the Washington Star. His epiphany moment came when, one day, sitting at his desk in the news room he realized that he “did not want to be one of those journalists who, whenever he opened the top desk drawer, would find a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, a pint bottle of whiskey, and an unfinished manuscript of a novel.” Groom leaned back in his chair and smiled as he said, “And I knew that if I told my editor that I was leaving to write fiction, I could never set food back in that newsroom.” And that’s what he did—going on to pen eight best-selling novels, one of which was the famed Forrest Gump—which earned Groom national recognition at the time of its publication and worldwide acclaim once it was optioned for the film starring Tom Hanks. Despite the novel’s achievements, Groom spoke of the “little book” with a humility that is reminiscent of the novel’s main character, Forrest, referring to its title in a sweet, almost grandfatherly voice as simply: “Gump.”
After the Conversation, Winston Groom adjourned to a suite adjacent to the grand ballroom for an autograph session. Nestled tightly in the corner and draped in a beige tablecloth was the small round table where Groom sat. The table looked even smaller in front of the man’s large frame. A line formed and in a matter of moments was out the door. People stood in crooked single file clutching copies of Groom’s various works and chatting with one another about their excitement for meeting the man whose words they had followed for years. Groom removed his glasses and set them aside as the first person presented him with a book. Like most writers, Groom supplied his own ink pen. The man took his time talking with each person, signing their title pages thoughtfully, and wishing them a good day. When it was finally my turn I handed him a copy of Forrest Gump and he examined the cover and smiled, then looked up at me and asked my name in a soft, sweet voice—not the commanding one he used during the conversation.
“My name is Zach, but the book actually belongs to my girlfriend. Could you make it out to Lauren?”
He obliged. As he wrote, his mouth moved but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. His voice held a quiet, almost inaudible reverence. There was a meekness about this man who had accomplished so much. He sat with his knees nearly touching and his large feet jutting out from under the table so far that I had to side step them to keep from tripping as I leaned down, asking him to repeat what he had said. Carrying South Alabama in his mouth, Groom said: “Where are you from? Here in New Orleeyuns?”
“No sir,” I said. “I’m from Shreveport and my girlfriend is from Baton Rouge; we moved to New Orleans last summer.”
He pushed himself back from the table, thought for a moment as if recalling dozens of memories all at once. He smiled a wide toothy smile and said: “Oh, isn’t this a great city to be in?”
Indeed, New Orleans is a great city to be in. Maybe even the greatest. I think it was for Tennessee Williams. Few writers have taken as much from this city as he did. Like Faulkner said, New Orleans was the last of the bohemias—a place where literature and art and music flourish like nowhere else. Earlier that day Josh Russell read a passage from his latest novel (about a German immigrant coming to New Orleans) and the words stayed in my ears. I thought over them, imagining that they could have been the words of Tennessee Williams himself, or maybe they could have been the words of any one of us:
“I arrived in New Orleans in springtime. My first day in the city I rode the streetcar without a fixed destination, changing lines at every transfer point and searching for signs offering a job and a place to live, signs a sailor promised I would see everywhere I looked. I was eighteen and had been in America for only a few hours; his promise seemed plausible. The car rocked like yet another boat, which was comforting, and from its window I saw, instead of signs, bushes of burning pink flowers I would later learn were azaleas. In the pure light the live oaks glowed like neon signs in the shapes of trees. The Munich March I’d left was cold and gray; New Orleans’s version was warm and green. I smelled perfume coming from behind the ears and off the necks of girls and women on their way from school and shopping, a mingled fragrance of flowers and fruit. When I finally saw a placard in a window advertising a room for let, I stepped down from the car and stood below a blooming tree and realized what I’d smelled was New Orleans.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment