Hey Spokane, It's Time to Get Lit!

Muchos Gracias to Eric Galey of EWU for creating this.

It was so nice of Barry White (wink) to give a shout out about the Get Lit! Festival. Watch for this Public Service Announcement on all the major television stations around town.

Charles Baxter and the Cure for Insomnia

In the National Book Award finalist novel Feast of Love, an insomniac and semi-retired professor of philosophy named Charlie Baxter spends his nights roaming the streets of his hometown. In a Random House interview, the author of the book admits that the character who shares his name and is a writer also shares his insomnia, but "...at the bottom of the stairs in his house is a mirror that I don't own, an imaginary mirror, and everyone he meets or talks to is imaginary. 'Charlie Baxter' suffers from 'identity lapses,' as every novelist does." The book was adapted for the big screen in 2007, starring Morgan Freeman in the role of Charlie.

Charles Baxter, the author of Feast of Love, was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works.

He originally wrote mostly poetry, but two years after completing his doctorate, Baxter experienced a crisis with his poetry prose. In an interview with Ploughshares, he describes it as: “I spent an entire summer trying to write poetry, and failing at it. It was as if the knowledge of how to do it had somehow left me, and I found myself ill-equipped to write. I was becoming more interested in sequences, characters, and characterizations, the rickrack of detail surrounding people.”

He turned to fiction writing instead, but even there, the words didn't work out. When talking about his first books, he says,“They were very abstract, these novels, very schematic, in some sense like bad postmodernism,” he says. “Nothing in them felt particularly real, although I didn’t realize that at the time. You rarely do when you’re working. I thought they were great. I was utterly baffled by the indifference or loathing with which people read them.”

Several years later and many, many rejections and bad reviews, Charles Baxter is a successful award winning novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. In an interview with Barnes&Noble he advices writers who are still waiting to be discovered: "Don't quit. Don't quit. Don't quit. Don't quit."

And how does Charles Baxter sleep these days? Very well according to what he told Ploughshares: “I’ve found the best cure for insomnia,” he says, “is thinking there isn’t anywhere I’d rather be than in bed. And my other cure is one that I first heard from Stanley Elkin, which is to imagine and then to start reading an endlessly large memorandum from some functionary in the English department.”

Don't miss hearing Charles Baxter read from his new novel The Soul Thief at the Bing Crosby Theater on Friday April 17 at 7.30 pm. (Tickets through Tickets West $10 general.)

For a preview, read Charles Baxter discussing the novel with Publishers Weekly.

Poetry & Improv: A Perfect Match?

Improvise your poetry!

The Blue Door Theatre has served the improv needs of our community since 1996. It currently resides at 815 W Garland Ave where it puts on shows every Friday and Saturday night.

The 2009 season is as spectacular as their previous ones and during April 3rd-24th the players need help from Spokane poets to participate in their Poet's Up! shows.

Here's how the show will work: a poet or two sit at a table onstage, writing away with a Blue Door player. The other players improvise scenes on the rest of the stage. Whenever someone finishes a poem, they ring a bell, editing the scene in progress. The poet reads said poem to the audience while the improvisers stay frozen. When the poet is done, they crumple the poem up and toss it. The scene either starts back up with new inspiration or a whole new scene starts.

If you think you're up to the challenge of improv prose, contact Joe Vander Weil at mutaytedjoe@hotmail.com or 509 230 0950.

Spokane is Always Getting Lit!

If the Mayan's could create an all encompassing calendar back in the 6th century BC, why can't we? Our goal: to create a synchronized calendar showing all literary related events in the Spokane area. Our new website has a Get Lit! Festival calendar for all 50 events happening April 10-19, but we didn't stop there. Under RESOURCES, you'll find an ongoing calendar full of all sorts of great events at local universities, bookstores, and community partners. If you have any events to add to our calendar, please feel free to email us at getlit@ewu.edu.

Poetry Out Loud winners: BreAnna Jones and Kevin Ma

(BreAnna Jones, Sam Green, Kevin Ma)

Two stellar high school students from the Spokane area travelled to Tacoma to compete in the State Finals of Poetry Out Loud on March 7. Congratulations Kevin Ma from Mead and Ciara Totton from East Valley on being the regional representatives!

Twelve students who advanced from regional finals in Clark, Pierce, Skagit, Thurston, Yakima, and Spokane counties participated in the state finals. Through three rounds of poetry recitations, they performed works selected from an anthology of more than 500 classic and contemporary poems. Participants were judged by a panel with expertise in various aspects of poetry and performance and awarded points for accuracy, presence, level of difficulty, and other criteria.

BreAnna Jones of West Valley High in Yakima won the state Poetry Out Loud finals with her recitations of "If" by Rudyard Kipling, "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr." by June Jordan, and "It would be neat if with the New Year" by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Jones, a high school junior this year, is now a two-time Washington State champion for Poetry Out Loud. As the winner of the state finals Jones won a $200 prize; additionally, her school gets $500 for the purchase of poetry books, and she will receive an all-expenses-paid trip (with a chaperone) to compete in the Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington, DC, on April 26-28, 2009. In speaking of her experience, Jones said, “Poetry Out Loud has created an opportunity for me to go deeper into poetry and understand the feelings of the author, which not only makes the poetry much easier to perform, but makes it enjoyable.”

The runner-up, Kevin Ma, a sophomore from Mead High School in Spokane, won $100 and a $200 stipend for his school. Many of the students commented on their new found appreciation for poetry, and encouraged others to get involved. “I would definitely recommend Poetry Out Loud,” said runner-up Kevin Ma. “I think it provides students the opportunity to experience poetry as a whole and provides the flexibility for every student to find poems that they personally enjoy.”

The state finals were produced in partnership with the Associated Students of the University of Puget Sound, and included a performance by Washington State Poet Laureate Samuel Green. Green commented, "I like the fact that kids themselves wind up giving an audience of adults the same advice that we try to give them: 'Give poetry a chance, go look around, try out your libraries, your bookstores . . .' How cool is that? Very cool."

Poetry Out Loud is sponsored by the Washington State Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Poetry Foundation. This is the fourth year that high school students in Washington State participated Poetry Out Loud, a national arts education program that encourages the study of great poetry. More than 225,000 students across the country participated this year. The Poetry Out Loud National Finals will award a total of $50,000 in scholarships and school stipends, with a $20,000 college scholarship for the National Champion. Who knows...maybe next year Spokane will be headed for Washington, DC.

Activist, Speaker, Writer Winona LaDuke to Visit Spokane

On Monday March 17, Spokane will have two opportunitys to listen to this renowned localism speaker and activist:

Spokane Falls Community College (SFCC): 11:30 am in sn-w’ey’-mn (building 24) in room 110

The Magic Lantern (25 W Main Ave): 7:30 pm

Don't miss this unique chance to hear Winona LaDuke speak about sustainability, localism, grassroots power, and the paradigms shifts needed for the next decades. Both events are free!

A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, Winona has written extensively on Native American and Environmental issues. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves, as co-chair of the Indigenous Women's Network, a North American and Pacific indigenous women's organization. In 1998, Ms. Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth. Also in 1997, her first novel, Last Standing Woman, was published by Voyager Press. In 1999, South End Press published All Our Relations, a non-fiction book on Native environmental struggles. Both books are available through the Native Harvest catalog. Winona's editorials and essays have also been published numerous times in national and international journals and newspapers.

Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations, and is the mother of three children. As Program Director of the Honor the Earth Fund, she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for front line native environmental groups. She also works as Founding Director for White Earth Land Recovery Project.

In 1994, Winona was nominated by Time magazine as one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the BIHA Community Service Award in 1997, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women's Leadership Fellowship, and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project.

You can support Winona LaDuke's work by making a donation to WELRP and by supporting Native Harvest.

Get Lit! Website is Live

Our website is finally up and running. To keep up to date with your favorite festival events and authors, make sure to visit it often.

Here are some of the gems you can find there:

Our Festival Event Calendar lists all activites day-by-day. To view events by categories, use the Program & Events-->Literary Festival navigation menu.

Author pictures and bios are on the Get Lit! Festival Authors page.

To find out how much events are and how to purchase tickets, visit the online Get Lit! Box Office.

If you'd like to volunteer during the festival, visit the Volunteer with Get Lit! page to find out what you can do and the cool freebies we offer as reward.

See you in April!

Cyber Author Panel: What Keeps You Writing?

April will arrive sooner than we think, but it’s still not quick enough for those of us that can’t wait to pick the festival authors’ brains about living the writing life. To satisfy that craving, Get Lit! asked some of the festival authors to blog about what keeps them going. Each response to the question “What Keeps You Writing?” was as unique as the authors themselves. Take our Cyber Author Panel tour of these writers’ blogs:

Kelly Milner Halls writes about being a single mom and keeping your kids in college, but adds that her motivation includes “…a burning curiosity. I was born with an unyielding need to discover the who, what, when, where, why and how of virtually any topic that crosses my field of vision….”

Activists and keeping the fight going inspires Claire Rudolf Murphy to stay at her keyboard, while Midge Raymond describes what it’s like stay motivated as a “writer who is still ‘emerging’ after a decade of slowly but surely getting published stories into the world amid my various day jobs.”

For some, the drive to write is always present. Martha Silano describes writing as something that, “…gives me permission to be silly, absurd, childish, sarcastic, ironic, grave, witty, ponderous, ambivalent, obfuscating, someone else. Who doesn't want to be some or all of these?”

Brandon Schrand acknowledges the hard work but also the reward of realizing that “not only have you placed words in a place where they had not previously existed, but you have done it in a way that affords new ways to see the world, new modes for accessing meaning.”

Many thanks to these fine writers for participating. Visit their blogs, leave them comments, and don’t forget to meet up with them again during our festival! Click on Event Details in our Blog Category list in the right navigation panel to view our festival schedule or visit the Festival Event's Calendar on our new website to find out when and where they will appear.