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PrintWorth reading: Something to celebrate
News and notes on the local literary scene.
You would have to fly to New York or London to find all the famous artists in one place who will be in our back yard Sept. 24-25.
The 2010 Celebration of Books, on the Oklahoma State University-Tulsa campus, after many years, has become much more than a book festival. Now the Tulsa tradition is a literary and musical fall ritual that draws artsy headliners from all over the world.
Author Michael Cunningham, best known for “The Hours,” and Sue Monk Kidd, author of “The Secret Life of Bees,” along with playwright Beth Henley (“Crimes of the Heart”), former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove and PBS news anchor and author Jim Lehrer are but a few who will appear. Three of them are Pulitzer Prize winners.
Despite the impressive lineup of artists, none of the local flavor has been lost. Teresa Miller, executive director of the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers and organizer/creator, has invited 60 regional writers representing almost every genre, including memoirs, songwriting, poetry, novels and young adult literature.
At 7 p.m., Sept. 24, at the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, Cunningham and Kidd will share personal insights about writing and filmmaking. They have much in common, although their works of fiction do not. Both have had their creations revamped into movie versions. Both have written literary travelogues. Nothing is more revealing about an author than his or her travel journals; wrote Anais Nin, “We write to taste life twice.”
Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor wrote “Traveling With Pomegranates,” a mother-and-daughter Greek
odyssey. “Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown” (a town on the tip of Cape Cod) is a tribute to a spot Cunningham loves.
Like Ernest Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon” or Graham Green’s “Journey Without Maps,” Kidd and Cunningham open their hearts and minds on the open road.
