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Sixth Annual Newburyport Literary Festival

I am so lucky to live in a town (or a town neighboring to a town) which values literature and reading so much that each year for the past six years it holds an annual literary festival.

Today began for me with reading for Paul Harding’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Tinkers. The auditorium was packed and the first thing I learned about Harding, which I did not know before, was that he was a member of Cold Water Flat. I actually remember that I did some sort of promotional thing with them when I was the promotions director of Tower New England. I’m pretty sure I had them (or at least the lead singer) in store at one point and then I also vaguely remember doing some radio station sponsored thing at a recording studio with them (maybe it wasn’t them?). Anyway, just a weird connection.

As for today, Harding was utterly charming and engaging from beginning to end. I got itchy when he said he was going to read for 20 minutes (too long, imo, for most people to read… unless you are Dorothy Allison and can really, really READ and engage and make it a performance) but Harding was terrific and I was completely focused on what he was reading from beginning to end. He was a great and low-key performer. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The Q&A was equally engaging. I was inspired by his story of bringing Tinkers to publication. And then charmed by the description of his revision process which he describes as akin to a roomba vacuum.

Next up for me was the Book Bloggers. They spoke about their beginnings as bloggers and how they established their individual brands but the most important message coming through was how much they all love books. During the Q&A at the end of their session an author (whom I recognized as she is local to the area but will not name here and, really, she has nothing to worry about given the quality of what she writes) said how fearful she is of book bloggers because her publisher has told her she must get in with all of them (paraphrasing) and she feels like a fish out of water. But the bloggers were all very gracious to her and encouraged her to talk to them after.

Finally, I went to see Andre Dubus III at the Unitarian Universalist Church (one of the most beautiful buildings in our town of beautiful buildings). The place was packed and Dubus showed up just a few minutes late (because he’d been shuttling back and forth between his sporting events for his three teenagers) and ran down the aisle at the last minute. Perfect. Townie: A Memoir is a book I very much love and even more so now after hearing Dubus read and speak after reading. When asked about any qualms he might have about writing a memoir, he recalled something his friend and fellow writer Richard Russo asked him, “Are you trying to settle a score by writing it?”

Russo’s point was that if you are trying to settle a score then either don’t write it at all or write it and don’t publish it. Either way, Dubus asked himself that question and found that he was not writing it to settle a score. He simply wanted to tell this story of his hardscrabble youth in Haverhill, MA. What he had not accounted for was how difficult it would be for him to unearth his family secrets. In the end, though, as in with the reader’s experience with the book, it has all proven redemptive.

Just a great day. Can’t wait until next year.

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Categories literary festival, Massachusetts, New England, Newburyport

Townie, by Andre Dubus III

8 Mar

After she finished reading Andre Dubus III’s new memoir Townie one of my friends called me and asked, “Is this book as good as I think it is or is it just that I grew up around all of these places he writes about?” I told her that while place is certainly important in the book, the book is exactly as good as she thinks it is. And it is.

And so what of this place where my friend, and Dubus, and I now live? This place is the north shore of Massachusetts, once known for its down-in-the-mouth mill and fishing towns bordering the Merrimack river but which is now gentrified and not only a commuter location for those working Boston but also its own happening place to live and work.

Not so in the days when Dubus and my friend were coming up.

Son of a hard-living writer and a hard-working mother, Dubus suffered the same fate of many of us living our childhood in the 60s and 70s when helicopter parents did not exist, that of benign neglect. Our parents meant us no harm; they had grown up in difficult times themselves–many born into the Great Depression or into war. They learned how to survive and that’s what they taught us, mostly by leaving us alone. And that was really okay, actually. Like Dubus, we either learned how to survive and thrive or we didn’t.

You might assume that this book is going to be about what it’s like to be the child of one of the 20th century’s best writers, but in actuality that Dubus’s father was a writer is only a fraction of the tale. At its core this is a story of this son’s redemption and, ultimately, of his awakening. Indeed, some of the most poignant moments within this narrative are when Dubus realizes what he has become (a brute) and what he might become (a murderer) and then, most importantly, what he wants to be and will choose to be (a creator/a husband/a father).

The pivotal scene occurs when instead of heading out to the gym as he would normally do after a day’s hard labor, Dubus makes him self a cup of tea and sits down at his table and writes. In this moment and in this act, he (perhaps unconsciously) saves himself:

I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I’d never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator.

I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn’t lose.

He does not use writing as therapy, rather he uses it as an act of survival. Of turning the eye outward, so that vision might reflect back inward. For me, this scene was keenly familiar to my own experience in which I, too, picked up the pen as a means of saving myself, of pushing myself away from darkness into the bright glare of awareness.

In fact, so much of the book feels familiar, not because of how I lived and live now but because what Dubus taps into is something common to the human experience: the choices we make that allow us to survive. The choices we make that bring us one more rung up the ladder from merely surviving up to thriving. As such, this book is not about blame or self-pity; it’s about examining the darkness within you so that you might share your own light.

Read it.