It was an impulse. I couldn’t predict I’d suddenly need to read the first paragraphs of the novels written by old friends, but once it felt necessary I found myself at Bookmans pulling hardbacks from shelves and standing on a stool in an aisle muttering words aloud.
And then, satisfied I hadn’t forgotten my wonder at their words, I spent the day imagining what if the ambulance-driving, poem-writing, dance-creating, songwriting, champions-of-social-justice friends of mine who aren’t novelists wrote novels, what kind of novels would they be? I imagined book jacket shorthand descriptions of assorted writing styles: Her puckish humor braids people in small communities into a sensible path through baffling events…Seams of dark despair contrast with insights rising on wings of gracious beautiful language …Flippant plot lines dance; action that splashes gurgles into unexpected truth.
Clearly I needed live authors to replace my imaginings so I headed south to the Tucson Festival of Books that is billed as the fourth largest book festival in the country. Imagine all that new snow on the San Francisco Peaks reconfigured as open white pages and you are close to the scale of the festival that unfolds for two days each March at the University of Arizona—400 plus authors, 234 exhibits. And this year, John Sayles.
Ever since reading his short story, “At the Anarchist’s Convention,” in the late ’70s, I’ve delighted in the characters created by writer/director Sayles and now here was my chance to see him in person. Three hundred and ninety-nine other authors I might glance at once I’d seen Sayles. I might lean my ear to Nevada Barr, check out Larry McMurtry, even stand at the back of a hall for a glimpse of Jodi Picoult. But first Sayles.
Well, no, first music, as I never spend time in Tucson without seeking Sabra Faulk and Heather Hardy. I found them at a Friday night gig in the Mint on Grant Road knitting the crowd together with fiddling, songs and blues. Sketching on a napkin, trying to capture Heather’s elegant spidery leaning into strings, I got to thinking about creators. Are they magicians these poets and dancers and photographers and novelists and screenwriters and songwriters that inhabit my heart and brain? And why do I need to eventually see in person the creators I savor? Could it be a misplaced savoring of my own inner writer?
It is true, I once constructed 268 pages of novel that didn’t exactly impress the three readers I pressed it upon. I grew tired of its death in my closet and finally when a friend said she was taking her journals to the Flagstaff dump to free herself of disconcerting past, I went along with my own offering. Before the bulldozer scraped dirt over our words the wind scattered my novel, turning the pages into white lambs scampering toward Sunset Crater. A good end, I thought. It freed me, anyway, to admire novelists with my hands empty of ambition.
Such a feast I enjoyed. On Saturday Nevada Barr signed books for beaming fans with so much grace and vivacity that I am inspired to never be cranky again. On Sunday, learning of Larry McMurtry’s 34 Oscar nominations and 13 Oscars didn’t impress me as much as his saying, “Five pages a day has been my working pace for 55 years.” Diana Ossana, the screenwriter who also produced “Brokeback Mountain” and shares a blog with McMurtry at www.flashandfilagree.com, expressed her admiration for his voracious reading: “My daughter says it best: He’s like a database with an opinion.”
I’m happy such lively brains keep translating the world for the rest of us.
Before he made 18 movies, the then 24-year-old John Sayles wrote “Pride of the Bimbos,” “A novel about masculinity,” he said, from the point of view of a son whose father is a midget on a exhibition baseball team that plays in drag. “One of the reasons I started making movies,” Sayles said, “was I thought, here’s all these people in the world around me I never see on screen.”
Later on the grassy mall I sat at a typewriter in the Poetry Center tent where the public was invited to create lines for group poems. Hundreds of book lovers swirled by with their separate enthusiasms animating their speech. Just us humans here, I thought, so very, very curious about each other. I typed, “Like flocks of clouds the pilgrim readers scud toward peaks on creative winds.”
