Texas Book Festival Comes to Town
The 25th annual Texas Book Festival took place this past weekend, and I overheard an attendee say that the best thing George Bush Jr. ever did was to marry Laura, who founded the TBF in 1995*. The first festival flowered the following year.
It was a glorious day, fine weather to be outside, either casually strolling or purposefully striding inside, on the grounds of, or within a couple blocks from the state Capitol building. You may not have heard that the Texans of the 1850s modeled their building after the one in DC and, being Texans, they had to have it be just a little bit bigger (about 14'7" taller), and it sure is a handsome structure.
Especially for a first-timer like myself, one of the best things about volunteering at the TBF was getting to meet authors you may have never heard of, and so to gain a bigger glimpse of the world than perhaps you'd had in a while. It was both a pleasure and a real honor to get to meet three different groups of authors, accompany the six of them to where they were scheduled to speak, hear what they had to say, and afterward to get them to a tent in which they'd sign their books.
My first group included the moderator who would introduce and interview her subject, Fatima Ronquillo, who was more of a painter than a writer. (Her painting, The Naturalist, adorned TBF's 2015 poster.) Born in the Philippines, coming of age in San Antonio, and now residing in Santa Fe, the colonial influences of these three places appear in her work, and somehow engender what she calls mad enchantment, a close cousin to magical realism. A slide-show of her recent paintings accompanied the talk she gave at The Contemporary (art museum), revealing a series of highly stylized children, in elaborate, sometimes military-looking costume, often accompanied by somewhat unusual animals, including a stately bison, and a mincing marmoset. One child had antlers growing from his head, meant to evoke the myth of Actaeon: the unfortunate youth turned into a stag before being torn apart by his hunting dogs, all for having glimpsed the (clearly easily provoked) goddess Artemis, who he'd caught bathing while nude. Ronquillo's paintings are not to be missed; see them here.
After guiding their authors to the signing tent, we author-guides had been requested to hustle on back to escort still more. After the pleasure of hearing Ronquillo speak and viewing her work, I certainly wasn't about to dally, and was amply rewarded by next getting to meet three luminaries, who spoke under the rubric Writing the Civil Rights Movement: author Sharon Robinson, daughter of famed baseball star Jackie Robinson; Barry Wittenstein, author of A Place to Land: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation, which had been handsomely illustrated by the third member of this second group: the hugely talented illustrator, Jerry Pinkney, at work on lavishly illustrating children's books since the mid-60s. He is the winner of one Caldecott Medal, and five honors.
Robinson was especially engaging, telling a rapt audience about what it was like for a 13-year-old to be at the 1963 March on Washington; she had been present more than once when her father met Dr. King. Ms. Robinson also talked about her experience as a black girl moving into an all-white neighborhood in Connecticut, and then with the advent of desegregation, the surreality of her being bused with her white classmates to integrate an all black school in downtown Hartford. Her new book is Child of the Dream, a Memoir of 1963.
Possibly most affecting of all were the two authors in my final group: Rene Denfeld, and David Dow, whose panel had been titled It's My Day Job: Suspense Writers with Real Life Experience. Denfeld worked as the chief investigator in an Oregon public defender's office, and so has come face-to-face with some of the worst, and sometimes the best, behaviors known to our species. She described the streets of Portland, where she began living at the age of 12, as being safer than her home, where a stepfather was (let's say) a constant threat to her well-being.
Margaret Atwood called Denfeld's book The Butterfly Girl a heartbreaking, finger-gnawing, yet ultimately hopeful novel; she is also the author of The Child Finder, and The Enchanted. I felt in her presence the spirit of someone with the grace and the power to remind us that even those who as children have suffered horribly can sometimes still manage to make of themselves something beautiful and inspiring to others.
Dow was the only Texan among all the authors I met that day; his 2012 TED talk on the death penalty has been viewed nearly 4 million times; he is the founder of the Texas Innocence Network.
Perhaps the most memorable comment I heard all day was his: many in this most righteous country of ours believe that the harsher we punish offenders, the more sympathy we show the victim. He reminds us of the falsity of this proposition: that it's possible to honor the human even in offenders; that "hurt people hurt other people"; and that taking into account the abject misery and violence so many are forced to confront as children does not mean excusing the awful behavior they sometimes exhibit as adults. But certainly this must be understood as significant, something needing to be addressed by us all, esp. by anyone interested in helping to create a criminal justice system that does a better job of acknowledging the humanity, yes, even of inmates.
Once an advocate of the death penalty, he pointed out that it would be practically impossible for anyone working on the cases of death-row inmates for as long as he has to remain a death-penalty advocate, unless they themselves were some kind of monster. Dow's novel, Confessions of an Innocent Man, was published in April.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not be too early to start making plans for attending next year's Texas Book Festival. Ms. Laura Bush, my hat is off to you.
-- --
* - Co-founded, really: with an Austin volunteer powerhouse named Mary Margaret Farabee (d. 2013)
It was a glorious day, fine weather to be outside, either casually strolling or purposefully striding inside, on the grounds of, or within a couple blocks from the state Capitol building. You may not have heard that the Texans of the 1850s modeled their building after the one in DC and, being Texans, they had to have it be just a little bit bigger (about 14'7" taller), and it sure is a handsome structure.
Especially for a first-timer like myself, one of the best things about volunteering at the TBF was getting to meet authors you may have never heard of, and so to gain a bigger glimpse of the world than perhaps you'd had in a while. It was both a pleasure and a real honor to get to meet three different groups of authors, accompany the six of them to where they were scheduled to speak, hear what they had to say, and afterward to get them to a tent in which they'd sign their books.
My first group included the moderator who would introduce and interview her subject, Fatima Ronquillo, who was more of a painter than a writer. (Her painting, The Naturalist, adorned TBF's 2015 poster.) Born in the Philippines, coming of age in San Antonio, and now residing in Santa Fe, the colonial influences of these three places appear in her work, and somehow engender what she calls mad enchantment, a close cousin to magical realism. A slide-show of her recent paintings accompanied the talk she gave at The Contemporary (art museum), revealing a series of highly stylized children, in elaborate, sometimes military-looking costume, often accompanied by somewhat unusual animals, including a stately bison, and a mincing marmoset. One child had antlers growing from his head, meant to evoke the myth of Actaeon: the unfortunate youth turned into a stag before being torn apart by his hunting dogs, all for having glimpsed the (clearly easily provoked) goddess Artemis, who he'd caught bathing while nude. Ronquillo's paintings are not to be missed; see them here.
After guiding their authors to the signing tent, we author-guides had been requested to hustle on back to escort still more. After the pleasure of hearing Ronquillo speak and viewing her work, I certainly wasn't about to dally, and was amply rewarded by next getting to meet three luminaries, who spoke under the rubric Writing the Civil Rights Movement: author Sharon Robinson, daughter of famed baseball star Jackie Robinson; Barry Wittenstein, author of A Place to Land: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation, which had been handsomely illustrated by the third member of this second group: the hugely talented illustrator, Jerry Pinkney, at work on lavishly illustrating children's books since the mid-60s. He is the winner of one Caldecott Medal, and five honors.
Robinson was especially engaging, telling a rapt audience about what it was like for a 13-year-old to be at the 1963 March on Washington; she had been present more than once when her father met Dr. King. Ms. Robinson also talked about her experience as a black girl moving into an all-white neighborhood in Connecticut, and then with the advent of desegregation, the surreality of her being bused with her white classmates to integrate an all black school in downtown Hartford. Her new book is Child of the Dream, a Memoir of 1963.
Possibly most affecting of all were the two authors in my final group: Rene Denfeld, and David Dow, whose panel had been titled It's My Day Job: Suspense Writers with Real Life Experience. Denfeld worked as the chief investigator in an Oregon public defender's office, and so has come face-to-face with some of the worst, and sometimes the best, behaviors known to our species. She described the streets of Portland, where she began living at the age of 12, as being safer than her home, where a stepfather was (let's say) a constant threat to her well-being.
Margaret Atwood called Denfeld's book The Butterfly Girl a heartbreaking, finger-gnawing, yet ultimately hopeful novel; she is also the author of The Child Finder, and The Enchanted. I felt in her presence the spirit of someone with the grace and the power to remind us that even those who as children have suffered horribly can sometimes still manage to make of themselves something beautiful and inspiring to others.
Dow was the only Texan among all the authors I met that day; his 2012 TED talk on the death penalty has been viewed nearly 4 million times; he is the founder of the Texas Innocence Network.
Perhaps the most memorable comment I heard all day was his: many in this most righteous country of ours believe that the harsher we punish offenders, the more sympathy we show the victim. He reminds us of the falsity of this proposition: that it's possible to honor the human even in offenders; that "hurt people hurt other people"; and that taking into account the abject misery and violence so many are forced to confront as children does not mean excusing the awful behavior they sometimes exhibit as adults. But certainly this must be understood as significant, something needing to be addressed by us all, esp. by anyone interested in helping to create a criminal justice system that does a better job of acknowledging the humanity, yes, even of inmates.
Once an advocate of the death penalty, he pointed out that it would be practically impossible for anyone working on the cases of death-row inmates for as long as he has to remain a death-penalty advocate, unless they themselves were some kind of monster. Dow's novel, Confessions of an Innocent Man, was published in April.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not be too early to start making plans for attending next year's Texas Book Festival. Ms. Laura Bush, my hat is off to you.
-- --
* - Co-founded, really: with an Austin volunteer powerhouse named Mary Margaret Farabee (d. 2013)
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