Fourth Oxford Conference
Kicking off the fourth annual Oxford Conference for the Book, held April 12-14 on the University of Mississippi campus, author and writer in residence Barry Hannah hailed conferees with the greeting: "Welcome to Lit-ville." It was an apt nickname for the diminutive north Mississippi town--also dubbed, by author Pat Conroy, "the Vatican City of Southern Letters"--during its yearly literary conference, which gathers book lovers, booksellers, scholars, writers, agents, and publishers for a weekend's worth of discussions on the most crucial and curious issues facing American book culture. For three days in April, Lit-ville was in full swing.
for the Book"These kinds of discussions occur regularly in New York, but we wanted to get those people out into a more academic environment and give them a chance to reflect on what they do," said Richard Howorth, proprietor of Oxford's Square Books and one of the conference's founders. "We wanted to take discussions of publishing and writing out of agents' and editors' offices and writers' rooms and into the public."
And out of those offices and rooms they came. The conference began with a Friday morning writing workshop titled "How to Submit Manuscripts and Work with an Editor," captained by Hannah and featuring Reginald Gibbons, author of the novel Sweetbitter and editor of the literary magazine TriQuarterly, and Cynthia Shearer, debutant novelist--her The Wonder Book of the Air was recently published, to much acclaim, by Pantheon Books--and curator of Rowan Oak, the home of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner.
That workshop was followed by another, "From Author to Reader," featuring authors Padgett Powell and John Berendt, whose nonfiction work, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, easily passed the 100-week mark on the New York Times bestseller list shortly before the conference. Berendt gave conferees his solid perspective as a longtime editor at such luminous magazines as New York and Esquire, while Powell, whose latest novel, Edisto Revisited, is a sequel to his 1984 debut, offered wry and often dark observations on writing and the publishing milieu. "Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper," Powell remarked, but nonetheless admonished would-be authors: "Spoil it."
University of Mississippi Chancellor Robert Khayat welcomed guests to the campus just prior to scholar Joseph Blotner's Friday afternoon presentation on Robert Penn Warren, the subject of Blotner's latest biography. Blotner's massive, double-volume record of the life of William Faulkner is widely considered the finest biography in the Faulkner studies canon and was recently published, as a single volume, in paperback. As evidenced from his reading, Warren scholars can expect similar quality--with his exhaustive knowledge and detail, Blotner's treatments ring with the finality of a gavel.
Later Friday afternoon, the perennially popular session "'Go, Little Book... :' Getting a Book to Readers," offered conferees five disparate perspectives on the book trade--from writing and editing books to selling them over a counter. Shearer, along with her agent, Leigh Feldman, and editor, Dan Frank, recounted how her early short stories coalesced into The Wonder Book of the Air, while Judy Long, owner of the Old Black Dog Bookstore in Athens, Georgia, explained the process of getting a book like Shearer's into readers' hands. "The publishing business is a great, scary jungle to many folks," said Hannah, the panel's moderator, but the afternoon discussion seemed to quell some of those fears. It also, incidentally, featured one of the conference's most memorable lines--this on the creative process--from moderator Hannah: "Writer's block is God's way of telling you to shut up."
The conference adjourned, as in years past, to the City Grocery restaurant on the Oxford Square, where conferees and participants dined on shrimp and grits and various other specialties of John Currence. Over cocktails and dinner plates, discussions were carried over from the day's panels and workshops and conferees prodded speakers with additional questions and observances. The City Grocery cleared and all conversations halted, however, when Shearer and Powell, reading from their novels, took the stage at the University's Education Auditorium later that evening. The duo was introduced by Oxford author Larry Brown, whose latest novel, Fathers and Sons, will emerge on bookstore shelves this fall.
Saturday morning began with "Publishing Poetry," a session moderated by poet and Ole Miss faculty member Aleda Shirley that featured Reginald Gibbons and Robert von Hallberg, founding editor of the Phoenix Poets series and the author of American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. Following that, in a session titled "Literature and the People," former Mississippi governor William Winter, a founding member of the Southern Literacy Forum, drew upon his childhood experience in Mississippi, his political experience in the state, and his extensive knowledge of literature to deliver a brilliant oration that stirred the audience to a long standing ovation and a hearty response of praise. One person asked what it might take for the former governor to again run for that office.
Despite the yawning specter of a declining readership, another threat to contemporary book culture has emerged, noted Avin Mark Dominitz, co-owner of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee and president of the American Booksellers Association. In a piercing Sunday afternoon address, Dominitz said the independent bookseller has become an endangered species in America, edged from the marketplace by sprawling chain bookstores--the dread superstores, with their acreages of titles but shrill and sterile impersonality. His plea for readers to hold tight to the independent bookstore was impassioned and personal; with shades of Wendell Berry, Dominitz urged a steadfast devotion to the unique and close-knit community an independent bookstore fosters.
Another readership issue--students' role in contemporary book culture--was explored in a Saturday afternoon panel directed by Richard Howorth. Former Governor Winter's fears of a readership loss found an echo in Ole Miss graduate student Jay Langdale, who criticized the reading patterns of many students and claimed technological distractions, such as the Internet, posed a considerable threat to those waning patterns. Anna Crimaldi, a high school student from Oxford, said many of her classmates found such technology easier to approach, and often more entertaining, than age-old printed words, and Ole Miss history professor Nancy Bercaw added that close to 80 percent of her students admitted that they rarely, if ever, read outside what was assigned to them in classes. The prognosis seemed bleak, but author Lewis Nordan tried to paint a little silver into the edges of the doom clouds: "Reading has been threatened for decades," Nordan said, "and, despite technological wizardry, books will one way or another find their audiences."
Other Saturday sessions included a discussion on children's literature featuring Stella Pevsner, author of 16 books for young readers, and Elaine Scott, chair of the Arkansas State Board of Education. Pevsner, whose latest book, Would My Fortune Cookie Lie?, came out this spring, said authoring children's books allowed her "to live an adult life and yet keep in touch with childhood." John Egerton, the award-winning author of Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, rendered an accurate portrayal of reading and writing in any age, and the evening closed with readings by Nordan and Bailey White, the best-selling author and exquisitely demure commentator for National Public Radio.
More readings followed on Sunday: Edwidge Danticat, nominated for the 1995 National Book Award and the PEN/ Faulkner Award for her story collection Krik? Krak! and, according to Howorth, a "rising star in the publishing world," read alongside Reginald Gibbons. The day kicked off with Robert von Hallberg, who spoke on the changing ways of literary scholarship at this century's fin de siecle, and included a distinctly personal session on the writing craft by author Sharon Creech, winner of the eminent Newbery Medal for her first children's book, Walk Two Moons, published in 1994.
Closing out the day's sessions, and the conference's, was John Berendt. Berendt, charming and affable, recounted the origins and making of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, his best-selling depiction of Savannah, Georgia, and its eccentric and often beguiling denizens. After six full years of research, Berendt admitted that not a few Savannah residents considered him just another local eccentric: the chatty New York journalist pretending to write some sort of book on their city. That book, of course, did appear, and, mostly by word-of-mouth, became a national sensation (one turned down, Berendt said coyly, by an unnamed and now-embarrassed New York literary agent).
The 1996 Oxford Conference for the Book ended as it always has: at the Gin, with food and music. Conferees, hunched over steaming bowls of jambalaya, were entertained by Rooster, a local country ensemble led by Southern Studies graduate student Stan Gray. As always, too, there was talk of next year--the promise of another gathering as stellar as the one drawing to a close.
Jonathan Miles
