We've called our event series “Literature Live” for a long time.
It's been called that for so long, in fact, that it's easy enough to forget the series has a name at all. We have “author events” or “readings” or “speakers” or “lectures,” depending on who you're asking. We host more than three hundred each year. And if you look up in the corner of any of our event calendars, you will, without fail, see the “Literature Live” emblem there.
In all the time I've worked for Village Books, I'd never really thought about that name or its significance. In all the time I spent here while growing up, it never occurred to me that the name was significant. It didn't occur to me until about a week ago, on a Saturday, when I had the house to myself and The Clash was turned up high on the stereo and I was standing in the kitchen washing a couple days worth of dishes.
I get kind of contemplative when I wash dishes.
What I realized, about halfway through “Spanish Guns,” was that any time the freedom of thought or expression is threatened anywhere in the world, the concept of live literature – of literature that is alive – becomes a very important one indeed.
I'd already been thinking a lot about that lately, as we all have. The recent tragedy in Paris was a jarring reminder that the freedom of expression – a freedom we often take for granted – is under constant threat. As Joni Mitchell said, you never know what you've got till it's gone.
How lucky we are, then, to have three hundred opportunities each year to take an hour and sit and listen to novelists, poets and journalists read their work. How lucky we are to be able to ask them questions, interact with them, and participate in the process of bringing their writing to life. How lucky we are to experience literature that is alive.
The other day, I got a moment to chat with Chris Hoke, who has worked for years as a jail chaplain in Skagit County. He's been a customer of Village Books for years, too, and on Saturday, February 2nd at 4pm, he read from his new book Wanted in the Readings Gallery. Billed as “a spiritual pursuit across borders and amongst outlaws,” Wanted is a memoir of Hoke's time working with gang members and migrant workers in a community not far from our own. Wanted gives a voice to groups that are often silenced, and it's important to remember, from time to time, how brave and valuable a thing that is. When Chris Hoke read here, he carried that voice off the page and out into the world.
He brought it to life, and there's no stopping it now.
I've been excited about John Vaillant's first novel The Jaguar's Children for a while now. It's a book that sticks with you. The Jaguar's Children is a tale of endurance and desperation on the modern frontier – somewhere just north of the Mexican border in the Arizona desert – and it is told through a ubiquitous modern medium, the cell phone. But it's a story that draws much of its power from ancient tradition, and from the clashes between past, present, and future that all cultures struggle with. The novel centers around Hector, a young man trapped, along with a dozen others, in the sealed tank of a decommissioned water truck which was supposed to take them across the border. The truck has broken down and the Coyotes who were driving it have taken off, so Hector begins sending texts and voice recordings to the lone American number he can find on the phone of his friend Cesar, who is lying next to him in the tank, seriously injured. He assumes the number belongs to a girlfriend but can't be sure, and we as readers can't be sure of anything as Hector begins to tell his story, hoping that someone somewhere will hear it.
Vaillant is no stranger to telling urgent, timely stories, as anyone who has read his bestselling books The Golden Spruce and The Tiger will already know. Those books were hard to put down and even harder to stop talking about, and he brings that same beautiful intensity to The Jaguar's Children. And although this is fiction, it's a story similar to many we've heard in the news. With this novel, Vaillant is bringing untold stories to life – the stories of the hundreds and thousands of people who risk their lives for an uncertain future, the stories of those bowled over by the side-effects of what they are told is progress, and the stories of those reaching for new beginnings while grasping at the last remnants of their pasts.
Frankly, I don't want those stories to be silenced, and I was glad to be there to hear John Vaillant read this past Saturday evening, as they came to life once more.
If you didn’t make it in to see Hoke or Vaillant, don’t worry. There are always more great events on our schedule. For instance Ann Pancake, whose novel Strange as This Weather Has Been - about a family experiencing the destructive side effects of mountaintop-removal mining – was praised by Wendell Berry as “one of the bravest novels I have ever read.” Ann Pancake will read from her new collection, Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, on Sunday, February 15th.
And you might be thinking that this is sort of about freedom of expression and sort of not, since there's been no great controversy around any of these great authors. But the thing about freedom of expression is that it's most important when it's not controversial. It's most important when it's just there, every day, for our benefit.
Three hundred author events. That's one almost every day of the year.
Come down and listen. Come down and watch literature come to life.
It's easy to forget that we have the opportunity to do this so often, which means we must try and remember. I hope I'll see you at a Literature Live event soon.
-Sam, Events Coordinator
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