If you’re not familiar with the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, think of it as a celebration of the written word in Nevada, in its many forms. More than 30 readings, panels and other events—all free—take place in venues of all sorts, mostly along California Avenue, on Saturday, Oct. 12.
Some happen at bars, like RN&R contributor Max Stone’s Landline Poetry Showcase at the Loving Cup. Royce Burger Bar will host a panel on masculinity featuring Christopher Coake, director of the University of Nevada, Reno’s creative writing program, as well as Las Vegas poets Harry R. Fagel and Rodney J. Lee.
There are hands-on workshops in letterpress and postcard making, a family story time at the Downtown Reno Library, and discussions on the various ways in which Northern Nevadans use language. Paiute language teacher Esha Hoferer and Reno-Sparks Indian Colony language and culture coordinator Stacey Burns, for example, will lead a panel on why and how the Numu (Northern Paiute) language is being revived.
You’ll also be able to record an oral history, take a workshop in science fiction and fantasy writing, or read your own poetry during open mic events. To avoid a long walk, you can hop on the Brew Bike shuttle. Yes, that’s the quirky, human-powered trolley you see ferrying people to bars in downtown-adjacent neighborhoods—and during the Lit Crawl, the Brew Bike is all-ages, and if you board at the right time, you might catch an onboard presentation by attorney/comedian David Gamble Jr., fiction author Mark Maynard or artist/poet Pan Pantoja.
If you’re already a dyed-in-the-wool fan of this (almost) annual event, you probably have a question: How can the Lit Crawl possibly retain its cozy, sought-after, neighborhood-stroll feeling now that its longtime hub—Sundance Books—closed earlier this year?
The folks at Nevada Humanities are just as sad as the rest of us that Sundance is no longer, and they’ve found a few ways to retain the Lit Crawl look and feel. For one, the Jabberwocky—that larger-than-life version of Lewis Carroll’s legendary monster—that long stood at the top of the banister at Sundance will be stationed at Lake Mansion for your selfie-taking pleasure. And there will still be a hub for books.
“We’re partnering with the Radical Cat to create a pop-up bookstore that will be at the Lake Mansion throughout the day,” said George Tsz-Kwan Lam, Nevada Humanities’ assistant director. “We needed, of course, a way for folks to gather and to check out the books that are on offer, written by the featured authors, and do book-signings.”
Typically, the Lit Crawl brings in a keynote presenter from another Western region. This year, it’s Anthony Doerr. He lives in Boise, Idaho, and he’s been in the national spotlight for quite a while now. Doerr’s talk, which takes place at the Nevada Museum of Art, sold out weeks ago, but given his razor-sharp view on the power of stories, we figured you’d still like to hear from him—so local educator (and major fan) Sarah Russell gave him a call.
—Kris Vagner
Anthony Doerr has published three novels, a memoir and two collections of short stories. His novel All the Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and other literary honors. Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) was shortlisted for various literary awards.
When we spoke, he was home in Boise, despairing about wildfires and how, between smoky skies and the presidential election, it was feeling like 2020 all over again. We talked about the pandemic and environmental concerns, but in the end, like his novels, he is filled with hope.
Cloud Cuckoo Land has three timeframes: The 1453 fall of Constantinople, with Anna inside and Omeir outside the city; a library in contemporary Idaho where Zeno, a Korean War veteran, protects children from a bomb; and in an interstellar starship where 13-year-old Konstance quarantines alone in a vault. Doerr had begun to draft Cloud Cuckoo Land before the COVID-19 shutdown in March 2020. The primary theme of the novel—becoming trapped (or “hemmed in,” as Doerr says), and how stories can help “slip the trap”—was already there, but the shutdown led to significant revisions of this theme.
In the novel, Zeno tells a friend about librarians reading him ancient texts when he was a lonely child. The friend says, “I know why those librarians read the old stories to you … because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.” This theme—a love letter to books, librarians and stories—became clearer to Doerr during the shutdown.
“I turned to books through the pandemic, because we were trying to keep it locked down, and books were really this salvation, a way for me to stay mentally sane and imagine myself outside of my own life during those hours,” he said. His characters—trapped in a vault, in a library under siege, in the walled-in city of Constantinople—already felt hemmed in.
“Before I sent the draft to my editor, I think, ‘I’m just going to try to heighten all these feelings of entrapment,’” Doerr said.
Some readers found the settings apocalyptic and scary. “But you also feel this hope, because you see art thrive,” he said. “The candle glows a little bit more brightly when it’s surrounded by that kind of darkness.”
This hope, despite the world crumbling around his characters, is also present in All the Light We Cannot See, which is set during World War II.
Doerr said writing a hopeful story about World War II is “kind of a wild, crazy, scary idea.” He believes he has a responsibility to address the horrors of war, but also, that if you focus on individuals and the way they connect, “It’s OK … to say, ‘Look at what humans are capable of’ in terms of connection and imagination. We can make these amazing, startlingly beautiful things, even as we’re also a really destructive species.”
Doerr’s stories are often set in the intermountain West. In his work, he said, the vastness of our region suggests that “our lives are just these little finger snaps in the 4 1/2-billion-year life of the Earth. Does that either make you feel tiny or make you feel incredibly blessed? Does it make you feel afraid? Or do you feel like, ‘Wow! What a privilege that we get to be here for a few decades and witness this extraordinary, incredibly complex tapestry of evolution that delivered this kind of organism to this moment’ … and maybe de-center ourselves in the best possible way, the way literature can de-center us, take us out of our own Copernican sense where everything revolves around us.”
Doerr places his characters in settings that show how simple they are, and their missions are. Can they still be heroes against a backdrop like the fall of Constantinople? In Cloud Cuckoo Land, he was subverting the hero paradigm, Doerr said.
“I was trying to invert the typical Greek and Roman hero, who is a male, who is Achilles. … When we were kids, maybe 80% (of movies) had a male who destroys things, alone. … I thought it’d be interesting to play … with unfamiliar hero tropes in Cloud Cuckoo Land—people who knit and embroider and connect, a librarian who is gay, who has to conceal himself from himself for most of his life, and finds heroism.”
The themes of protecting texts, stories and radio so people can connect left me wondering: What are the most important texts to preserve? I asked him what he would include on a golden record, like the one launched into space on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 with sounds and images to convey life and culture on Earth. His answer included Emily Watson’s translation of The Odyssey (“I feel like The Odyssey has got this new blood pumping through it”); Sappho; Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino; Aboriginal music from Australia; and a big list of species and DNA: “We’re never going to be able to actually lift these big bodies full of water … out of the solar system, but maybe we can launch little, tiny DNA printers. Someday spacecraft could colonize a habitable planet in another solar system.”
Doerr then turned the question to everyone participating in the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl: He asked us to contemplate what should go on a golden record, and what metaphorical golden records have been lost.
“What voices are being silenced right now? … When you look at book bans across the United States, what kinds of voices are those? Often, there are characters who are LGBTQIA+ or writers of color, or characters of color. What if we were to be able to access the works of Indigenous peoples from before the Columbian exchange and smallpox, and learn from them?
“We worship progress in the United States, but progress isn’t this steady curve that sweeps ever upward. There is a lot that we don’t know that our ancestors did know. How we can build a more rich and resilient codex in the years to come? That’s what these literary festivals are all about.”
The Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl will take place from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 12, with 30-plus panel discussions, book signings, workshops, family-friendly activities and other events at the Nevada Museum of Art, Downtown Reno Library, Lake Mansion and other venues, most of them on or near California Avenue. Learn more at www.nevadahumanities.org/literarycrawl.