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Establishing a Literary Beachhead

February 18, 2008 On Saturday, I stepped away from the keyboard and various writing projects and headed into Washington, DC for a veddy literary afternoon at Politics & Prose. I moderated an NBCC Good Reads panel and then went out with the panelists out for an hour of coffee and conversation. Since most of us tend to be fairly solitary creatures, we don't congregate often. It was a lot of fun to just sit and throw around phrases like "Austen did not have 'Sapphic tendencies'" and "It's got a logo with a little globe reading a book" and "Ian McEwan wrote a libretto?" without anyone nearby to roll their eyes.

As I mentioned in my NBCC Critical Mass post about the affair, panelist Scott McLemee declared that we've now established a sort of literary beachhead in DC -- it's time for us literary types in this company town to get people talking about books, reading, and publishing. I was really glad that David Kipen of the NEA attended and talked up the latest DC Big Read, which is The Great Gatsby and starts in April.

You can read more about the panel here, and I urge you to check out accounts of the other NBCC Good Reads events that have been taking place around the country, too.

An interesting side note: as the panel progressed, a young man appeared towards the back of the audience, uneasily clutching a tall stack of what were obviously all the same book. He asked a question, and I facetiously said "You're making all these critics nervous with your stack of galleys," or something like that. It turned out that the paperbacks were indeed his book (which he handed out to the audience), but it also turned out that the young man, Goodloe Byron, did the cover art for one of my favorite indie novels of 2007, Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe from Soft Skull Press.

Goodloe Byron may not be a headliner at Politics & Prose, yet or ever (such are the vagaries of lit life) -- but meeting him and learning about his work was a great reminder of why establishing literary beachheads in places other than Manhattan is important.

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on February 18, 2008 | Comments (2)