The annual Arkansas Literary Festival repeats its oldest and best story in 2016: There's something -- a book, event, activity or presenter -- for everyone.
Held Thursday through April 17, the festival is mainly four days of great stories told by an acclaimed and varied cast of authors, historians, poets, scientists, journalists, essayists and more.
But the event, a program of the Central Arkansas Library System, always goes beyond the book.
This year is no different.
Offerings at the 13th annual festival, held at the system's Main Library and venues across Little Rock, include something for food lovers, yoga enthusiasts, music aficionados, sports fanatics and cartoon admirers, among others.
There's even an escape room, an adult coloring book workshop, a pie contest and a children's play.
"The 2016 festival offers an invigorating mix of best-selling and prize-winning authors, emerging writers, immersive activities, practical workshops, exciting performances, engaging competitions and fun social gatherings for everyone from the most erudite scholar to the most reluctant reader," says coordinator Brad Mooy. "All but two of the 65 offerings are free."
Here's just a small sampling -- some brief quotes from four festival authors -- of the more than 80 scheduled presenters.
RIEN FERTEL
The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog
Noon Friday, Whole Hog Cafe, 2516 Cantrell Road
If Fertel's last name is recognizable, it's because his grandmother was Ruth Fertel, otherwise known as the founder of Ruth's Chris Steak Houses. Rien Fertel spent his early years in the kitchens of his family's restaurants, but as a grown-up, he has made his own name writing for such publications as Oxford American, Garden & Gun and Southern Living, and earning a doctorate in history from Tulane University and teaching in New Orleans.
He's also a finalist for a 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for his essay "(The New) Broad Way, NOLA" that appeared in the magazine The Local Palate.
His second book, following 2014's Imagining the Creole City, is The One True Barbecue, "a flavorful portrait of Southern life" touching upon race, religion and historical events through the lives of whole hog pitmasters in Tennessee and the Carolinas.
On growing up in a Ruth's Chris Steak House:
"My mom, who was Ruth Fertel's daughter-in-law, ran the one in Lafayette, [La.], and I grew up really in that kitchen. I didn't go to day care. Before kindergarten, it was kind of everyday in a high chair in the back in the kitchen of that restaurant. And then I graduated to working in the kitchen, washing dishes when I was 12 and making salads. I moved up to the front of the house when I was of legal age to earn a paycheck. I was a busboy. The book is dedicated to all the people who raised me in those restaurants."
On the synopsis of The One True Barbecue:
"I like to think of it as a story about all of the things that we don't talk about -- we might be thinking about them, but we don't often talk of them -- when we eat barbecue. It's all those things that are linked with the history and culture of barbecue in the South. The work and the labor that is involved with the art of making barbecue, especially whole hog barbecue. Plus, there are the racial dynamics of barbecue that have been really evident and expressed in the food and the making of the food since the very beginning."
MARY PILON
The Monopolists
1 p.m. Saturday at Ron Robinson Theater, 100 River Market Ave.
During Mary Pilon's travels the past couple of years -- where she picked up bylines in publications such as The New Yorker and Esquire and the online blog SB Nation -- she has developed a few travel tips she's willing to pass on.
If possible, she says, try to land at night so you're already tired. Always be hydrating. And when traveling to a developing country, a chewable Pepto-Bismol everyday is a handy prevention measure.
The former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times also traveled the United States over the five-year period when she wrote The Monopolists, the must-read-tale of the true history of Monopoly, the popular board game inspired by Elizabeth Magie's The Landlord's Game, which was created to teach the economic principles of Georgism.
On the genesis of The Monopolists:
"The whole book was an accident. In 2009, I was on staff at The Wall Street Journal writing about the financial crisis and I was going to mention in passing that Monopoly was developed during the Great Depression. ... So, I started looking and looking and the story just wasn't adding up. It wasn't making any sense. I was finding inconsistent information online. I reached out to Ralph Anspach [creator of Anti-Monopoly] on a whim. ... He got back with me and said, 'Oh, I know all about this. It wasn't invented by Charles Darrow. It was invented by Elizabeth Magie.' It hatched open this whole thing."
On who Elizabeth Magie was:
"She was fascinating. Right off the bat, I knew she was going to stand out because even if you talk to game designers today, the gender issues are really intense. The fact that she was a female game designer today would be a huge issue. In 1904, it was even more so. I wondered where did she come from? ... She ended up being an outlier in all sorts of ways. She was really outspoken on things like equal pay at a time when women couldn't vote. ... This game and her inventing this game wasn't an accident by any means."
ANGELA FLOURNOY
The Turner House
Noon April 17 at Ron Robinson Theater
Angela Flournoy's debut novel about one family's 50-year history in Detroit and their family home has received several accolades since being published in April 2015.
Like what? The Turner House was a National Book Award finalist, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, short-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and more.
A graduate of the University of Southern California and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy first started working on The Turner House while in Iowa.
On the novel's setting of Detroit:
"My father is from Detroit and from a neighborhood very similar to the one in the book. I've visited Detroit throughout my life. Probably in the fall of 2009 was when I visited and it was the first time that nobody was living in the house that my father grew up in. ... That was the beginning of me thinking about what stories a house could hold in a broad way."
On the writing process of The Turner House:
"It took four years to write this book and probably every year was different depending on what my other job requirements and obligations were. The first few years I was still in Iowa City and had minimal professional outside commitments so I would write in the morning. ... When I moved to Washington, D.C., I was working various jobs -- sometimes at once -- so I would just write when I could. I would try to figure out how to get to a coffee shop for just a couple of hours a day, sometime within the day."
SLOANE CROSLEY
The Clasp
1:30 p.m. April 17 at Ron Robinson Theater
How funny a writer is Sloane Crosley? She's featured in the 2011 collection The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor From Mark Twain to The Onion and her 2008 collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Just don't ask her what makes her -- or anyone -- a funny writer.
If anyone answers a question about what makes a writer funny with any sort of authority, they are lying, she says.
Crosley's debut novel is The Clasp, a comedic treasure hunt involving three friends and Guy de Maupassant's classic short story "The Necklace."
On creating The Clasp's plot:
"The germination of the idea came from two different places at once. One is a general love for short fiction and a general love for other people's novels that, frankly, focus on a different art form. ... Meanwhile, on the other side I was sort of playing around writing about this age group ... it's 30-year-olds in the book but really it could be any age at which you take stock of your friendships and you feel like people you've known forever could be your family or are they complete strangers to you."
On her failed first attempt at writing a novel before The Clasp:
"I had a night where I printed out [the first novel] and went through it and read it and thought, 'This is something I can salvage.' I had like a glass of whiskey and I sat down going through it, and it was just like this cartoonish theme -- if anyone had witnessed it -- of just me throwing pages on the floor, page after page after page until they were in a pile and I was sort of disgusted with myself."
Style on 04/10/2016