Anticipate next year! That’s the best way to describe the KR Literary Festival and the momentum generated by this seminal event. In a day full of panels, discussions, books, magazines, and lectures, festival-goers had options aplenty, on a beautiful day in Gambier, Ohio.
The CLMP Lit Mag Fair was wonderful–journals of all types representing myrid aesthetics. I went there first. Back issues were two dollars each (joy!) and I gravitated to the tactile–Ugly Duckling Presse periodicals and Tuesday; An Art Project. The Kenyon Reveiw also was unloading a backstock of review copy books, and there were some diamonds in the rough. Approximately 12-15 journals had staffed tables; I didn’t make it to all of these, but the new ohio review is lovely; Ninth Letter, an astonishing collaborative effort between the students and faculty of the writing and art programs at the Univ. of Illinois is too innovative and beautiful not to have your attention.
I sat in on Tom Stamp’s presentation on the history of the Kenyon Review–a history that includes whisperings of a CIA connection via past editor Robbie Macauley, a turbulent financial history (including a dormant period in the 1970s), and influential cast of literary characters. (Especially the slide pictures of William Empson with a neck beard–what may very well be the eighth type of ambiguity. See him seated, second from the left, in this photo of the faculty in the Kenyon School of English, a summer school for literature.)
The coffeehouse readings were superb, as were the editorial panels. Expect even more next year.
Margaret Atwood’s keynote lecture, on her book Oryx and Crake, was a great capstone to the evening. Atwood joked that she could deliver many lectures on the book, and had prepared two–one on the race toward apocalypse that the ever-warming world seems to demand as destiny, and the other on the power of art in the light of these possible futures.
These are things we should all be thinking about, and Atwood’s lecture left the audience rapt and challenged. It also set a high bar for the KR Literary Festival, and honored the namesake of the lecture, for the memory and influence of Denham Sutcliffe, legendary professor of English at Kenyon College. So I’ll end as I began: Anticipate next year!