A number of exciting creative initiatives have come together this fall. Louise Erdrich will receive the 2009 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement at a gala dinner in New York on November 5. As with other honorees in years past, she will then come to Gambier as the featured speaker of the KR Literary Festival on November 6-7. By happy chance, Ms. Erdrich’s wonderful novel LOVE MEDICINE is also one of the books on the list for this year’s National Endowment for the Arts Big Read project. And so The Kenyon Review has expanded its festival to include a wider reach into schools, community discussions, and the distribution of free copies of the novel.
One of the most innovative projects is an online book discussion of LOVE MEDICINE here at kenyonreview.org. Starting next Tuesday, September 29, Professor Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, KR’s Associate Editor, and I will post regular comments about sections of the novel, starting with the first two stories/sections, “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” and “Saint Marie.” Our references will be to the 2009 paperback edition, but will also be by section so they should be easy to follow. Click here to see the weekly reading assignments for the month of October.
Our posts will be not very professorial. We won’t be trying to teach so much as to stimulate, to play, to provoke, to seek new insights through conversation. Indeed, part of our intention is to test what’s possible with the new medium of the internet, of this kind of online conversation. And your participation is what we’re hoping for. The more readers around town and around the globe who participate in this conversation the better. If it’s as successful as I hope, we’ll do more in the months to come, with different genres and different voices.
I’m eager to start and eager to know what you think.