Books in Bloom

It is the 20th year for Eureka Springs’ Festival of the Arts. It’s always a pleasure to see spring ushered in with a special festival of distinctive character, Books in Bloom. Writers from around the country, as well as Arkansas’ own, come together to give talks about their books in a relaxed but splendorous environment, the Crescent Gardens at the hotel on the hill.

The essence of the festival is captured in its description: a Garden Party Celebration for Writers and Readers.

Co-chairs Jean Elderwind and Lin Wellford put their creative and organizational skills to together to bring the festival off. We had to send a scout out to find them, they were so busy hosting the festivities. We literally cornered them in the conservatory where the major authors gave their talks.

The festival has three venues, so to speak, the Conservatory, the Reader’s Tent, and In the Books at Sow’s Ear Tent. The Sow’s Ear is a local book shop which also sponsors local authors, and sets up readings for them in their store on the Berryville square.

Donald Harington, one of Arkansas’s most honored fiction writers, provided us with a reading from one of his novels, Revisiting Staymore. Much of the delight of Harington’s work lies in their background of Ozark small towns based on the town where he would visit his grandparents; and on the tales he heard there as a child before he lost his hearing to meningitis at 12. With his shock of white hair and coffee-cup handlebar mustache, Harington looks every bit the prominent writer he is.

Also speaking in the conservatory was Carolyn Hart, a gentle, mild-mannered, and humorous author who told us stories of how many of her novels came into being. She got her start in mystery-writing, she said, when she was a kid, loving Nancy Drew. As we heard from several of the writers, her career was slow to develop but she finally hit the mark with a female protagonist who owned a bookshop. Hart had been kept out of the New York writers’ scene early on by the lack of appreciation for women sleuths. Now of course it’s different. Women are for a going thing.

We also enjoyed J.A. Jance, another mystery writer who, as others, spoke of the long, difficult, time she had of it before becoming a best-selling author, moving from an old beater of a car to her own corporate company jet (which she and her husband used to get to Oklahoma before coming here from Seattle, her home town).

Jance had been kept from enrolling in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona because she was, she was told directly, a woman. It was the best thing that ever happened to her, she jested, referring to the mystery in which her protagonist’s husband, a prof in creative writing, gets killed off– I think she said in the first chapter.

Describing herself as a true ugly duckling as a child, Jance ended her presentation with the Janis Ian song At 17.

Also appearing in the Conservatory were Michael Palmer, a physician who writes medical thrillers; and Stephen R. Donaldson, a fantasy writer who says the genre can be very serious, dealing with universal themes.

The Readers Tent

The Readers Tent was an outside setting in the garden atmosphere. Jim Fliss is on the board of the Carroll and Madison Public Library Library Foundation, and introduced the writers under the Tent.

First up for the day in the Readers Tent was Radine Trees Nehring. One of her mysteries is set at the Crescent Hotel, A Wedding to Die for. Her most recent book was set in the Buffalo River area, was written in part to educate and inform readers about the poaching of the many ancient artifacts from the area.

We also heard Grif Stockley, also an attorney, who has written fiction but is now writing non- fiction to address issues of race relations in Arkansas. Stockley told us how he had been brought up in a conservative family, noting that it took actually having a gay nephew come out before he was accepted. Stockley seemed unfamiliar with the concept of the nexus between race and gender, as African American feminists Angela Davis and bell hooks have explained the issue.

I’d first read the poetry of Andrea Hollander Budy when I ran across it in The Poets Grimm, a collection from different poets writing on the non-Disney version of the Brothers Grimm. I’d liked that poem so I’d bought her books,and couldn’t believe the good fortune of being able to hear her at Books in Bloom. She can be serious and deep, or humorous and deep, but she is always and ever accessible– something that’s often hard to find in the confusion of contemporary postmodern poetry. I’d asked Budy if we could interest her in coming back (she lives in Mountain View, AR) to be a featured reader in a poetry series some of us have been talking about here in Eureka. Happily, she said, “Yes.”

I stopped in for a moment to hear Eurekan Stephen Foster, who addressed the issues of writing for a specialized audience. Foster is an herbalist– a medicinal and aromatic herbalist– who has published in the Peterson Guide series and National Geographic.

We didn’t get a picture of the shuttle van that took people from parking lots down the hill up to the Crescent, but it was a new service provided by the new owner of the van tours, our most Victorian lady about town, Michelle McDonald.

As always I enjoyed the day totally, and look forward to next year.