Tag Archives: Big Read

Author Chris Crutcher Came to the Eugene Public Library, And All I Got Was A Lot Of Tears And Laughter

Posted on by
1

Chris Crutcher opens his March 10, 2012, talk at the Eugene Public Library with a joke. Photo by Suzi Steffen

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed young adult lit author Chris Crutcher for the Literary Duck – link here, and it was a delightful interview, so you should go read it & then come back – and on Saturday, March 10, he spoke at the Eugene Public LIbrary for one of their programs during the Big Read (there’s one big event left – Ursula Le Guin is coming to Eugene on March 24th! Hurrah!).

I live-tweeted a fair amount of the talk – I had to leave a few minutes before the end – and thought I’d get up a record at least of the tweets, with a little information in between the tweets

Crutcher was in town for a few days before the talk, going around and speaking to teens in Eugene and maybe Springfield? I don’t know the details, but here’s YA librarian Traci Glass’ tweet about that:

Crutcher started off thanking the hosts of his trip and saying that he’d had a great few days talking to people and eating good food. Then he said that when he was young, his dad thought he was kind of lazy:

Then Chris told us what kind of a high school student he was – not a star, to put it mildly. But not a screwup either.

He wasn’t a reader, and he didn’t want to be a reader. Didn’t want to read the books for high school.

(This status came later, but it fits here:)

That story: He told about how he became a writer, and how he modeled the football coach in his first book somewhat after the football coach at his high school in Cascade, Idaho. He went to read in Cascade’s high school library, and he said one boy said to him, “Is this a real book? LIke, can you get it?” When the boy believed that it was a real book, he turned to the librarian and said, “How many people who went to this high school have written books?” and the librarian said, well, just Chris. And then the kid asked, “Well, why don’t we have it in the library, then?”

Crutcher: “And that was how I learned that the book was banned in my own high school library.”

Then Crutcher talked about his work as a child abuse therapist and how he doesn’t take any one kid’s specific story to create his own work:

Then Crutcher read (on his iPad, which he called “just about the coolest little thing in the world”) from his book Deadline.

This was a short reading, and it sounded pretty good. I have read many of Crutcher’s books, but not Deadline, so it might be time to pick it up (especially as I just read John Green‘s  The Fault in Our Stars, which made me cry continuously, with short burst of sobbing, for about the final hundred pages and occasional moments before as well, and was lovely but not half as funny as Crutcher’s writing).

He proceeded to tell us a story about part of where this book – about a kid who’s dying of cancer, and how the kid deals with saying goodbye to everyone – came from:

Then he told a super sad story about a 5-year-old from his experience as a family/child abuse therapist. How sad was it?

And this is one of the reasons Crutcher doesn’t like the banning or the censorship – every topic needs to be open for discussion in order for people to have a chance of connecting and healing.

And some wise words:

And finally, just before I left:

What’s On in Eugene? REVIEW: Fahrenheit 451

Posted on by
3

A little learning, as one character quotes to another in Fahrenheit 451, is a dangerous thing. So dangerous that no one should be learning at all – at least in the world of the 1953 Ray Bradbury book, adapted for the stage also by Bradbury (in the 1970s) and playing at the Lord Leebrick Theatre through March 24.

In the way of dystopian futures – though perhaps they all seem that way because Bradbury’s story influenced so many later writers – the world of Fahrenheit 451 is circumscribed, narrow, stifling and fairly violent. That violence and oppression come in the form of continuous government monitoring via wired, artificial-intelligence houses that can report whether their inhabitants are sleeping, eating, laughing or enjoying the forbidden – that is, reading books.

The firemen in Fahrenheit 451 don’t put out fires. All news houses are fireproof, so they’re not needed there. Instead, they make fires to burn books and burn knowledge. In Steen V. Mitchell’s clever set (a set whose generous size makes it clear how much the Leebrick needs to get into its new, larger space on Broadway), each house and building has a direct line to an incinerator, and that’s where books go.

Sorry if this is review – probably you know this already; most people seem to have read the book in junior high or high school, at a time when young people really feel the injustices of others controlling their lives and are ready to believe in a better, different world out there beyond the confines of the adults’ damned rules. That’s a good time to read dystopian novels about unfair, capricious authorities; Bradbury’s genius was to make those terrible authoritarian figures into a kind of rebellious teenage hater-of-books state, wherein videos are superb and books are outlawed. I never read it, but I’ve got my chance this year as Eugene and Springfield participate in the National Endowment for the Arts’ many-locality Big Read program – the Eugene Public Library had 100 free copies of the book, which is also pretty inexpensive at any local bookstore.

Back to the play. It’s long, y’all. But somehow (perhaps because Mary at the Leebrick told me the first act was an hour and 10 minutes, and I gulped half a cup of coffee before the play began) I didn’t find the first act boring or tendentious, though it’s not exactly subtle. Part of this is because I usually enjoy watching Cameron Carlisle act, and he’s on stage about 99 percent of the time as fireman Guy Montag. Montag’s not quite sure that he likes his job. Then there is Montag’s muse/ not quite seductress (as I said, Fahrenheit 451 is a little … heavy-handed) Clarisse (Arun Storrs), who feeds him sips of information and ideas that make his job a lot harder to do. And one of the absolute rewards of this production is watching Stanley R. Coleman, who plays fire chief Beatty with a menace and control that keep the wordy script going. I want to see Coleman a lot more. His playing of the cleverly revealed secrets of the fire chief – the war of quotations, especially – sustained the less interesting second act until he left the stage.

Montag looks sickly and withdrawn the entire play; that’s one part of the script, but still, Carlisle could play Montag with a little more vigor as he realizes that his life means nothing, that he’s been propping up a regime that only harms people, never helps them.

Aside from the acting, the star of the play is indubitably Ryan Rusby’s media design. Where I was sitting, I could hear someone, probably stage manager Jacs Bruscato, calling cues just about all night long, and that’s understandable: There’s a video every other second, and the incorporation of LOLcats and other cute animal videos as distractions from serious thought make for a modern update on the 1970s play. (Though what were those weirdly thick tabletphones? Pretty sure iPads would have worked better.)

The part of the play that gets too long, really, is the utopian end. OK, we get it. People memorize books. Oral culture. Also a hippie woods culture with free love, just in case you were wondering. (Not to spoil it – oh, but you’ve read it, haven’t you? Or you’ve read Scott Westerfield’s Uglies or Pretties, or Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, or any of the dystopian city/utopian country novels – I think there’s a paper in here for a scholar of young adult books, just in case anyone wants that idea. Shakespeare’s Green World, continued in dystopian lit.)

In any case, if you grab some coffee either before the play or at intermission, you will probably enjoy this DOOM WARNING play even if you wonder, as I inevitably did, what happened to all of the e-books? Can’t burn those.

Tickets run about $17-$20, and you can get them (if any are left – it’s selling out fast) here.