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Get Breaking News on your cellSunday at the festival: Fiction that stretches
4:57 PM Sun, Nov 04, 2007 | Permalink
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February 2008
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I realize it’s the big names – the Carl Bernsteins, the Roy Blount Jrs. – who bring people out to the festival. But I’ve decided that the real spirit of the event lies in the smaller sessions. Last year, it was sessions on Texas nature writing and rising Texas writers that stuck with me the longest. And this year, the best exchanges I have seen took place in yesterday’s “revenge” session and my first panel of this morning, “Stretching Exercises: How I Became Someone Else in My Fiction.” Among the writers: Wesley Stace, whose novel “By George” is partly written from the point of view of ventriloquist’s dummy; Darryl Wimberly, a middle-aged white male who wrote “The King of Colored Town” from the point of view of an African-American girl at the end of the segregation era; Clifford Chase, who wrote “Winky” from the point of view of his teddy bear, of the same name; and Kim Powers, who took on the personas of Truman Capote and Harper Lee in “Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story.” Any aspiring writer or involved reader would have enjoyed the non-scholarly discussion on technique. Especially when it contains revelations such as Mr. Chase pointing out that Winky, a real bear, had been inherited from his mother, who called him “Marie.” “So he’s also a transgendered bear,” he noted. And Mr. Stace brought along the actual dummy that had inspired his book, one that his grandfather had once used. When asked how he came up with the dummy’s voice in the novel, he replied: “Just look at him!” Writers hearing voices and transgendered bears. Interesting way to start off a Sunday morning. |
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