PROLOGUE

In its essence, literature is an experience that goes beyond definition. Provocative poems, plays, performance pieces, and works of nonfiction and fiction cross boundaries, shaping their own definitions in the process. We hope for this year’s Literary Festival to be an experience in which you will be led into new territories, guided across genres, shown the shifting boundaries between forms. Great writers, artists and performers will be your guides -- Art Spiegelman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus and Maus II, will illustrate the thin line between comic strips, the graphic novel, and serious fiction; Tobias Wolff will illuminate the subtle relationships among the short story, novel, memoir and reportage; and the poet Miller Williams and his daughter, Grammy Award winner Lucinda Williams, will demonstrate how song is poetry and poetry is song. In crossing such ground with Susan Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief was made into the film Adaptation, and Reno, the critically acclaimed performance artist, we will be compelled to ask new questions and perhaps arrive at a new definition of the literary act.

Michael Pearson and Brian Silberman
co-directors