Orcas Island Writers Festival begins. Registration at the Outlook Inn in Eastsound, to run through Sunday, Sept. 20. www.orcasislandwritersfestival.com
The second Orcas Island Writers Festival begins today with several community events — an all-day picture book-writing event for $65 with Deb Lund, and a free reading to children in the afternoon. Registration for the class is at 9:50 to 10 a.m. at the Library Conference Room.
Zora Neale Hurston, from the Carl VanVechten/Beinecke Library, Yale
And in honor of the Festival’s “Big Read” campaign of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a “High Tea” will take place from 2 to 4 p.m. this afternoon.
Writers Festival Founder Barbara Lewis lassoed a grant from the National National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for sponsoring their “Big Read” campaign, with a community read of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Lewis’ appreciation of the Hurston book comes from many perspectives. “It’s the story of a nobody, but she’s not angry. She created something new.” Lewis notes that Hurston’s book was rejected by her male friends and colleagues, (Richard Wright said her novel had “no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, [it] is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”
Hurston died in poverty in 1960, but her work was “brought back to life” by novelist Alice Walker.
“I hold lost women’s stories deep in my heart – I love that about the book and I love the language,” said Lewis. “It doesn’t obey the rules of literature, but it works.
“I’m proud to champion her, and I encourage [readers] to hang in there and get to know the dignity of these people whose stories are being told,” said Lewis.
Hurston, a college-educated anthropologist and writer, said in 1928,
”I am not tragically colored. . . . I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.”
When Zora Neale Hurston published what is arguably her most famous essay, ”How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” [quoted above] she was at the beginning of what she no doubt hoped would be a brilliant career. She was 37 years old but passing for a good 10 years younger. Her words have all the arrogance, optimism and innocence of youth, although some might argue that, whether 16 or 60, Hurston was never innocent.
Confident to the point of conceit, she was by most accounts a flamboyant, infinitely inventive chameleon of a woman, who could make herself equally at home among the Haitian voodoo doctors who informed her research and the Park Avenue patrons who financed it. She was a lightning rod of contradiction and controversy.
(For more of this review, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/books/looking-for-zora.html)
Events of the Writers Festival “Big Read” are posted in the Library Conference Room. The Library is co-sponsor of “Big Read” events.
High Tea with Zora Neale Hurston at the Outlook Inn, Victorian Room Sharon Abreu sings Billie Holiday songs commemorating the Harlem Renaissance. Free and 0pen to all. 2 to 4 p.m.
Picture Book Writing Class 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Orcas Library. $65, must be preregistered at www.orcasislandwritersfestival.com, or call 317-4383.
Children’s Author Deb Lund reads to children at the Outlook Inn at 4:30 p.m. as part of the Orcas Island Writers Festival.
