The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture will present their seventh annual MLK Symposium this evening at the Winspear Opera House with a conversation focusing on the cultural conditions that led to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. “The World Dr. King Inherited and Changed,” as the program is titled, will feature keynote speaker Isabel Wilkerson, the first African American woman Pulitzer Prize-winner.

Wilkerson is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, the culmination of more than 15 years of research into the movement of African Americans from the south to urban centers between 1915 and 1970. In addition to telling a general history of the migration, the book focuses on three individuals, each story representative of the trends that led African Americans to places like New York, Los Angeles, and Florida.

Wilkerson will also be joined at this evening’s symposium by two panelists, each of whom also have personal histories rooted in the “great migration.” Dr. Carol François, a longtime Dallas resident who grew up in Pennsylvania, has served as a teacher, principal, Dean of Instruction, Chief of Staff of Dallas ISD, and Associate Commissioner of Education for the State of Texas. Dr. Robert Green is the former Dean at Michigan State University who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. His father migrated to Detroit.

The program will begin with a keynote address by Wilkerson, followed by an interview and discussion. For more information, visit here.

Robert Edsel is the Dallas writer who has made a name for himself hunting down priceless works of art that fell into Nazi hands during World War II. His efforts have contributed to one documentary, The Rape of Europa, and you can read about the 2011 Texas Medal of the Arts recipient in this D Magazine profile. Now, according to the LA Times, Edsel’s book, The Monuments Men, about the soldiers who helped save art in the aftermath of the Second World War, will be adapted into a new movie directed and starring George Clooney. (h/t Art&Seek)

Photo: Robert Edsel by Matthew Hawthorne for D Magazine

Diana Senechal, an author, journalist, and teacher, has been named the 2011 recipient of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, an annual award bestowed on an up-and-coming thinker who is recognized as a leader in the humanities. Senechal’s wave making has come in the form of her debut book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, which criticizes  the lack of solitude and silence in the contemporary eduction. Writes Senechal, ”the chatter of the present, about the present, cannot always grasp the ..read more

Merritt Tierce, a Denton-dwelling writer, was one of six women to receive the national Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, last week in a ceremony in New York. The award carries a grant of $25,000, and it is awarded to emerging woman writers as a way of helping them build their writing careers. Tierce’s story is a moving one, especially for any of us who have ever attempted to make a go at this difficult trade. After attending the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she returned to Denton and began waiting tables. Tierce writes in her submission for the award:

“Last night at the restaurant I experienced a moment of dissonance. It was as if I had never left. I went to Iowa, which doesn’t make me a writer by any means, but nonetheless gave me a taste of what it’s like to live as a writer. To make the words the thing life is organized around. I don’t believe anyone owes me anything because I want to be a writer; I’m not afraid of hard work. But I see clearly that for me the time to write depends on money. The Foundation can buy me that time.”

Now she has that time. You can read Tierce’s story “Suck It” here. Here’s the full release:

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Let me point you to this very attractive book by Alec Williams and Leslie Coulture about Denton’s legendary Fry St. entitled The Fry Street Neighborhood 1977-1986: A Photographic Memoir. About the book by Williams and Coulture, who works for the Denton Public Library:

Fry Street earned its greatest notoriety in the early 1970s when it is rumored that Willie Nelson, while on the Johnny Carson show, said that the best dope he ever got was on Fry Street in Denton, Texas. Or maybe it was the police officer, who, while on the Johnny Carson show, said that Denton was the drug capitol of the world. It’s hard to say.

The origin of these accounts started in the late 1960s. Growing and selling illegal drugs had become widespread in Denton County and drug arrests peaked on October 31, 1970, when 132 persons were arrested throughout the county.

Whatever the case, Fry Street had always been a place of lively activity. It borders the University of North Texas, and old storefronts have mirrored the changing times. It was a good place for students to try their hands at a first business, a great place for a group of musicians to start a band, and a fun place to hang out.

If you want a taste of what to expect in the tome, check out Williams’ Flickr page which is chock full of historic images.

Image: Gilbert Olivarez, the owner of Fry Street Classics at the 1985 Fry Street Fair (via Williams’ Flickr)

The new movie Sarah’s Key, currently playing at the Angelika Film Center, began its life as a best-selling novel by French author Tatiana de Rosnay. The road from writer to screen wasn’t an easy one. It took de Rosnay nearly 10 years to find a publisher for her book, and condensing its interlacing narratives into a 111-minute movie proved complicated. We spoke with the author about her book and the new film.

FrontRow: Let’s start by talking about adaptations. This is the first movie you’ve done. Was there some trepidation in terms of the interpretation? And how involved were you in working through screenplays?

Tatiana De Rosnay: No, all of this has been really an extraordinary adventure for quite different reasons. When the movie deal came in, the producer, Stéphane Marsil, happened to be a friend of my sisters, so I knew who he was. And then Serge Joncour was the guy who wrote the script; I know him very well. So when I finally met Gilles Paquet-Brenner, the young director, I really felt like I was part of a team and that they were not going to butcher my work. And that’s very important because as a writer I’ve heard so many horror stories about really bad adaptations and writers being upset and worried and finally disappointed at what the movie turns out to be. So this is absolutely not the case for me.

FR: That’s always the fear, and especially a story like this, that can be sensationalized in some way or could kind of lose the sense of tone, which is what makes the movie so powerful. In terms of tone and in terms of the overall story what was sort of the essential core for you — what kept it together?

TDR: The two story lines — Sarah’s voice and Julia’s voice — were how I constructed the book. I couldn’t have written this book if I didn’t have those two visions. And when I saw the movie — when I read the script, it’s difficult for us writers to read scripts because it’s so different from what we write, it’s just like sentences. Because you don’t see the actor’s power when you read a script you just really blur.

FR: There’s no texture to it.

TDR: Exactly. So it’s kind of difficult for a writer. But I could tell that the script was jumping backwards and forwards from 1942 to now. And I could tell it was respecting my book perfectly. But it just seemed so dry, and it wasn’t until I saw the movie that I realized to what extend Gilles has respected all of my book, which for me was the voice was going from Julia to Sarah. There is also a key scene in the book where Julia is confronted with her father-in-law, who finally tells the truth about her coming home — that’s really how I fixed those two together like a puzzle. And I was worried about how Gilles was going to do that, but he pulled it off beautifully.

FR: When could you tell that Gilles had managed to figure out how to translate your story for the screen?

TDR: I had to see the movie about four times to kind of understand how he did it because the first time I saw it I cried so much that I just couldn’t see a thing. I just sobbed from the first scene to the last, and then the second time I was still so moved that I really was caught up in it too emotionally. It wasn’t until really the third or fourth time that I could honestly say, “Oh that’s how he did that. I see how he roped that to that.” Gilles is able to pick out these random parts in my book and just like make them into something which is not technically that way in my book but which absolutely works in the movie. He told me, we spent so much time studying how you constructed the book, how you built that story and trying to find out we could pull out one of your threads without something, you know, all the stitches falling apart. And he said to me afterwards I feel like I know your book better than you do [laughs].

FR: The taboo here is that you are talking about the Nazi atrocities in the context of France. Was there any backlash from the French public over your book?

TDR: Of course, this book, what you probably don’t know is it took me at least three years to get it published. Nobody wanted it. I wrote it nearly 10 years ago and it was published in 2007.

Image: Sarah’s Key author Tatiana de Rosnay and Melusine Mayance, who plays Sarah in Gilles Paquet Brenner’s film (courtesy of The Weinstein Company).

The idea of Dallas as a literary hotbed is a hard sell. No one knows that better than George Getschow, journalist, writer, University of North Texas professor, and architect of UNT’s Mayborn Conference. The Mayborn is a seminar and workshop dedicated to the art of literary nonfiction, and in the seven years since it launched, it has quietly drawn some of the nation’s leading luminaries, including Paul Theroux, Susan Orlean, and Gay Talese, to a nondescript hotel in Grapevine.

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The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference kicks off this Friday, and over on the Dallas Morning News‘ website (sub. req.) writer, UNT professor, and Mayborn director George Getshow has an interview with keynote speaker Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife and One Hundred Names for Love, in which she speaks about the role of language in her marriage after her husband’s stroke robbed him of the ability to speak.

We shared our work with each other, discussed books, talked by phone several times a day when one of us was traveling and played endless word games. For instance, Paul used to improvise silly songs about me throughout the day, little domestic operettas really. I include some in One Hundred Names.

The story behind the title of “One Hundred Names for Love” speaks volumes about your shared love affair with words. Would you share it with our readers?

Paul felt sad that he couldn’t remember any of his many pet names for me. So I suggested, partly as a form of speech therapy, that he try making up some new ones. And with much effort, he did, conjuring up a new name every day for 100 days in a row. All zany and wonderful. Whatever aphasia allowed out he tried to give a romantic spin to: “My Little Bucket of Hair,” “Dream Hobbit,” “Spy Elf of the Morning Hallelujahs,” “Smooch Owl” and so on.

Photo by Michael Weschler

On KERA, Jerome Weeks reports on Miroslav Penkov, a University of North Texas professor and writer whose debut stories have been well received. Penkov’s own story contains some unexpected international twists. English is not his native language, and he says becoming a writer in Bulgaria was considered impossible, so he moved to America. That move has played a epart in defining the writer’s fiction, which blends his experiences of America with a distinctively eastern European sensibility:

In East of the West, Penkov’s stories range from low-key, lyrical realism to the out-and-out mythic and dream-like. The author he’s most often happily compared to is Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story). But Shteyngart has a more antic and vaudevillian spirit. As brilliant as he is, Shteyngart can betray a need to keep the reader entertained at all costs — it leaks through like flop sweat. In contrast, Penkov’s humor is often laced with a gentle melancholy, a sense of loss. He has that characteristic Eastern European fatalism that can flip between nostalgic acceptance and hilarious absurdism.

There’s a nice piece over on the Morning News (sub. req.) by Carlton Stowers who wrties about his visit to Robert E. Howard Days, an annual June event in the tiny town of Cross Plains in West Texas that honors the writer who create Conan the Barabarian. Howard died in 1936, but the legend he created (which is set for a reemergence on screen with Jason Momoa stepping into the role that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous (and made Arnold famous)

The 25th annual gathering drew fans, scholars and movie folks from as far away as Sweden, France, Germany and Russia to little Cross Plains (pop. 1,000) to honor the man who once lived there with his parents in a little white frame house that still sits on the edge of town. There, Howard biographer Mark Finn tells us, the strange and tragic young man wrote furiously on an old Underwood typewriter, creating a genre that would eventually be known as sword and sorcery fiction.

The historian and writer David McCullough will speak tonight as part of the World Affairs Council’s 60^th Anniversary Lecture Series. In the Dallas Morning News, he speaks with Bill Marvel about his deep love of the state and how close he came to writing a book about the women of Texas:

I love all the malarkey of Texas,” he says. “I love the tall tales, the bull-slinging, the exaggeration. I love the fact that Texans fly the Texas flag and talk Texan. And the sense that no matter how low you get, you can come back again.”

Years later, he began thinking about a Texas book. What was needed, he decided, was a history of the women of Texas. “They have some of the expected charm and appeal of Southern women, but there’s a pioneer attitude, too, a Western attitude that I really like.”

But a woman should write that book, he decided.

My fellow commuters are into escapism these days. Nearly every book I’ve spotted on the DART trains lately was genre fiction, usually one in a series of thrillers, murder mysteries, or sword-and-sorcery epics.

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The Bin Laden raid has cast the world’s attention on a small Pakistani city, a mountainside retreat that was, in fact, founded by the British. Abbottabad was named after General Sir James Abbott, and Stephen Moss of the Guardian discovers that the military man was also a man of letters, writing a poem to his namesake town. The rub, however, is that it rather awful poetry:

Abbott’s poem is notable chiefly for its non-sequiturs. “To me the place seemed like a dream/ And far ran a lonesome stream.” It takes genius to produce a couplet in which the second line bears no relation to the first. One begins to suspect satirical intent – or perhaps brain damage. “The wind hissed as if welcoming us / The pine swayed creating a lot of fuss” … “And the tiny cuckoo sang it away.” WTF? as William Empson might have said. And does that final word “thwart” make any grammatical sense?

Image: Abbottabad in 1907 (via wikicommons)

Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, has been at the top of many best-seller lists and it will be made into a big budget Hollywood film later this year. The author will speak at First Presbyterian Church of Dallas tomorrow evening, but first she chats with the Dallas Morning News about her success.

The Dallas Museum of Art has annoucnced its new BooksmART Fest, a daylong festival at the museum that will feature authors and illustrators of children’s literature. Included on the list of participates are a few Caldecott winners as well as some other decorated masters of the children’s story. Here’s the line, and after the jump, full info:

• Rick Riordan is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. While at the BooksmART Festival, he will discuss his latest book in The Kane Chronicles series, in which he turns his attention to Egyptian mythology.
• Norton Juster is the author of the beloved children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year.
• Laurie Halse Anderson is a two-time National Book Award finalist for her books Speak and Chains. Anderson will discuss Forge, the recently released historical fiction book and follow-up story to Chains.
• David Wiesner is a three-time winner of the Caldecott Medal, making him only the second person in the award’s history to have won this honor three times. He has also received two Caldecott Honors during his career as an author and illustrator. He will share insight about his popular picture book Art & Max.
• Jerry Pinkney has received a Caldecott Medal, Five Caldecott Honors, and Five Coretta Scott King Awards, has illustrated over 100 titles, and was recently elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. He will discuss the body of his work, including the Caldecott Medal winner The Lion and the Mouse.

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Google’s master plan was to create the world’s largest digital library, but a federal judge in New York has rejected a $125 million legal settlement that would have allowed the internet company to sidestep copyright issues.

The decision throws into legal limbo one of the most ambitious undertakings in Google’s history, and it brings into sharp focus concerns about the company’s growing power over information. While the profit potential of the book project is not clear, the effort is one of the pet projects of Larry Page, the Google co-founder who is set to become its chief executive next month. And the project has wide support inside the company, whose corporate mission is to organize all of the world’s information.

“It was very much consistent with Larry’s idealism that all of the world’s information should be made available freely,” said Ken Auletta, the author of “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”

But citing copyright, antitrust and other concerns, Judge Denny Chin said that the settlement went too far. He said it would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners.

The Borders at the corner of Lemmon and McKinney is one of a number of area outlets of the bookstore chain that is shuttering its doors in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bob Hoover wonders where the business went wrong, discovering that the problems go deeper than the usual print-to-digital storyline: 

Kmart dropped Borders in the late 1990s but the chain managed to thrive and expand on its own in the new century, but it made one fatal mistake: It hired Amazon to handle its online book and music sales while B&N established its own website. Dumb.

After Borders launched its own online sales operation, it was too late to make headway as Amazon and B&N soon moved into the e-book world with their digital reading devices.

Other business decisions aside, the decline of this almost iconic book chain reflects a subtle shift in minds of readers after years of “bigness” — in stores, sales numbers and the franchising of “big” authors.

Dedicated readers are a sensitive bunch; whether they are pushing the buttons on a digital screen or turning the page in a well-used paperback, they crave that quiet one-on-one with the book.

But, for some time now, they have been getting books and authors shoved in their faces, not because they’re good, but because publishers flog them so hard. And the superstore concept is a willing partner in this relentless marketing.

Image via wikcommons.

It’s hard to ride a DART train these days without invading the personal space of your fellow commuters. Although most people fiddle with their phones, a good number still read books. This is the inaugural edition of a new series of posts on FrontRow we’re calling “Riding and Reading.” Here’s what the people around me were reading this week:

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Alan Lidji, Principal Lidji Design

Current book: Indignation by Philip Roth. A charming story that recalls his early classic Portnoy’s Complaint. I ate up the first 120 pages and now find myself uninterested in finishing it.  Earlier, I read The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck as our economy crashed all around us. It’s fascinating to think that only 75 years ago there was such a disaster in our country, starvation and hopelessness on scale that is really unimaginable today. And to see how Americans coped makes anything we are going through seem inconsequential by comparison.

Bookmarks: Designobserver.com globalpost.com tabletmag.com cartype.com

Magazines, newspapers:  New Yorker,  Vanity Fair, New York Times and Dallas Morning News

Brian Bolke, Owner, Forty Five Ten

Books: I wish I had more time to read. I guess Vanity Fair isn’t really a book. But here goes. Just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson when I was on vacation. Couldn’t put it down — a great mix of murder mystery and family anthology. Looking forward to the next one, The Girl Who Played With Fire. The author is now deceased, so I have to read it slowly.

Bookmarks: WWD.com, Style.com, and, yes, perezhilton.com

Magazines: W, Elle Décor, Vogue, Details, Vanity Fair

Newspapers: New York Times junkie

On November 1, 15 brave FrontRow readers took up the challenge of attempting to write a novel in a month as part of the National Novel Writing Month challenge. We knew our writing didn’t have to be polished, interesting, or very good. It was only necessary to try and accomplish the heavy lifting of novel writing – the grueling schlepping through chapters and plot and character development to get the bare bones of a finished work of fiction on paper by the stroke of midnight, November 30.

Some of us have already confessed to giving up – myself among them. But, impressively, others have accomplished the task.

And so, brave souls, who as of today can claim to have finished a complete work of fiction?

As promised, we will host a public reading for the participants. Details on that will follow in the coming week.

Michael Solis, Creative Director, Store Development, Visual Planning, Neiman Marcus

I”m reading Outliers : A Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, a blueprint of the hidden advantages that got certain people to where they are — from athletes, The Beatles and Bill Gates to even your date of birth. It’s a great  ”WOW” book. Also Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture by Jennifer Hudson. This book is an in-depth study of the creative and manufacturing processes behind 50 contemporary domestic design objects. I love the thought process involved in making things. You see design morphing though the initial ideas /sketches to the final product. Its always amazing to see how things come to fruition.

Bookmarks: core77.com; youtube.com – ( any daily monster video); instructables.com;mocoloco.com; neimanmarcus.com

Magazines, newspapers: Frame magazine; Dwell; Rolling Stone; New York Times

So much for support groups. I have completely crashed out of the National Write a Novel in a Month project. At some point I told myself that Thanksgiving would be my time of last minute proliferation, but it wasn’t to be. . . for me, at least.  Though I had all but forgot about my failed efforts, this note dropped in my inbox from one of the writers in FrontRow’s group: 

Sunday night, 65,031 words (35,000 of those in just the last three days) with three more good hours of typing left in the evening.  Unfortunately, I am not even 3/4 through the story.  There’s still a hit-and-run, a murder and kidnapping to be written.

Did I mention that it’s a romance?

I also have a title for my next book:  How I Ended Up Divorced From Writing 65,000 Words In One Month.

 Too long? 

So fearless novel writers for a month, tomorrow is the deadline. Who among you is still standing?

I’ll admit that two weeks ago there were more than few times when I imagined printing out the fruit of a month’s worth of hard labor, collating pages that, when arranged and stacked high, contained around 50,000 words of prose fiction – a finished novel. Now, half way into the National Novel Writing Month project, I haven’t even written a quarter of the words required. Judging from the feedback, other writers in FrontRow’s NaNoWriMo support group are making remarkable progress, and others, like me, are sluggish. The problem is I have given up hope, which basically means I’ve given up. 

These words of encouragement dropped in my in box this morning from NaNoWriMo’s Chris Baty:

The most common refrain at the Struggler’s Party, though, is that we’re just feeling Blah. Our stories are Blah, our writing is Blah. We’ve spent the last two weeks mining our creative depths, and many of us have emerged with too few diamonds and way too many lumps of coal.

Blah indeed. Throw the coal into the fire. So fellow NaNoWriMo – how goes it? Who’s all but given up? And who has an idea about how to turn around the negative inertia?

At this point, I’ve basically given up hope that I’m going to hit that 50,000 word mark by the 30th. I’ll keep writing and will try to find time each day, but I’m only at about 6,000 words and it is day ten, so at this pace I’m only going to get close to 20,000 words – not even half.

But there are other obstacles that are fazing me more than the marathon logging of words. I’ve only been able to ..read more