Uptown slam
American Writers Museum cements Chicago’s future as U.S literary capital
CHICAGO— Carl Sandburg’s poetry is alive, its exquisite heart laid bare in the cascade of words delivered in perfect metre by Marc Kelly, the maestro of this show.
“Love is a deep and a dark and a lonely,” he begins, “and you take it deep and you take it dark and you take it with a winding.” As the poem unfurls, the audience sits, rapt, in melancholia.
It’s Sunday night at the Green Mill’s Uptown Poetry Slam and, as Kelly reminds the audience, this is the show that started a movement 30 years ago.
It’s a mix of spoken word and sung, crazy and profound, and for all the doggerel and in jokes and competition for $7 prizes, there is original talent in the room, in particular a heart-rending poem about a Filipino nanny named Lupe who raises three American boys as her own children grow up, motherless, on the other side of the world.
If you need a reminder that Chicago is a literary town, the uptown slam will do this and more, dispelling the doom and gloom about the internet killing the will to write, and to write well. These young poets clearly know their way around a thesaurus and dictionary.
It is a promising opener for a whirlwind literary weekend that includes bookstore visits, Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace and museum, the world premiere of Chicago playwright Charles Smith’s most recent work, Objects in the Mirror, and the Chicago Zine Fest. But the climax is the official opening of the American Writers Museum, a seed of an idea that was planted seven years ago after a poetry-loving Irishman visited the Dublin Writers Museum and wondered: Where is America’s temple to its literary giants?
“I found out pretty quickly it didn’t exist,” says Malcolm O’Hagan, a retired CEO from D.C. and a book lover who returned to reading once he was liberated from the demands of work. “It’s part of the Irish gene,” explains the museum’s founder. “I grew up in Sligo, Yeats country. I do love words and the power of words to express emotions and thought.”
As the museum’s executive mulled over locations, it had a long list of criteria: It had to be a large city, a destination city, a convention city, a literary city and a philanthropic city.
“We didn’t choose Chicago,” says O’Hagan, “Chicago chose us. So many great writers lived or wrote about here.”
It took seven years and $10 million raised from about 150 benefactors, until the big May 16 reveal on the second floor of a Michigan Avenue office building in Chicago’s Loop, the downtown area defined by the tracks of its famous elevated trains.
O’Hagan was seeing the museum for the first time the day of a pre-opening reception.
“It’s a literary jewel box,” he beams. “It’s small, it’s intimate. It feels wonderful to be here.”
As a docent for the Library of Congress, O’Hagan knew most museums and galleries had so many acquisitions they could only show a fraction of their holdings. He didn’t want that to happen here, and he didn’t want it to be a dusty repository for books, either. There were libraries for that. And you won’t find any artifacts here. The exception, one of two temporary exhibits on display until October, is the Kerouac scroll, the 120-foot-long original transcript of the stream of consciousness known as On the Road.
In the Writer’s Room, the scroll’s story is told in text on the walls, while the manuscript that launched a thousand road trips lies encased in a Plexiglas box. Indiana University conservator Jim Canary explains that Kerouac taped pages of tracing paper together so he could type uninterrupted. Though Kerouac crisscrossed America for seven years with a friend, it took him just three weeks to write the book.
“He could type 120 words a minute,” says Canary, pointing out that Kerouac kept notes in “meticulous little pocket journals” and on sheets of 8-by-11 paper, which allowed him to recall details and absorb them before he started writing “at a furious pace.” Canary became its chaperone and champion after Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, who bought the scroll for $2.43 million (U.S.) in 2001, asked the university how to care for it.
O’Hagan’s favourite gallery is a wall that features blocks inscribed with the names and works of American artists. When you flip them open like Vanna White revealing Wheel of Fortune letters, you get nuggets of information via words, pictures or sound. You can hear a mockingbird sing on Harper Lee’s, and a book burns in a video as words from Ray Bradbury’s Fah
renheit 451appear on screen. At the end of that gallery, a black digital wall is a jumble of words until excerpts and quotes from American writers materialize, highlighted in white, from rows of greyed-out letters. In another room, you can “write” poetry, fridge-magnet style, by picking words out of a pile with your fingertip and dragging them into some semblance of prose on the tablet-like surface of a table.
Then there are two vintage typewriters where guests are encouraged to hammer out stories and pin them to a bulletin board. One ribbon is out of ink, the analog equivalent of running out of batteries.
The museum is a place to play with words, and gives meaning and context to those written by some of America’s greatest authors.
The idea is to appeal to as many people as possible, including digital natives who are taking in and creating literature in new ways and forms, such as the next-gen authors gathering a few miles away in the West Loop at the Chicago Zinefest.
At booth C16, comic artist and writer Beth Hetland says she’s really into Stephen King these days. She read On Writing and Cujo last summer, and is part way through The Shining.
“When I say read, I mean listen to,” says the School of the Art Institute of Chicago grad, who now teaches comics and writing at her alma mater. “I spend so much time drawing, I listen to audiobooks.”
At booth D5, J.B. Roe is selling his Brainbuster comics, “a weird, grimy wrestling book that’s fun,” which was also his pitch to his collaborator James Henry Dufresne, an Oakland, Calif.-based cartoonist. “We’ve never actually met,” Roe says, explains that they use email to send images and text back and forth. “He found me on Instagram, which is where a lot of visual artists are.” When Dufresne invited the illustrator to show his work, “I agreed, and then realized I had nothing to show.” So Roe made a book and two comics, one of which has just one word in it. “I made it up as I went along — it was stream-of-consciousness stuff.”
Downstairs at a panel discussion, employees and customers of the iconic Quimby’s bookstore are talking about the Chicago institution’s 25-year history. Manager Liz Mason says they are “extra excited” about zines and comics, which sell very well. After the discussion, she says she notices a move toward fewer words on the page, but that doesn’t bother her. “It’s sequential art,” she says. “It’s still a narrative.”
Audiobooks, slam poetry, post-word narratives, collaboration by email, a writers’ museum without books — if this is the future story of American literature, Chicago is central to the plot. Kim Honey was a guest of Choose Chicago, which did not review or approve this story.