By BILL CASTANIER
A recent federal study called The Nation’s Report Card found reading and math scores for K-12 students have reached an all-time low. Many experts blame the growth of smartphones as a contributing factor.
A T-shirt I saw being worn by a retired teacher might have the answer: “Read a book,” it repeated a dozen times.
That’s the implied message of this week’s Lansing Lit Festival, featuring authors, a boozy book crawl, poetry readings and a book scavenger hunt, among many other events.
Numerous area bookstores, literary organizations, nonprofits and businesses are sponsors, including City Pulse. Check our back cover this week for the schedule or go to lansinglit.com.
Lansing Lit’s second year coincides with Christian Cooper’s appearance as part of the citywide reading program called One Grand Read. His memoir, “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in a Natural World,” details his life as a gay man and how it intertwines with his passion for birding. He also includes a tempered retelling of the Central Park fiasco, where he confronted a dog walker for not following leashing regulations in certain areas of the park. The woman called the police to report she was being confronted by a Black man. Unfortunately for the woman, Cooper had used his phone to record the entire interaction and posted it online.
Cooper will appear at MSU’s Kellogg Center at 3 p.m. Saturday (Sept. 20). The event is free, as are all Lansing Lit events.
Poets will take the stage several times during the three-day excursion. A Novel Concept will host Olivia Gatwood for a poetry reading at 7 p.m. Friday. At the same time, Lansing Community College will host a reading for its own homegrown poets at Dart Auditorium in downtown Lansing.
One interesting twist will occur at Robin Books, which is asking patrons to come prepared to talk about their favorite book. It’s kind of like a high school book report but a lot more fun.
Schuler Books in Okemos is hosting local author, illustrator and lawyer Amy L. Dua for a story time at 11 a.m. Saturday. Dua has written an engaging series of four children’s books called “Woe is Me.”
REACH Studio Art Center will take participants on a journey to learn how to create zines, which is still a powerful medium for thoughtful topics and just fun and wacky things. For the uninitiated, zines are the precursor to blogs and podcasts.
Events continue through Sunday, culminating in an appearance at Hooked by Greta Lynn Uehling, author of “Decolonizing Ukraine: How the Indigenous People of Crimea Remade Themselves After Russian Occupation.” Uehling is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Michigan and spent decades working in Ukraine. She is also the author of “Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine.”
Beginning at noon Sunday, REO Clubhouse will host what the festival is calling “bookish vendors,” who will sell their wares throughout the day.
This year’s Lansing Lit Festival comes at a time when a “Fahrenheit 451” burn-the-books approach is growing. Recently, The New York Times reported books in federally designated historic sites were being removed from gift shops because they covered topics such as slavery. And just this month, an Indiana school district banned “Forrest Gump” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” among others, on the grounds of portraying explicit sex.