Nashville's Literary Scene

In the last month, Margaret Atwood, Mark Jarman, and Billy Collins have all read in Nashville and more than 1,000 local writers are currently participating in the National Novel Writing Month extravaganza. Tourists have been pouring into the city in their fanciest cowboy boots and hoping for glimpses of stars at the Country Music Awards and I have been overwhelmed trying to fit in all of the literary opportunities. As my friend Michael would say, "It's a good problem."

Margaret Atwood proved to be as quick-witted and delightfully quirky as one might guess from her work. In regards to her novel, The Year of the Flood, she commented on the complexity of constructed communities: "Every Utopia contains a little dystopia in it, and every dystopia has a little Utopia." This thought-provoking remark has made me re-think the back-to-the-lander Tolstoyans portrayed in the 2009 film, The Last Station, as well as my own disastrous attempts at joining living communities. As many of the characters from In the Year of the Flood discover, periods of isolation can mean survival. Sphinx Productions made a documentary, In the Wake of the Flood about Atwood's wildly original, theatrical international book tour that looks quite funny.