Drawing upon the overwhelmingly positive responses to communal reading endeavors at national, regional and local levels, the Louisiana Book Festival was pleased to continue as part of 2009’s events the Louisiana Book Festival Book Club, a special event that invites participants to read a common text that explores key elements of Louisiana’s rich literature, history, and heritage and, in book club fashion, to discuss that text as a group as part of the state’s annual literary celebration.
The 2009 Louisiana Book Festival Book Club selection was Same Place, Same Things, the short story collection by Tim Gautreaux, our 2009 Louisiana Writer Award recipient.
2011 Louisiana Book Festival
YOU’RE THE CASTING DIRECTOR
LBF One Book, One Festival to Feature the Best Southern Movie Never Made
Inaugurated in 2008, the Louisiana Book Festival’s One Book, One Festival discussion group continues at the 2011 Louisiana Book Festival. Participants are invited to read the same book in advance and then join the scholar-led discussion with others at the festival. This year’s selection by Ernest J. Gaines, the recipient of the first Louisiana Writer Award, is Of Love and Dust, with the discussion led by Gaines scholar Reggie Scott Young. This hour-long book festival event is scheduled at 4:00 PM in the State Capitol.
As participants read the Gaines novel in preparation for the festival discussion, they are encouraged to play the role of casting director and imagine the actors and actresses from today or the past that they would select to play the roles of Marcus, Jim Kelly, Bonbon, Tite, Pauline, and the other characters who appear in the narrative.
Though Of Love and Dust is not as well known as other works by Gaines, the novel is a very lively work, and a controversial one for its time. It is one that will surely evoke a lively discussion. Therefore, be sure to pick up a copy of the novel soon and give yourself plenty of time to read it in preparation for the One Book, One Festival celebration.
Since so many important works of dramatic fiction are turned into movies by Hollywood studios, it is time to ask why Gaines’s second novel, Of Love and Dust, has not yet been made into a film, since it is arguably the best Southern movie never made. Written early in a career that would eventually produce such important works as The Sky Is Gray (and other stories from the Bloodline collection), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson Before Dying (all of which have been made into films), Of Love and Dust might be the most cinematic work ever written by Gaines.
Reggie Scott Young is a scholar, fiction writer, and poet who serves as Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is an advisory board member of UL Lafayette’s Ernest J. Gaines Center and has co-edited two books by and about Gaines: Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays (with Marcia Gaudet) and This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me: The Legacy of Ernest J. Gaines (with Gaudet and Wiley Cash).