Rock Town Lit Fest
Midwest Writing Center
Friday, May 5, and Saturday, May 6
Here’s a riddle for ya: What has three legs, dozens of voices, and only one eye? Answer: The Rock Town Lit Fest!
Permit me to explain. The legs are the three stops in the inaugural event’s May 5 literary crawl. The voices will be those of the many local and regional writers, publishers, and even musicians participating in this May 5 and 6 celebration of the written word.
And the eye? Well, it’s actually the “i.” The only one found in the phrase “Rock Town Lit Fest.” Trust me, that riddle works better out loud ... though admittedly, not much better ... . So maybe the Midwest Writing Center Executive Director Ryan Collins should do the explaining from here on out.
“When we moved into the library,” says Collins of his organization’s fall relocation to its current home in downtown Rock Island, “we were talking about the possibility of doing some kind of new event that would showcase local writers and local publishers, and something that would maybe coincide with some other event happening in the District. And while we’ve done things similar to this before – we’ve had book fairs, we have readings a lot – we’ve never done anything quite like this.”
The “this” that Collins and his associates decided on was a two-day festival, one beginning the same day as Rock Island’s Gallery Hop!, that would incorporate a number of different literary-themed events: readings, panel discussions, a book fair, and – for the first time in the Quad Cities – a traveling “Lit Crawl” modeled after those presented in Iowa City’s annual Mission Creek Festival. (The River Cities’ Reader is one of the Rock Town Lit Fest’s co-sponsors.)
“I’ve read for Mission Creek, like, three years in a row,” says Collins, “and it’s always a good time. Some legs of their crawl are in venues where you maybe wouldn’t expect to find performances of any kind – salons and things like that, all scattered around the downtown area. But ours is just the three legs – kind of a beta test, to see how it goes.”
With the scheduled writers and readers including such well-established area talents as Misty Urban, Sean Whitney, and Farah Maklevits, May 5’s Rock Town Lit Crawl will begin at the Midwest Writing Center at 6 p.m., and although “there are more poets than anything else,” says Collins, “we’ve also got some fiction and nonfiction writers kind of sprinkled throughout the night.
“We’re gonna start with four or five readers on the ground floor of the library,” he continues, “and then four readers at the second leg at the Blue Cat [Brew Pub], and at least five readers when we end up at Rozz-Tox at 8 o’clock. The first two legs will go on about 45 minutes so people have time to mosey down to the next spot at a leisurely pace. But we might go on a bit longer at Rozz-Tox. That’s where Benjamin [Fawks] is putting together an after-party with live music” by the “twisted country” artists of Dimples. “And that’s also where we’ve got our headliner reading – a woman named Tara Betts.”
Tara Betts
Betts is the author of two full-length poetry collections and is a two-time Chicago representative at the National Poetry Slam competitions. “We’re really excited to have her here for this,” Collins says. “She’s been around the Chicago scene for a long time and is widely anthologized, and was even on [HBO’s] Def Poetry Jam back in the day. She’s one of those people who’s contributed a lot to the scene and just had a book called Break the Habit released from Trio House Press, and we’ve been trying to get her for a while. So with her book coming out, it seemed like a good fit. She’s amazing.”
As for the literary amazement on May 6, it comes with the commingling of what Collins says is “about two dozen authors and about a half-dozen magazine publishers” who will gather for the Rock Town Lit Fest & Book Fair at the Midwest Writing Center and the upper floors of the Rock Island library.
“It’s from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.,” says Collins, “and while it’s definitely local-centric, we’ve got a couple people coming from Chicago, someone from Des Moines, Iowa City, Decorah, Cedar Rapids ... . There are hour-long readings at 11, 1, and 3. The first one is kind of a mix of fiction and nonfiction readings, and the one at 1 features younger writers from some of our youth programs, like the Atlas magazine we publish, and hopefully contributors to Augustana’s Saga and the St. Ambrose journal Quercus. And then at three, we’ve got a featured reading with people that are in an anthology called New Stories from the Midwest 2016,” including editor Jason Lee Brown and contributors Keith Lesmeister – winner of the Midwest Writing Center’s 2015 Great River Writers Retreat competition – and Augustana College professor Kelly Daniels.
“And then throughout the day,” says Collins, “we’re gonna have panel discussions on ‘Writing & Place’ at 10, ‘Writing as a Healing Process’ at noon, and ‘Writers on Reading’ at 2. It’s a lot going on, for sure. But it’s really exciting. And if we have a good response, hopefully we can build on it, and make it a regular thing.
“I know it’s easy to get wrapped up in the New York Times bestsellers and things like that,” says Collins. “But there’s a lot of writing of all kinds going on in the Quad Cities, and by people of all different ages and walks of life. Every New York Times bestseller was probably a writer in their hometown before they got to that point. So this is an opportunity to maybe see some talent on the rise before it gets to another level.”
For more information on the Rock Town Lit Fest, call (309)732-7330 or visit MWCQC.org.
