Books by the Banks, Cincinnati’s regional book festival, celebrates its 10th anniversary Saturday with a diverse array of authors — more than 100 who work in various genres and styles, from children’s and locally themed books to fiction and non-fiction offerings. A number of nationally and even internationally based writers will appear, as will such area-based authors as longtime CityBeat contributor Rick Pender, discussing his 100 Things to Do in Cincinnati Before You Die. A nonprofit organization, Books by the Banks was founded by several Cincinnati institutions promoting literacy, prominently including the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
Perhaps the most anticipated of the author panels will be the one at 2:30 p.m. featuring Chris Bachelder, a local resident and University of Cincinnati creative writing professor, and Paulette Jiles. They are two of the five finalists for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction.
Bachelder’s latest novel, The Throwback Special, centers on an unlikely conceit — a group of men who gather every year to reenact the play in which Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann broke his leg during a nationally televised Monday Night Football game in 1985. (CityBeat interviewed Bachelder in the May 4 issue — see “Rituals of Reenactment.”)
Jiles’ latest effort, News of the World, emanates from a far different place than Bachelder’s contemporary musings. News of the World is set during the aftermath of the Civil War and focuses on a pair of polar opposites — a 71-year-old retired military man, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, who makes his living performing live readings from newspapers, and a 10-year-old girl who four years earlier was orphaned and kidnapped when a band of Kiowa raiders killed her parents.
The unlikely duo travels alone from northern Texas to San Antonio, a 400-mile trek, to reunite her with distant relatives. Along the way — despite age, language and other differences (she doesn’t speak English and refuses to wear shoes) — they form an unlikely bond that results in a story far more powerful than one might initially expect.
Jiles, a Missouri native who now calls San Antonio home, has a long-running preoccupation with historical fiction set in the 19th century, an era that couldn’t be any more at odds with our current technologically enhanced age.
“It interests me what people can do on their own or had to do on their own, and one thing was gather news and cook their food,” Jiles says by phone when asked why she seems fascinated by stories set 150 years ago. “If there was music, they had to make their own music. People are so used to consuming music and having a vast array, from Classical to Baby Metal, close at hand. Simply by the touch of a button they become consumers of music. They don’t realize how much people had to create their own music; otherwise it just didn’t exist. People were much closer to the basic processes of cooking food or making a fire.”
A onetime journalist, Jiles relishes being able to immerse herself in research. In fact, News of the World is a direct result of the work she did for her 2009 novel The Color of Lightning, which first introduced Captain Kidd and also dealt with people taken captive by tribes and the ordeals those captives often had to endure to get back home.
Elemental forces like weather and terrain had a much deeper impact on everyday life in the 19th Century. Jiles knows this fact better than most — she lives alone on a rural ranch with two horses, a donkey and a dog. That elemental aspect is an essential narrative force in News of the World. Jiles is delighted that her work is being recognized — the National Book Award winners will be announced Nov. 16 — but she keeps going back to how lucky she is to be able to immerse herself in an art form that gives her such pleasure in learning about the past.
“It interests me because people were more or less doing things on their own, which to me makes them more interesting characters,” she says. “There is more opportunity to show a character’s inner life. If a person is neglectful or absent-minded, then something is going to go wrong really quickly.”
BOOKS BY THE BANKS occurs 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday at the Duke Energy Convention Center. Admission is free. More info: booksbythebanks.org.
This article appears in Oct 12-19, 2016.
