Thomas Fox Averill will deliver the keynote speech at this year’s Iola Family Reading Festival.
His address, “Reading Kansas Literature: 60 Years and Going Strong,” will begin at 11 a.m. Saturday in the Allen Community College Library.
If there is a person better qualified to address the subject of Kansas writing, he has yet to surface.
Averill, a professor of English at Washburn University for more than 30 years, a novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and a co-founder of the Center for Kansas Study, has also managed, with the help of his students, to create the most comprehensive online database of Kansas writers.
The site — www.washburn.edu/reference/cks/mapping — offers visitors an interactive map of the state, linking Kansas writers to their hometowns, and providing short biographies of each, along with lists of their published works. It would trivialize it to call it one-stop shopping for Kansas lit, but its usefulness to those interested in the subject is invaluable.
According to the site, southeast Kansas is one of the more densely represented areas of the state. Iola, however, is still waiting for the writer who will put it on the map.
Averill will not be speaking at length about the online project Saturday but, in his keynote speech on his life in literature, he will certainly draw from the well that informed it.
In a phone conversation with the Register Wednesday, Averill dated his interest in the cultural history of the state to his grade school days in Topeka, which coincided with the both the Territorial Centennial of 1954 and the Statehood Centennial, seven years later. By the time he began reading “The Wizard of Oz” and “Little House on the Prairie,” books whose imaginative landscapes matched the one he was seeing on the long Kansas road trips he would take with his parents, the hooks were in.
To the extent that Kansas has a unique literature, Averill points to the ways the state’s rambunctious history — a bloody border war, the fight over temperance, women’s suffrage and the jagged influence of the Old West — have shaped a literature diverse enough to spend a lifetime studying.
Given the state’s rich literary history, Averill’s answer, when asked to point to the heyday of Kansas writing, is surprising: “We’re in it right now.”
Come hear why he thinks so, this Saturday.
Kansas literature topic of keynote speech
