How I Got Rushdie's Autograph

...by standing in line in front of the signing table, of course. But there's more story to it than that.

The Festival of Faith & Writing has been incredible. I heard one of the organizers tell someone (while I was standing in line for someone else's autograph) that they hoped that there would be too much to choose from during simultaneous sessions so that people would be frustrated and that there would be enough diversity of ideas that people would be, well, frustrated. Caught off guard, challenged. Indeed the first afternoon, I heard a Christian poet, Luci Shaw; another Christian poet, this one who had escaped the Liberian war, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (both with InterVarsity connections); an Orthodox poet, Scott Cairns and a Muslim convert poet, Daniel
abda-Hayy Moore. That's more poetry than I usually have in a year, and you'll notice the diversity of faith traditions.

I began the first full day with a panel on writing historical fiction given by two Jewish novelists, Mary Doria Russell (whose books I have loved) and Lilian Nattel (whose novels immediately went on my must-read list). I heard an interview with Lauren Winner, whose essay/non-fiction writing has so impacted my daughters and other young people. I heard a panel of essayists and I gave my own talk. Then the Rushdie lecture. Today I saw a visual/word exploration of the meaning of dawn that proceeded a lecture about the fate of words in a visual era by James Schaap from Dordt (wonderful!); a plenary lecture by Marilynne Robinson (Gilead); an interview with Rushdie (the highlight of the conference for me); an anatomy of the making of a YA novel by a woman, Han Nolan, whose work is not in the current Honey for Teens but ought to be for the next one, Lord willing there be one. Then a lecture on feel-good Holocaust novels by Mary Doria Russell and finally an "After the Feast" reflection. That doesn't begin to say what I didn't go to--eight choices for nearly everyone I made.

For me Rushdie was at the center of it all. He did not come to my talk and so I did not melt into a pool of butter and my young colleague (a new grad student) did not have to worry away one night's sleep. My talk seemed well received (my dad liked it and that is high praise)and hearing Rushdie later that evening convinced me that my analysis was spot-on and fair. I spent a few minutes with a project idea editor of a good publishing company about the possibility of turning my M/C dialogue comparative study into a book. We're going slowly and I will have to submit some revised chapters by summer's end, but at least the light has not turned red. That encourages my heart (which is much more doubtful than my head). One of the things that impressed me about Rushdie's speech is that it wasn't a canned book tour speech even though the title hinted that it might be (same title as his new collection of essays). No, he had figured out his audience though he most certainly did NOT pander to it. He was forthright in his rejection of all faith and he ended his speech with a statement of what he had learned from the Satanic Verses incident: It revealed for him the most significant question of all: Who will have power over the stories within which we all live? A totalitarian society will control that power and exercise it to kill anyone who disagrees. A free society shares that power with everyone. (As someone summed up today, at heart Rushdie is just a liberal American!) I had pointed to Freedom/Art as being Rushdie's god who gave him power to retell the story of the genesis of Islam but which, ironically, did not prevent him from injuring folk in the process.

Oh, and because the book signing process was so expeditious, I was able to get my S.V. signed AND give him a printed copy of the paper from which my talk came AND get Karen from her Horizon's social event on time. He can throw it away, or file it in one of the gazillion files of commentary on his novels, or do whatever he likes with it, but I gave it to him and he said "Thank you." And in this aside, let me say that he is quite a bit shorter and surprisingly rounder (though I would never say fatter) than I would have dreamed. He's so much larger than life that who would have guessed?

I will give you one great story out of the interview just to give you a taste of it. The interviewer is a prof of English from Bethel College in MN. He began by saying that he had been accosted by a group of girls who had travelled 12 hours to hear Rushdie because they had an exam question to answer on Midnight's Children and figured they could do no better than ask the author for advice. (He never said, but I'm sure he was the prof who gave the exam....pick a passage and explicate it with reference to theme, style, narrative, etc.....no more than 1000 words and don't pick the first page.) So, Rushdie picked a passage, read it, explicated it, enjoying this whole exercise immensely. Afterwards the prof said, "What do you say to Mr. Rushdie, girls?" and they sing-songed in unison, "Thank-you-Mis-ter-Rush-die." With the ice broken, the questions and answers were far-ranging, and when he ended with "Don't you think that 20th secularists have killed far more than religious fanatics?" R could answer, "You sound just like my mother." He gave his response "God could have stopped the killings...therefore, there is no God," but said also, "Yes, I know, my mother didn't believe me either."

In addition to the lectures, I saw old friends and met new ones, an important part of any conference. I feel privileged to have been here. I got several other autographs and missed getting yet others. I'll have to return in two years. Come along with me, won't you?