The Book Festival, which begins today, promises many great authors and events aimed at the book-lovers of Iowa City.
By Claire Dietz
The Iowa City Book Festival will kick off today and continue through Oct. 9 at many locations throughout central Iowa City. It will include such authors as Leslie Jamison, Roxanne Gay, Nathan Hill, and Rick Riordan.
This year, the festival has grown from four days to six days, all dedicated to literature. John Kenyon, the executive director of Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, said there were so many authors and so many options that the festival had to expand.
While some actually complain of too much to see and too many authors to ever hope of going to, Kenyon hopes that the festival crowd will grow into the lineups in the next few years.
“If we were able to grow the audience, then the festival can continue to grow organically,” he said. “I would love to see people standing in the doorways because it’s jam-packed, despite two or three other events still going on.”
Joan Nashelsky, a program coordinator for the UI Center for Human Rights, has coordinated a One Community, One Book event around Suki Kim’s Without You, There is No Us, which tells the story of Kim’s time in North Korea teaching English to the elites’ children.
Kim will be at the Book Festival at 2 p.m. Oct. 9 at the Pomerantz Center, and Nashelsky sees this discussion as an essential, livening part of the novel-reading process.
“Nothing compares to a book discussion to when the author is there,” Nashelsky said. “No one knows the subject like [Kim] does; no one can lead a discussion like she can.”
One featured author is Leslie Jamison, the author of The Empathy Exams and a graduate of the Writers’ Workshop.
At the beginning of her career, moments of success — a magazine accepting her piece or a teacher’s encouragement — buoyed her. For her, there was no giving up, even if it meant working a variety of day jobs, including being an office temp, a personal assistant, a tutor, an innkeeper, a baker, and a barista.
“There was only the constant determination to keep writing, no matter how many stories had been rejected and the parade of day jobs necessary to make good on this determination,” Jamison wrote. “There were definitely moments where I felt someone else’s faith in what I was doing, and those moments were hugely important and sustaining.”
The inspiration behind her best-known work, The Empathy Exams, was her time as a medical actor at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. There, she would pretend to have various conditions so the medical students could practice diagnosing.
“That job was one of the first times I’d really questioned my understanding of how empathy worked; we were supposed to grade students on how well they expressed it,” Jamison wrote. “It gave rise to what became the title essay in the collection, as well as helping me realize that empathy was one of my guiding obsessions: It gave me the idea to frame a collection around exploring empathy and its limits.”