The inner courtyard at the University of Michigan's North Quad. This year's Ann Arbor Book Festival and Writer's Conference, which takes place on June 25, will be held at North Quad, located at State and Huron.

The publishing industry as we knew it is all but gone, as is the bookselling industry. (A visit to the almost ghostly downtown Borders store on a recent Friday night grimly reminded us of this.) The Great Recession all but dried up sponsorship and grant money for the arts in general and the literary arts in particular.

So how did organizers manage to bring back the book festival for another year?

Like most of us, by deciding what expenses weren’t essential, by figuring out how to stretch a buck and by some simple community cooperation.

Check out the schedule and you’ll see that this year’s festival – set for Saturday, June 25 – is being presented essentially in conjunction with the Neutral Zone’s Volume Summer Institute and the Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

Jeff Kass, Neutral Zone’s creative arts director who is heading up the book festival this year, says organizers were faced with “trying to move forward with the book festival under difficult economic circumstances, and we really didn’t have the resources to go it alone anymore.”

Kass apparently saw an opportunity to tap the talent that was coming to town to lead workshops for the Volume institute at Neutral Zone. The annual program “brings in some pretty terrific instructors, writers and performers,” says Kass. Integrating them into the festival happened by moving it from its traditional long weekend in early May to late June.

Bill Zirinsky, owner of Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tearoom, remains a key sponsor of the festival; Kass says Evans Young of the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science & the Arts, and Peter Schork of Ann Arbor State Bank have “stepped up” their own commitments to the event. And, Kass says, foregoing the expense of a festival executive director freed up some funds for conference scholarships (email Kass at a2bookfestival@gmail.com for scholarship info).

The Summer Festival partnership, Kass says, opened up some new venues for the festival and the Volume institute, including the Stern Auditorium at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The festival tent will be pitched on Ingalls Mall for some afternoon discussions and the presentation of this year’s Leader in the Literary Arts (LILA) awards to local storyteller Laura Pershin Raynor and to Ann Arbor’s Family Learning Institute and its executive director, Amy Rolfes.

“These kinds of alliances are the way things are going to have to be,” Kass says, and the “vision for the book festival is going to continue to evolve: What does the community really want as a literary arts festival?”

The heart of the matter, of course, remains the Writer’s Conference and its sessions focusing on the crafting of fiction, poetry, memoir and literature for young adults; Kass says he’s hoping for a “healthy turnout.” Things get started at 8:30 a.m. with the annual Breakfast With the Authors (emceed by Raynor), when festival and conference participants will gather informally at the Image Café in the North Quad building, located at the southeast corner of State and Huron. The conference is organized into three sets of sessions led by 14 writers – among them Kass (a creative writing teacher at Pioneer High and Eastern Michigan University), Lori Tucker-Sullivan and Cynthia Furlong-Reynolds. Margaret Yang returns this year as well. (See the full list on the festival’s website).

Volume institute faculty who are also on board at the Writer’s Conference include poets Roger Bonair-Agard and Kevin Coval. (Coval’s conference session, “Working Class Poetics,” sounds intriguing: “It’s vital to remember the power of art to bring the everyday lives of workers into the forefront of the public’s literary imagination.”) And this year’s wrap-up Author’s Forum will feature Ann Arbor writer Karen Simpson and her first novel, Act of Grace. (On Wednesday, June 15, Simpson will give a reading from the novel at Nicola’s Books, starting at 7 p.m.)

Linda Fitzgerald, whose day job is running her own marketing communications business in Ann Arbor, was sending out feelers early on about the prospect for this year’s festival; she says she might have missed one conference since the festival’s inception 2003.  While noting that there’s “lots of local talent” leading the festival sessions this year, Fitzgerald says she hasn’t settled on the sessions she might check out this time around.

But she has watched the character of the conference evolve along with the “seismic changes in the world of publishing itself” – Fitzgerald herself is now investigating the self-published “e-book route” for her mystery novel, Mantra for Murder. A marketing orientation in the early years – “all knees and elbows” in the quest to snag an agent and find a publisher, she says – has shifted to something that is “more supportive and fun and inspirational.” The focus on nurturing a “community of writers.”

(A friendly aside to the festival folks: Update the website! The Ann Arbor News and Shaman Drum Bookshop are listed as sponsors – both organizations are no longer in business.)

Poetry in the Garden

One Pause Poetry, sponsored by Copper Colored Mountain Arts, will present Laura Kasischke and Keith Taylor reading Poetry in the Garden on Friday, June 17, from 7 to 9 p.m. at 7101 W. Liberty Road in Ann Arbor.

Kasischke’s latest collection of poetry is titled Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), and several of her new poems appeared in the April issue of Poetry magazine. Taylor’s Marginalia for a Natural History will be out from Black Lawrence Press in October.

It’s Still 2011, So We Are Not Late With This

The Library of Michigan announced its list of 2011 Michigan Notable Books – in December 2010. So we’re thinking this means that these books will remain notable for another six months, right?

Well, it just so happens that some of them may remain notable for even longer than that. So there.

This could especially be the case for local favorites who made this (last?) year’s list, including Thomas Lynch’s Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (Norton) and Eden Springs: A Novella by Laura Kasischke (Wayne State University). Another really fine title that made the list is Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams, edited by M.L. Liebler (Coffee House Press). Among this book’s many riches are selections by Lynch and that fine poet of blue-collar work and workers Philip Levine. It made a dandy Christmas present for my brother – and kudos to Nicola’s Books for the featured shelf space.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and has been known to compile her own notable lists. Her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

An Ann Arbor Book Festival board meeting at the offices of the Ann Arbor State Bank (from left): Peter Schork, Kathy Robenalt, Jeff Kass, Evans Young, Bill Gosling, John Knott.

The starkest of those is the absence of Shaman Drum Bookshop, which closed its doors last summer. The bookstore had been a key sponsor since its owner, Karl Pohrt, took a key role in launching the festival in 2003. The void, for the festival as well as the community, has been deeply felt.

Pohrt’s staff “was extremely helpful in attracting some of our main guest authors,” said festival executive director Kathy Robenalt, “so that was a loss we had to work with.” And the woes of the wider industry have hit home, too: publisher-paid author tours are far from routine anymore, meaning fewer authors who might be able to appear at the festival on, say, HarperCollins’ dime.

Pohrt remains on the 18-member festival board, along with Bill Zirinsky, who owns returning sponsor Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room with his wife, Ruth Schekter.

“It’s been a difficult time for nonprofits, obviously,” Zirinsky wrote in an e-mail Friday sent on his way to a meeting in Birmingham. “And I think the festival board came up with a plan this year to keep the festival thriving, but on a scaled-back basis.”

“Our authors, poets, bloggers, digiterati, readers and assorted literary types deserve this kind of regional festival,” he wrote.

Organizers expect to continue with a smaller event for “a couple of years, when, hopefully, funding will be more consistently available,” Robenalt said. “There are a lot of people in the community who support the festival financially and in other ways, and they want to see it continue.”

No exhibitors this year, indoors or out

The high-profile – and expensive – street fair of previous years gave way in 2009 to a group of exhibitors inside the Michigan League and a few more outside on Ingalls Mall. This year’s event skips that aspect altogether. “We’re hoping things will bounce back and that this won’t always be the case,” Robenalt said.

And while that “festival feeling” might be lacking without exhibitors, she acknowledged, the planning committee decided to “focus on some of our key events that we have had good response to in the past and at the same time earn some revenue. Hopefully,” she says, “that would put us in better shape for next year.”

Hence, the emphasis on the Writer’s Conference.

Kathy Robenalt, executive director of the Ann Arbor Book Festival.

“A strong contingent of people attend it pretty regularly,” Robenalt says. “There aren’t enough of these sorts of events in the area, and people like them.”

The festival kicks off at 7 p.m. Friday, May 14, at the Neutral Zone, 310 Washington St., with “Literama.” It’s a celebration of poetry with readings by Rachel McKibbens and Aracelis Girmay (“Teeth,” Curbstone Press, 2007) as well as an “intergenerational poetry slam.” Admission is $5.

Also on Friday night, the festival will present its LILA Award to two local “Leaders in the Literary Arts”: Nicola Rooney of Nicola’s Books and the Family Book Club, a nonprofit that promotes literacy and the value of reading to children in Washtenaw County.

Saturday starts, appropriately enough, with breakfast: an Author Breakfast, at 8:30 a.m. at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library. Authors and participants will get together with Michigan Radio’s Charity Nebbe and pastries donated by Zingerman’s; there’s a $20 charge.

Festival organizers decided to start this year’s Writer’s Conference at 10:15 a.m. – a little later than in past years, Robenalt said – so area participants driving considerable distances to Ann Arbor (“they really want to come”) could make it in for the whole conference without a killer pre-dawn drive.

Writing workshops – the how and the why

This year’s conference workshops range from writing exercises and the art of revision to magical realism and new approaches to nonfiction – the last led by New York Times auto industry reporter Micheline Maynard (“The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market”). Other instructors include local lights Ann Pearlman (“Infidelity,” “The Christmas Cookie Cookbook”); Ann Arbor Observer editor John Hilton; and Margaret Yang, a former restaurant critic for the Observer and winner of the Ann Arbor Writer’s Festival 2009 short story contest. The workshops will meet in the Mason/Haven Halls on UM’s Central Campus.

For the last session of the conference, all participants will gather at the Library Gallery (Room 100 at Hatcher) for a panel discussion on “the sort of question that everyone has” at writing workshops, Robenalt said: How do you find a publisher?

Panelist Bonnie Jo Campbell of Kalamazoo will provide an important perspective, Robenalt pointed out. Her most recent collection of stories, “American Salvage” (Wayne State University Press), was a 2009 National Book Award finalist and a 2010 Michigan Notable Book – and she doesn’t have an agent. Campbell is proof that “you don’t have to have an agent; you don’t have to go through New York City,” Robenalt said.

An Author’s Forum wraps up the festival at 5 p.m., featuring Campbell and Lolita Hernandez, a writing teacher at the University of Michigan Residential College and author of the award-winning short-story collection “Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant” (Coffee House Press, 2004). They’ll talk about working-class characters in contemporary fiction.

Interested in the Writer’s Conference? You can register as late as that morning but, obviously, the sooner you sign up, the better the odds of landing in your first-pick sessions.

A community presence

Some of the guest authors will be visiting the Ann Arbor Public Schools in the week leading up to the festival. “It’s a great way to fulfill our mission of continuing to push reading, writing and literacy,” Robenalt said, “and doing that with authors in schools opens up a lot of doors for a lot of kids who may not normally be able to be exposed to an author or an illustrator.”

And the annual Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair returns to the Michigan Union on Sunday, May 16, thanks in great part to Jay Platt and the West Side Book Shop, 113 W. Liberty St. Among some 40 exhibitors will be locals Bessenberg Bindery, UM’s William Clements Library, Third Mind Books and Kaleidoscope Books and Collectibles.

With an overall budget of about $40,000 this year, the festival took smart advantage of free, local online and radio events calendars for the bulk of its promotional efforts. The Ann Arbor Visitors and Convention Bureau also offered meeting space to festival organizers in its building on Huron and Ashley streets, and in-kind contributions came from such local companies as Zingerman’s and Edwards Brothers, which is handling some of the festival’s printing work.

“Unfortunately, we were having to look at the bottom line in deciding how to go forward,” Robenalt said. “Choosing to do the events we are doing will keep us out there.”

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor and has been known to attend a writer’s conference from time to time.