What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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38 WHAT'S UP! OCTOBER 30-NOVEMBER 5, 2022 PRESIDENT Brent A. Powers EDITOR Becca Martin-Brown 479-872-5054 bmartin@nwaonline.com Twitter: NWAbecca REPORTERS Monica Hooper mhooper@nwaonline.com April Wallace awallace@nwaonline.com (479) 770-3746 DESIGNER Deb Harvell ! UP WHAT'S ON THE COVER Kids are at the heart of the Fayetteville Public Library's True Lit Festival because "we know how important it is to connect with reading when you're young," says Willow Fitzgibbon, the director of library services. The festival, set for Nov. 1-6, includes story times, a performance of "Peter and the Wolf" by the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas and a songwriting workshop for kids led by children's musician Dino O'Dell. (COURTESY PHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK) What's Up! is a publication of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. COVER STORY K-Ming Chang Acclaimed novelist and poet K-Ming Chang is the fall 2022 Walton Distinguished Visiting Writer this year at the True Lit Festival. The 24-year-old author is a Kundiman fellow, Literary Award finalist, and the National Book Foundation listed her as a 5 Under 35 honoree. Chang was an "obsessive journal writer" while in grade school, collecting gossip, myths and stories based on what she heard from her multi-generational family. In previous interviews she said that she sought to "completely efface" herself from the narratives. "I'm still definitely interested in the perspective of a witness or an observer. I think I'm continually drawn to stories where the narrator doesn't necessarily feel like a bounded individual, but they're part of a collective, and that they're defined by the rules that they've been given and how they navigate different relationships. But I definitely feel that everything is still kind of embedded with my own obsessions and what I'm haunted by," she explains. Myth is at the center of "Bestiary" — long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel and a PEN/Faulkner Award — in which the story centers on three generations of Taiwanese American women, queer desires, violent impulses and the myth of Hu Gu Po, a tiger spirit that wants to devour children, especially their toes. After a mother tells her daughter the tale of a woman possessed by the tiger spirit, the daughter awakens one day with a tail. Then more mysteries follow. "I think I'm so drawn to the world of myth because of its transformative properties," the author says. "I just feel that in the world of myth, everything is possible. "I grew up with so many stories of transformation … the idea that anything can become anything, anyone can become anyone, I find that there's something really deeply liberating about thinking always about transformative potential within storytelling. … There's also an inherent playfulness in myth as well, oftentimes, things that are really crass or really gross brush up against things that are really beautiful and divine and lofty. I just love that. It feels like in the world of myth, all of these borders collapse." Chang released a collection of short stories, "Gods of Want," in July which has garnered critical praise from Kirkus, New York Times and Publishers Weekly. The stories focus on family, ghosts, queerness and secrets. "I think what's so incredible about myth and folklore and fairy tales is that they're collectively owned stories that don't belong to a single individual," Chang posits. "They invite everyone to kind of participate collaboratively in their telling. I think definitely for marginalized writers, for exploring queerness which is oftentimes about the blurring of boundaries, about taking given definitions and rewriting them or destroying them entirely — that there's something inherent about them, that is just so, so communal." Like several of the other authors appearing at the True Lit Festival, Chang has an Arkansas tie as well. "My mom actually immigrated to Pine Bluff Arkansas in the '80s. So she grew up in part in Arkansas before moving to LA. She has a lot of stories that she's always telling me. Her family used to grow taro, and they were very pleased at the humidity, which is very similar to the humidity of Taiwan. They always thought that was really funny," she says. "My mom was actually very excited when she heard that I would be getting to visit Arkansas." True Lit Continued From Page 4 "I feel like my writing is my secret life in a lot of ways. Everything I dream about and the sediment of my daily life always ends up being recycled or resurrected in new forms in the writing … I feel like I exist in the imagery and the metaphors and the obsessions, even if the character themselves is kind of unwilling to define themselves directly." Author K-Ming Chang will give a talk at 7 p.m. Nov. 2 in the Willard and Pat Walker Community Room during the True Lit Festival at the Fayetteville Public Library. Books will be available for sale and signing following the event. (Courtesy Photo)