LAST NOVEMBER, GRETCHEN Kalwinski and Eugenia Williamson were among a crowd of local writers and editors bundled into the California Clipper for the Guild Complex’s monthly Palabra Pura event. On the bill were poets Ada Limon and Jorge Sanchez, but for many the real draw was New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear, in town to research a piece on the Poetry Foundation and its new president, John Barr. “It was a bit sad,” says Kalwinski, 31. “Everyone was lurking around, trying to get a chance to talk to her.” Williamson, 27 and fresh out of the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, puts a more theoretical spin on things. “It was almost Lacanian—it was like, ‘Look at me! If the eyes of the New Yorker do not validate me, I do not exist.’”
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The two women talk about validation a lot. As writers and editors, between the two of them they’ve worked at or freelanced for more Chicago literary organizations and publications than you can shake a mouse at, including the University of Chicago Press, the Newberry Library, the American Library Association, the Tribune, the Reader, Time Out Chicago, Stop Smiling, and Venus Zine; currently Kalwinski handles permissions part-time for the Poetry Foundation. They belong to a writers’ group that includes fiction writer Patrick Somerville (profiled in the Reader last fall) and TOC books editor Jonathan Messinger, who also runs the Dollar Store reading series. Both women say they attend anywhere from three to eight literary events a month. But despite, or perhaps because of, their connections and broad experience, they think Chicago doesn’t get enough respect. Not enough authors stop here on tour—and if they do, not that many people show up to see them. All the elite publishing jobs are in New York, and Williamson (who’s working on a book project) says she and her peers feel constant pressure to move. “I was out to dinner with Gary Shteyngart about a year ago,” she says, “and he told me I needed to move to New York because ‘all writers’ live in New York.” This despite the fact that he’d been hanging out with Jeffrey Eugenides and Aleksandar Hemon the night before.
That statement may speak more to internalized second city-ism than to any real crisis. Writers of national and international prominence call Chicago home, and multiple writing programs churn out scads of new scribes every year. Chicago’s hardly some culture-starved cow town. (And with the eyes of the New Yorker focused on entities like the Poetry Foundation, one of the largest and wealthiest private literary organizations in the world, Chicago’s not being ignored, even if Goodyear’s article was less than flattering.) But it’s true that Chicago doesn’t have the professional infrastructure of New York, so community-building efforts always seem to have legs. Take, for instance, the inaugural Printers’ Ball at HotHouse in 2005—this mixer for local publishing types drew 800 and left a line of would-be community members outside in the cold for hours. Last year’s, at the Double Door, drew just under 1,000. People who spend lots of time alone, staring at pages of text, are primed for face time and, yes, validation.
When Friday 6/22, 8 PMWhere Halfway House, 1539 N. DamenInfo literago.org
