Festival encourages writers of all stripes

By Ana Preger Hart

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” Toni Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, said in a 1981 speech.

This may well be true for how CityLit Festival, Baltimore’s annual celebration of literary arts now in its 20th year, came to be.

“Honestly, it was a grassroots kind of thing,” said Carla Du Pree, author and executive director of CityLit Project, the nonprofit that hosts the annual festival. It features a series of readings, classes, conversations and lectures, open to all who are or want to become writers.

“Four book lovers decided that Baltimore needed something like that, and they created a festival. And it was just that — book lovers: people who were invested in words and getting writers together in one place,” Du Pree said.

Since 2003, CityLit Festival — which remains free, something Du Pree said is “in this day and age unheard of” — has hosted Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award winners, MacArthur “genius grant” Fellows, Guggenheim Fellows and a Carnegie Medal Award winner. These writers visit Baltimore in person or virtually to offer constructive criticism, teach master classes, appear on panels and give lectures.

Past authors include Junot Díaz Mark Doty, Elizabeth Acevedo, Claudia Rankine, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Patricia Smith, Dani Shapiro, Terrance Hayes, Nikole Han-

nah-Jones, Philip Gourevitch and more.

For new as well as seasoned writers

Despite the big-name authors, the festival is open to all writers. “We always wanted to support writers at every stage of their journey. It didn’t matter if they were emerging or established,” Du Pree said.

“CityLit became this place where writers could experience being a writer and feeling like a writer and being supported as a writer, which they don’t always get a chance to do.”

When Du Pree took over as executive director in the fall of 2016, succeeding founder Gregg Wilhelm, she saw an opportunity “to tap into people who didn’t necessarily call themselves a writer because they weren’t out there publishing, but still were invested in the craft of writing.”

To that end, the festival hosts a master class and a 90-minute craft intensive, each of which bring graduate-level instruction to a wider audience. This year’s craft intensive is called, “How to visually map out a story.”

Another popular feature is the opportunity to have an excerpt of your writing critiqued in a one-on-one half-hour session.

“Our hope is that writers attend our festival, they go home and feel empowered to do the work, and continue doing it regardless of the circumstance,” Du Pree said.

“Because writing belongs to everyone. Everyone I know has a story they want told; they want to read something that looks like them or close to their experience.”

Baltimore as a literary hub

Baltimore was home to many literary greats beyond the ubiquitous Edgar Allan Poe.

On a Literary Walking Tour of Mt. Vernon, hosted by Maryland Humanities, you can follow in the footsteps of poets Carl Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay, see the birthplaces of Baltimore natives Upton Sinclair and Emily Post, visit the Peabody Library where nov-

See FESTIVAL, page 21

As part of this year’s CityLit Festival, Joy Harjo, the winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and former Poet Laureate of the United States, will be giving a reading of her poetry and conversing with a local poet on Tuesday, March 28, at Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater.

Fire trucks

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U.S. House of Representatives).

Besides fire engines that range from non-motorized stagecoach-sized vehicles to mammoth 20th-century ones, visitors can delve into firefighting’s intricacies over time.

The museum has an 1888 Clapp and Jones, which was pulled by horses and had a steam-pumping engine that pushed water out. There’s a 1913 gas-powered Ahrens-Fox Model A engine, the only one left in the world.

Inside the museum, which is open to the public only on Saturdays during the winter months, visitors can see fire station facades, uniforms, helmets, buckets, hoses, extinguishers, megaphones and goldleaf decals that firefighters proudly displayed

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Mar. 4 on their vehicles.

There’s a wooden hand rattle that street watchmen spun around to make a loud clacking sound and alert people to fires. On one wall is a Stokes basket, a metal rescue stretcher used to lower and haul a victim away from a fire.

Collectors cherish their trucks

Melia, a Cockeysville resident who teaches engineering to high school students, “grew up around the firehouse because my father was a fireman,” he said.

He himself was a volunteer fireman in New Jersey for 10 years, and was so bothered by regularly seeing an open-cab, ladder firetruck rusting in a junkyard that he bought it.

Fixing up old firetrucks is “my thing,” he explained. “When I pass a red Corvette, I say to myself, ‘I’ve got my red convert-

JAZZ TRIO PERFORMANCE ible, too. It’s just a little bigger.’”

Visit UMBC’s Linehan Concert Hall and enjoy an afternoon performance by pianist Harry Appelman and his jazz trio, featuring drummer Eric Kennedy and bassist Jeff Reed. They will perform original compositions and their takes on jazz standards and songs from the Great American Songbook. This event takes place on Sat., March 4, from 3 to 5 p.m. at 1000 Hilltop Cir., Baltimore. Tickets are $15 ($10 for seniors) and can be purchased by visiting bit.ly/JazzTrioUMBC.

Most Tuesday nights, Melia and a few other firefighting buffs gather to repair and restore antique vehicles. “Every time, I learn something new,” he said.

To complete the picture, he even has a black and white Dalmatian. “When my dog is in the parade, no one sees the firetruck,” he said.

A retired fuel truck driver, Miller has driven his firetrucks to events as far away as Florida, Texas and Minnesota. He has five vehicles: a 1968 Hahn, his newest; a 1946 International brush truck; a 1959 Ford brush truck; a 1956 Ford pumper and a 1948 American LaFrance pumper. A brush truck has a front-end spray bar for putting out fires in fields or forests.

No two firetrucks are alike, he says, because each station that ordered them had certain specifications.

Miller has been a volunteer firefighter since age 16, and now volunteers at the Manchester and Pleasant Valley stations. He used to ride on the side of the truck, but not anymore. “When I turned 70, I quit fightin’ fires,” he said.

Instead, Miller helps with other tasks. He’s been inducted into the Maryland

State Fireman’s Association Hall of Fame. He finds joy in driving a big red firetruck down the interstate and watching reactions, “especially the kids with their noses pressed up against the window. It’s neat.”

How to buy your own firetruck

Used firetrucks are the cheapest of any antique vehicle, typically costing between $2,000 and $3,000, according to Tom Herman, president of Virginia’s Old Dominion Historical Fire Society. Today’s sales are mostly conducted on the internet, on eBay, or at government surplus auction sites like govdeals.com.

“You don’t have to be rich to own a historic firetruck,” said Herman.

Admission to the Fire Museum of Maryland is free on Wednesday, March 4 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for Fire Safety Day, and on Saturday, May 6 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for Steam Day. Regular admission is $15; $13 for seniors and firefighters; $7 for children 2 to 18. Visitors under 2 are free.

The museum seeks volunteers to help in the office with archives and membership, assist visitors, restore apparatus or ride in parades. Visit firemuseummd.org or call (410) 321-7500.

Peace of Mind is Priceless

Pre-planning a funeral is a great gift, to your family and to you: It relieves the pressure on them to imagine what you might have wanted while they deal with grief and loss.

Your funeral service will be exactly as you wish.

Your family can enjoy peace of mind knowing everything has been arranged.

If you choose to pre-fund, the cost is fixed and protected from later price change or inflation.

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From page 19 elist John Dos Passos wrote daily, and more.

In addition, Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library hosts a robust Writers LIVE! series year-round featuring conversations with authors across all genres.

Past guests have included Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Jericho Brown, author and national radio personality Garrison Keillor, National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, and local journalist and detective fiction novelist Laura Lippman.

Lifting as we climb

This year’s CityLit festival is back in per- son after two years of virtual programming and with new partnerships with local arts organizations. It will take place over three days in late March.

Its theme is “Lifting as we climb,” the same motto as the National Association of Colored Women, whose founder, Mary Church Terrell, championed racial and gender equality.

The festival’s signature daylong event will be held at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall on Saturday, March 25.

On Tuesday, March 28, in partnership with Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater, CityLit presents former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.

The festival closes on March 31 at Busboys and Poets in Baltimore, featuring Pa- tricia Smith — the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement winner — with her new book, Unshuttered: Poems

CityLit hosts two other annual events in partnership with the City of Baltimore: CityLit Stage, as part of the Baltimore Book Festival, and CityLit Studio during Free Fall Baltimore.

Du Pree believes everyone has a story, and she wants to encourage average citizens to write.

“There’s always a way to reach an older adult who has retired but still has life in them or a story they want to tell. Or that writer who’s got the 9-to-5 job, and after the kids go to sleep, they get out the pen or get on a computer. Or the writer who gets up at 5 o’clock in the morning to do their work.

“Those, to me, are still writers,” Du Pree said. “There’s something about owning the idea that you can claim yourself as a writer because you are actually doing that work. We want to lift those people.”

For more information about the CityLit Project and its programs throughout the year, as well as more details about this year’s CityLit Festival, visit www.citylitproject.org.

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ART EXHIBIT & RECEPTION

Baltimore County Arts Guild hosts this Artists 4 ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) exhibition, created to expand awareness of the effort to add gender equality to the U.S. Constitution. The exhibit runs from Mon., Feb. 27 to Sun., March 5. The reception takes place on Fri., March 3, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at 10 Saint Timothy’s Ln., Catonsville. Both events are free, but you must register for the reception at bit.ly/Artists4ERA.

AARP

Driving Safety Course

When you take the AARP Smart Drivers Course, you could be eligible for a multi-year discount on your auto insurance. This course takes place on Mon., March 6, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Victory Villa Senior Center, 403 Compass Rd., Baltimore. The cost is $20 for AARP members and $25 for non-members. Space is limited; call (410) 887-0235 to sign up.

String Quartet Performance

Thalea String Quartet’s musical program explores the influence of American musical traditions, including bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll, hiphop, the blues and spirituals. This free performance, part of the Shriver Concert Hall’s Discovery Series, takes place on Sat., March 11, at 3 p.m. at UMBC’s Linehan Concert Hall, 1000 Hilltop Cir., Baltimore. The suggested donation is $10. For more information and to reserve tickets, visit bit.ly/ThaleaStringQuartet.

FREE MOVIE: BROOKLYN

Visit the Lansdowne Senior Center to enjoy a screening of the movie Brooklyn, about an Irish immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn. This free event takes place on Thu., March 16, at noon, at 424 Third Ave., Baltimore. Have a sub and a bag of chips with the movie for just $6. For more information, email Lansdownesc@baltimorecountymd.gov or call (410) 887-1443.

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