There are many reasons to go to this weekend’s Printers Row Lit Fest, now in its 39th year and stretching along a few blocks of Dearborn Street, south from Ida B. Wells Drive to Polk Street, alive with dozens of events and hundreds of authors and many thousands of readers, all happily celebrating the written word.
I will be there at noon Saturday on the Plymouth Court Stage, talking with Judy Royko, wife of columnist Mike Royko, as well as Northwestern University professor Bill Savage and actor Mitchell Bisschop, creator and star of the one-man show “Royko: The Toughest Man In Chicago,” playing through the end of this month at the Chopin Theatre.
On Sunday at the North Stage, Miles Harvey will appear in conversation with Garnett Kilberg Cohen, the author of four short story collections. Harvey is new to the short story realm with his powerful debut collection, “The Registry of Forgotten Objects” (Ohio State University Press), but not new to Lit Fest, having participated in the past to talk about his three non-fiction books.
His first was 2000’s “The Island of Lost Maps” (Random House), about Gilbert Joseph Bland Jr., who in the latter decades of the 20th century became the most prolific American map thief in history.
In 2008 came “Painter in a Savage Land” (Random House), focusing on Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European to capture in his visual art the North America of the 1500s.
In 2020 there was “The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch” (Little Brown), about James Jesse Strang, a mid-19th century figure so famous in his time that his death made front-page headlines across the world before quickly fading into history. Reviewing it in this newspaper, I wrote, “Great writers deserve great subjects and Miles Harvey … has found another subject worthy of his skills.”
Harvey was born and raised in Downers Grove and attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in journalism. Though he enjoyed his time as a reporter for United Press International, he was never a fan of tight deadlines and later wrote for magazines, In These Times and Outside among them, and spent a decade in the precarious business of freelance writing.
That life he soon discovered, especially with a wife, the actress Rengin Altay, and two children, had to change. “We had $35 in the bank, which wasn’t a comfortable place,” he says. “It was frightening. And time to get a steady job.”
He taught at Northwestern University and the University of New Orleans before, as he puts it, “lucking into an opening at DePaul.” That is where he remains, a professor and chair of the Department of English. It was there that he, along with colleagues Chris Solis Green and Michele Morano, created the estimable Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social justice-focused press that has published some stunning and important books and distributed more than 100,000 copies of them, and counting.
But throughout these active years, Harvey says, “I have always written short stories on the side and loved doing it. I have been lucky enough to have some published in good places (such as literary publications Ploughshares, Mid-American Review, failbetter and others). I had six stories finished, at least one of them 20 years old, when I decided to write some more and pull a collection together.”
“The Registry of Forgotten Objects” is a gathering of 12 stories, as imaginatively varied as one could wish, taking the reader from rural Indiana to contemporary New Orleans, from “yesterday” to a dystopian future. The characters — a couple devastated by the death of their son, a small town TV weatherman — are compelling and surprising.
“There are what I’d call quiet linkages between the stories,” he says. “The stories felt like they wanted to be related and objects provide the links.
In “Balm of Life,” a couple of aged strangers visit a house in which they long ago lived, perhaps wanting to “have the things they were seeking, proof that their past was not lost.”
Here are some more words from that story: “Strange to think they had lives of their own, all these objects, lives that would outlast her, and even the house, by decades, maybe centuries, lives as mysterious as those of the strangers across the room, their skin incandescent in the half-light, their sport coats making her think of ushers at the ballpark from when she was a girl, pretzel salt on her tongue and cigar smoke in the air, no thought of it in years, those Sunday doubleheaders with her father, long dead, and her big brother, also dead, the past suddenly so luminous she didn’t even need to close her eyes to see it.”
Short story collections are not hot literary commodities. Harvey is blunt on the subject, saying, “No one cares about short stories. It was hard to get this book published. But it means a lot to me. It is something I am really close to and proud of. And I like the thought that, love the idea that someone will discover it.”
Well, you’ll be able to buy his collection at Printers Row or on Sept. 12, when he will be in conversation with former WBEZ host Steve Edwards at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston. Or at a bookstore.
Harvey and I both share an affection for short stories and one of our favorite practitioners is George Saunders, who grew up in Oak Forest, who has said, “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.”
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
Miles Harvey speaks at 3 p.m. Sep. 8 at Printers Row Lit Fest on South Dearborn Street, on the North Stage just south of Ida B. Wells Drive; free, more information at printersrowlitfest.org. Then at 6 p.m. Sept. 12 at Bookends & Beginnings, 1620 Orrington Ave., Evanston; free RSVPs and more information at www.bookendsandbeginnings.com.
