High marks

FIXX’D ATTENTION Guth centered her new fest around her old stomping ground.

Photo: Justin Wolta

In 2006, author Amy Guth watched from the crowd as competitors stretched their pipes in a “Stella!” shouting contest, as part of the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans. She stood with Paul Willis, the festival organizer, who turned to her and asked, “Do you have any interest in curating a festival? You should. You’d be great.”

That’s when the idea first occurred to Guth. Then all it took was the fuel of a few fancy cocktails in Omaha with Timothy Schaffert, founder of the (Downtown) Omaha Lit Festival—who made festival organizing sound easy—to propel Guth to create the newest literary party in Chicago, The Pilcrow Literary Festival. Free to all attendees, the fest takes over various venues around the nexus of Belmont and Sheffield Avenues, and brings together more than 70 novelists, poets, booksellers, librarians and publishers from across the U.S. and Europe for back-to-back panels, discussions, workshops and readings.

“When you sit down with writers and publishers, ideas start happening,” Guth says. “And I just really felt like that community-building format would work well in Chicago. I thought if I could get 20 to 25 authors to come, that’d be fun for us and for people in small press. But now I’ve got about 70 authors from all over the place.”

With two events scheduled for each time slot, Guth has already far surpassed her own expectations. The fest has attracted up-and-coming novelists like Schaffert (Devils in the Sugar Shop) and Jami Attenberg (The Kept Man), as well as a slew of Chicago authors like Elizabeth Crane, Cris Mazza and Charles Blackstone.

For Guth, the festival is a culmination of her pursuits in the past few years. After a nearly fatal car accident about five years ago, she was told she’d probably never run again; five months later, she ran a marathon. And she hasn’t slowed her pace professionally, either: So New Media published her debut novel, Three Fallen Women, in 2006, she started the monthly Fixx Reading Series last year, and she now serves as assistant fiction editor for the online literary magazine 42opus.com. She’s also taken an interest in helping others, which has become part of Pilcrow, as well. Complementing the writer-driven events, Guth will hold a fund-raiser at 8pm on Saturday 24 to benefit the New Orleans Public Library rebuilding project. Hurricane Katrina destroyed 13 of the 21 branches. Part of the fund-raising will come from a silent auction of art made from books that participating authors have taken apart and reassembled, an idea she got from a picture of the MLK branch in New Orleans.

“You can see different multiple levels of balcony, and there are books all over the floor,” Guth says. “So I was thinking of this image, really burning into my head, of these books in mud, and all the language the library is using in their campaign is about rising from the dust, so I really thought, Let’s take apart books, make something out of them, auction them off.”

Pilcrow also partners with Eco-Libris, a company that plants trees to offset book printing. It’ll sell small stickers that go on the front of each book, signifying that a book’s carbon footprint has been offset by the tree planting. On the evening of the New Orleans fund-raiser, it’ll double its tree planting for every $2 sticker purchased on the library’s behalf.

And yet, questions remain about the fest. Or rather, one question keeps cropping up: What is a pilcrow? In the world of grammar and punctuation, it’s that funny little half-circle with two black lines slashed through, delineating a paragraph break, the sort of thing you never thought actually had a name. But in this context, Guth says, the little pilcrow signifies anything but painful red marks.

“I’ve always liked that little symbol, and I like the idea of it starting a new paragraph,” Guth says. “And in the middle of the greater scheme of the writing world and the publishing world, I like the idea of this new thought, this new paragraph.”

Click here for the Pilcrow schedule.