By Chris Young
Daily Bruin Staff
Authors come from all over over the country to attend the Los
Angeles Times Festival of Books, but some never even have to leave
home. Some of UCLA’s own faculty will participate in the
Festival, bringing their academic specialties and unique
perspective to bear on the event.
“The festival is about enchantment of the written and
spoken word,” said Carolyn See, an adjunct professor in the
English department and a California novelist.
“It’s a huge forum for serious literary
writers,” she continued. “If you’re a reader, you
can see people who you’ve read all your life but never had a
chance to meet and get a sense for how they create, and it’s
just marvelous.”
The brainchild of the Los Angeles Times, the Festival started in
1996 as a potential flop but instantly turned into a cultural
beacon and rallying point for book lovers.
“Before the first Festival, all the planners were nervous
whether it was going to work out,” said See. “Some of
my students worked as publicists at Random House and they were
hired for that weekend to sit in classrooms and attend the panels
““ nobody was sure that anybody would show up. But it turned
out to be a marvelous madhouse, so they didn’t need to pay
anyone to sit in the audience because it was just packed and a
tremendous success.”
For See, the festival was successful in part because of the
series of panels offered throughout the day. Each panel discusses a
topic with the audience using the expertise of a board of authors.
Many UCLA professors serve as either panelists or moderators.
See will moderate the panel “L.A. Stories: Life and Death
in the City of Angels,” at 1 p.m. Saturday at Schoenberg
Hall.
Joan Waugh, an associate professor in the history department,
will be a moderator for the panel “The Price of Union:
Revisiting the Civil War,” at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Korn
Convocation Hall.
“The panelists are superb scholars of the Civil War and
their books are excellent,” Waugh said.
The tie between professors and their books is very strong. For
professors in the humanities, writing books is very important.
“The centerpiece of our career is the book,” Waugh
said.
Waugh explained that writing a book on history is different from
writing fiction, requiring many years of research and an involved
writing process. Historians are promoted and rewarded for producing
quality books. Authors submit their manuscripts to academic
presses, a group of peers, who write criticisms and evaluations,
and a book will often go through many revisions before it can be
published.
At UCLA, Waugh teaches “Civil War and
Reconstruction” and “The Gilded Age: 1855-1900.”
She has also written a biography, “Unsentimental Reformer:
The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell,” about a woman whose
family was involved in the Civil War.
“The person in charge of this part of the festival knew I
was the professor of Civil War history at UCLA and that I’d
be the perfect person for it,” Waugh said.
Waugh’s first book took three years to produce. With the
research done on her next book, about Ulysses S. Grant, she said
that next year she has a National Endowment for the Humanities
grant to write it.
For Rachelle Zukerman, university research has direct
implications for applying solutions to issues.
“Much of what we do in the university is discover new
knowledge,” Zukerman said. “I’m excited about my
book because it’s an application of my research in aging,
mental health, and human behavior. It’s taking the ivory
tower of academia and applying it to real-life, everyday human
problems.”
Zukerman is a professor in social welfare with a specialty in
aging. She will be a panelist on “In the Prime: Mid-Life
Woman,” at noon Saturday in CS 24, discussing issues that
interest mid-life women.
Zukerman has written four college textbooks about counseling and
psychotherapy and also teaches a year-long course sequence for
graduate students on becoming counselors and clinical social
workers.
“Writing a book is, I think for most authors,
agonizing,” Zukerman said. “And after it’s done,
some of us feel sort of a letdown, like post-partum blues. But when
it’s published, it’s like giving birth to something.
It’s a source of pride and anticipation. When you have a
child, you want that child to contribute to the world. I’m
hoping that my book will make a practical contribution.”
Other panels will focus on more literary topics. See’s
panel will discuss Southern California as a place to set serious
fiction.
See said that for many years, American literature was centered
geographically in the northeast and was part of the elite,
educated, mostly white Protestant upper- middle class. But in the
last several decades, things have changed dramatically and American
literature now involves the entire country.
See teaches the class “Literature of California and the
West,” in addition to small seminars in memoirs, creative
writing and Australian literature. She has also participated in
every Festival of Books since its inception.
“The Festival combines two of the greatest cultural
institutions in Los Angeles ““ the L.A. Times and UCLA,”
See said. “I think it’s a very felicitous marriage.
It’s wonderful to see the culture of a huge city kick
in.”
BOOK: For more information about panel discussions, visit the
Los Angeles Times Web site at www.latimes.com/events/fob/.