Bloglander

By next Wednesday, Get Lit will have presented 58 events. Thirty-seven of them are on Saturday.

Tonight at the Bing, though, a burning question will be answered: Does the Borg Queen take Nexium ("the little purple pill") for her acid reflux? You know how fiction, when read by an accomplished actor, sounds different (and, let's face it, better) than it sounds inside your head when you're reading silently on your own? That's why it's worth $25 (but free for students!) to show up at 7 pm tonight and hear Susanna Thompson (the Borg Queen on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and James Naughton (TV pitchman for Nexium) read stories about fathers and their children.

You've got a father, right? Well, those two actors (along with Selected Shorts co-founder Isaiah Sheffer) will be reading stories by the likes of John Updike and Roald Dahl in celebration of Father's Day. We're just two months short of celebrating Father's Day's birthday — conceived in Spokane in June 1910. (Will public-radio fans get to hear Selected Shorts' familiar tinkling-piano-and-sonorous-cello theme?)

And you can make your father proud ... by strolling over to the Hotel Lusso at 9 pm tonight for a six-poet verse fest. (There might be some wine involved.) EWU's Christopher Howell will introduce half a dozen poets. Here are the names, titles and topics:  Jorn Ake, Boys Whistling Like Canaries (political cruelty); Gregory Dunne, Home Test (living in Japan); Timothy Kelly, The Extremities (a physical therapist praises the beauty of the human body); Greg Pape, American Flamingos (interacting with nature); Susan Rich, The Alchemist's Kitchen (activism in Bosnia, Ireland and Zimbabwe); and Willa Schneberg, Storytelling in Cambodia (working for the UN in southeast Asia). And Metaphors Be With You.

Big Saturday ... The headline event (Saturday at 8 pm at the Bing — free for students, $20 for everyone else) has Richard Russo (Empire Falls) and Spokane's own Jess Walter (Citizen Vince) reading their own most recent books (That Old Cape Magic and The Financial Lives of the Poets) and cracking wise about the other guy's stuff.

But there's so much else on Saturday, too: all manner of workshops and panels ... four poetry slams ... actors enacting 17 young poets' poems at the Civic at 2 pm ... discussions of how to write grants, how to use dialogue in fiction, how to adapt novels into movies (with Russo and Walter in attendance), how to write YA novels, how to start a book club, how to write a feminist romance novel, how graphic novels engage in visual storytelling, and much more.

On Sunday, don't sleep in and miss Sallie Tisdale and Janet Fitch. Tisdale will discuss her book on women and Buddhism at the Davenport at 11:30 am. Fitch, the author of White Oleander, will discuss her latest novel at 2 pm at the Bing.

Visit our events system for all the details on Get Lit, or check out ewu.edu/getlit.