Fantastic finish

Eight years ago, when the first Get Lit! literary festival was held in The Met, there weren’t that many people in the audience at any one time.

And the people reading? Talented they were, no question. But there wasn’t a household name among them.

This year, now that Eastern Washington University Press has made the festival into what is arguably the premier book event in the Pacific Northwest, that has changed.

Not that people are likely to talk about Marilynne Robinson or Yusef Komunyakaa around the dinner table. But both have won Pulitzer Prizes.

And Alexander McCall Smith? Well, pretty much every fan of modern mystery has at least heard of his “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series.

So the fact is that as we head into the final weekend of Get Lit! 2006, there should be a healthy number of literature lovers on hand to listen to each of the three as they show up in person, one in Cheney and the others in Spokane.

Komunyakaa will read from his works, which include the Pulitzer-winning “Neon Vernacular,” at 7 tonight at Showalter Hall Auditorium on EWU’s Cheney campus.

“He’s one of the country’s foremost poets,” Ivar Nelson, director of the EWU Press, says of Komunyakaa, adding that “the whole American experience is wrapped up in his lifetime.”

“He writes about jazz – he’s a black guy from the South – he writes about Vietnam and Vietnam veterans, because he was in the war, he writes about the black experience and now he’s a professor at Princeton,” Nelson says.

Robinson, who will read at 7 p.m. Saturday at The Met, offers a voice that is far closer to home.

A native of Sandpoint, she first drew attention with her 1981 novel “Housekeeping.” Her long-awaited second novel, “Gilead,” won the 2005 Pulitzer.

” ‘Gilead’ is a book with ties to biblical experience,” Nelson says. “I think it’s very, very special having her come back here. I think people will find that interesting because she grew out of our experience here.”

In contrast to Robinson, McCall, who will read at 3 p.m. Sunday at The Met, takes us half a world a way. He lives in Scotland and writes about Botswana.

“He’s a white guy from Scotland writing in the voice of a black woman from Botswana, and you feel like you’re there,” Nelson says. “I’ve been there, I’ve seen the streets that he’s talking about, and yet he has this interesting mix – it’s a mystery story.”

Having all three at Get Lit!, Nelson says, allows readers the opportunity to meld what they get from each work with the respective authors who created them.

“They can personalize what they’ve read,” Nelson says, “and therefore create an immediacy that would be different than reading a book.”

As proof, he points to last year’s festival and the reading by novelist Salman Rushdie, whom many had prejudged as a “strident political commentator.”

“Everybody had this image of him from reading, or not reading, his books and all the media,” Nelson says. “And what they found was a humorous, enjoyable person who really cared about human beings.”

The value of a literary festival, then, and Get Lit! in particular, is that it brings the writer and reader together.

As Nelson says, “You humanize the creative impulse behind the book to the audience.”