It's an ambitious project and an impressive lineup. The Cracked Walnut Reading Festival, brainchild of St. Paul writer Satish P. Jayaraj, opened Monday night at Coffee Shop Northeast in Minneapolis with Sheila O'Connor, Susan Thurston and others, and will gallop around the Twin Cities area (with a side trip to Duluth), ending April 12 at Coffee Bene in St. Paul.
During that time, writers will gather at 21 different spots on 21 different afternoons and evenings, and read.
Cracked Walnut began two years ago when Jayaraj, who was studying for an MFA at Hamline University, talked with other students about the need for an outlet for their creativity.
"It started off as an experiment," he said, "to do readings in unorthodox locations." He staged readings wherever he could secure space, including a grocery store, skating rink and funeral home.
"The funeral chapel one is our crown jewel right now," he said. Writers tend to read to the space — the grocery-store reading involved lots of pieces about food — and the funeral home reading, he said, brought out powerful stories and poems.
The Cracked Walnut reading festival is a little more orthodox, held primarily in coffee shops. "The very basic idea was that if anyone is curious all they have to do is walk one or two blocks to their local neighborhood coffee shop," Jayaraj said.
He has lined up an impressive bunch of writers, including novelist Charles Baxter, poets Ethna McKiernan, Katrina Vandenberg, Kris Bigalk and Wang Ping, fiction writers Thomas Maltman and Erin Hart, and many others.
"I tried to get six people to each reading," he said, "so, roughly, 120 writers. No writers will appear twice, and I tried to mix it up — poets with fiction writers and performance poets." Readings will last about two hours.
