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If
you sing it, dance it, sculpt it, and act it, they
will come.”
So
says David L. Robbins, one of the
Richmond
area’s most successful novelists and, as it
happens, co-chair of the James River Writers
Festival. He might have added, “If you write
it, they will come.”
Robbins
is talking about luring businesses to Richmond,
not driving attendees to the festival. Traditional
economic development involves building physical
facilities – a baseball stadium, an industrial
park, a convention center, maybe even a performing
arts complex. But according to Robbins, the
conventional wisdom misunderstands the driving force
of economic progress in our mobile, knowledge-based
economy.
People
are free to live where they choose, free to settle
in communities where the culture, lifestyle and
amenities appeal to them, observes Robbins. Increasingly,
talented people – such as the Philip Morris USA
executives and managers deciding now whether to
relocate from New York City to Richmond when the
company moves its divisional headquarters – choose to live in communities
characterized by artistic creativity. “Every city that’s experienced an
economic renaissance,” he says, “has first
empowered a cultural renaissance.”
That’s
the pitch that Robbins and his co-chair Phaedra Hise
are giving Richmond’s
corporate community as they raise money to support
the writers festival. The purpose of the two-day
event, scheduled Oct. 3-4, is to link professional
writers in the Richmond
area with one another and with national writers,
agents and publishers. By assembling a conclave of
nationally known authors, the organizers hope, the
festival will highlight Richmond
as a city that has long fostered literary talent,
from Edgar Allan Poe to Tom Wolfe.
As
book writers, neither Robbins (War
of the Rats and Scorched
Earth) nor Hise (Pilot
Error: The Anatomy of an Airplane Crash) are
more plugged into Richmond's artistic circles than
its
civic and business elite, but their argument linking
artistic and economic vitality is resonating with
the city’s leadership. So far, they have signed up
Dominion, Hunton & Williams, Media General and
Ukrops as corporate sponsors. “It’s exciting,”
says Hise. “People have latched onto this. Everyone
seems to get it.”
The
timing was fortuitous. A year ago, it’s possible
that no one would have gotten it. But around the
time that Robbins and Hise began seeking corporate
contributions, Richmond’s
civic leaders invited Richard Florida, author of The
Rise of the Creative Class, to present his
iconoclastic theories of economic development. Based
on his study of metropolitan areas across the United
States.
Florida told audiences at the Chamber of Commerce
and Virginia Commonwealth University that economic
prosperity is closely correlated with the presence
of what he calls the “creative class” – occupational categories encompassing “science and
engineering, architecture and design, education,
arts, music and entertainment, whose economic
function is to create new ideas, new technology
and/or new creative content.”
Rather
than focus exclusively on recruiting corporations,
Florida contended, cities such as Richmond
and his hometown of Pittsburgh
should
create an environment attractive
to creative people. Scientists, engineers,
designers, educators, professionals and other idea
generators will develop new technologies, spot new
market opportunities, start new businesses, attract
investment capital and generate economic growth.
Members
of the creative class look for certain
characteristics in a community, some of which –
openness, tolerance and diversity – are cultural
attributes not easily changed. But they also are
drawn to urban environments with history, natural
beauty, distinctive architecture and a vibrant arts
scene, which communities can develop.
A
city trying to lure and retain members of the
creative class should support the arts, suggests
Florida,
but not necessarily the SOB, his shorthand for the
highbrow trinity of symphony, opera and ballet. Baby
boomers would rather listen to music in a nightclub than
in a concert hall. They would rather learn ballroom
dancing than watch someone else perform ballet.
Instead of supporting the arts by investing in
bricks and mortar, Florida
suggests, communities should find ways to stimulate
the artistic creativity that bubbles up from the
community.
Florida's
visit created a sensation, inspiring Richmonders to
rethink precepts of community development that no
one had challenged in years. Robbins, a free thinker
unfamiliar with Florida's theories, had reached
similar conclusions based on his own observations.
When he began making the rounds, seeking corporate
contributions, he found a remarkably receptive
audience. The James River Writers Festival was made
to order for Richmond's new economic-development
order.
Richmonders
need to ponder Florida's advice -- as should other
Virginians thinking seriously about the role of the
arts in their own communities. The city's civic
leaders are backing a
Performing Arts Center in downtown that will soak up much of the region's philanthropic
capacity for years to come. Richmonders need to ask
themselves if this is a wise commitment. What's more
likely to enhance the city's renown as a regional
center of artistic creativity: a theater complex
where Richmonders watch the performances of others,
or a festival that fosters the creative output of
the city's home-grown artists?
Put
another way, which is more likely to generate a
positive return on civic investment: $100 million
lavished upon bricks and mortar or, say, $10 million
to endow grass roots arts initiatives like
the James River Writers Festival? A gleaming new
arts center is something tangible that donors can
see. But it is legitimate to ask whether it will
contribute as much to Richmond's cultural
renaissance as events and festivals that strengthen
the city's indigenous community of artists.
Four
years ago, Phaedra Hise lived in
Boston,
where she had written two books and worked on the
staff of Inc.
magazine. Then her husband, Bill Hargis, got a job
running a company in Colonial
Heights.
It was a great opportunity, and they couldn’t turn
it down. But she wasn’t looking forward to the
move. “I thought, oh, my God, I’m going to Richmond
– there aren’t any writers there.”
When
Hise arrived, she started calling people and making
contacts. She was pleasantly surprised to find that
Central Virginia
was not, in fact, a literary wasteland. Before long,
she’d organized a rotating cocktail party for
local writers. “It turns out there are a lot
of writers here,” she says – not just local
journalists and P.R. types, but people who author novels, biographies, non-fiction and articles for
national magazines. The writers she knows here, she
says, actually have more experience and a higher
level of literary achievement than her buddies in Boston.
When
they moved to Richmond, Hise and her husband planned to stay two years then
high-tail it back to Boston
as soon as they could. That was four
years ago. They have no plans to leave.
Moral
of the story: The wealth of writing talent in
Richmond, an asset scarcely acknowledged by the
artistic community much less the region's civic
boosters, helped keep at least two talented
individuals -- one a writer, one a businessman -- in
the region.
David
Robbins, by contrast, is a local boy. Raised in
Sandston, outside Richmond,
he graduated from the College
of William
& Mary. He earned a living for years as
an advertising copy writer before writing books
became a consuming passion. He spent a couple of
years in Santa
Barbara, burned out on the California
lifestyle and moved back home.
A
couple of years ago, Robbins organized a rotating poker game,
limiting the guest list
mainly to his writer friends.
One evening, he was chatting with fellow
authors Howard Owen (The Rail), Tom De Haven
(Dugan Under Ground) and Dennis Danvers (The
Watch), lamenting the fact that
Richmond
had nothing comparable to
Charlottesville’s
Festival of the Book.
Then,
as they thought about it,
the poker players figured
Richmond
could do better. The Festival of the Book generates
attention and burnishes Charlottesville’s
reputation as a literary haven, but it comes across
as a “spasm of celebrity,” Robbins says. Readers
attend to see big-name authors, but the event
doesn’t do much to advance the craft of writing.
“What if we held a conference for writers?”
Writers
tend to be loners, not civic organizers, but Robbins
decided to make it happen. He recruited a strong
board of directors, accomplished writers all,
including Hise as co-chair. The Library of Virginia
committed to host the event, and Virginia
Commonwealth
University,
which launched its own First Novelist Forum last
year, agreed to integrate its annual event with the
festival. VCU will fly in the winner of its national
competition to participate.
Tom
Robbins (no relationship to David), a former
Richmond native and best-selling author of Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues, will deliver the keynote
address and participate in seminars.
Pulitzer prize winner Tony Horwitz (Confederates
in the Attic) will participate, along with
numerous Richmond
authors. Some 20 seminars
will run the gamut of topics, covering
poetry, fiction, biography, magazine articles,
science fiction, children’s books, popular romance
and, of course… the Southern novel.
Robbins
hopes the festival becomes “a permanent fixture on
the city’s cultural calendar.” As it grows, he
sees it providing a networking function as well as
ongoing, professional-development programs for
writers of all stripes.
Above
all else, Robbins hopes the festival will build
Richmond’s
self respect. “I was tired of Richmonders being
treated as cultural philistines,” he says. It
would represent a tremendous victory if, one day,
instead of thinking of his hometown as the city
that’s still fighting the Civil War, people
thought of it as the home of the best writer’s
conference on the East Coast.
Many
writers are involved in the other arts, as painters,
actors and musicians, notes Hise. By elevating
writing, she suggests, Richmond
elevates all the arts – and makes the city more
desirable to anyone else, whether a writer or not,
who might consider moving here. Write it, sing it,
dance it, sculpt it, act it, and they
will come.
--
April
14, 2003
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