“It’s like you’re sitting in a bar, and there are all of these fights going on all around you,” the novelist Ann Patchett is telling me. “You look over, and you think, ‘Not my fight.’ And you look down the bar, and you think, ‘Not my fight either.’ And then someone comes into the bar, and this horrible fight ensues, and you think, ‘Oh, God, that’s my fight.’”
Ms. Patchett is not sitting in a bar when she tells me this story. She’s sitting in her family room explaining how she got involved in trying to save Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, at a time when the future of humanities programming looked very bleak. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency had just defunded the N.E.H.
State humanities councils have never depended entirely on federal funding to survive. The program was meant from the beginning to foster public-private partnerships. But how could they possibly make up the loss of all their federal funding? At a time when hundreds — thousands? — of other nonprofits, locally and nationally, were trying to do the same?
This was Ms. Patchett’s fight, as she put it, because she is a regular headliner at the annual Southern Festival of Books, one of Humanities Tennessee’s most visible programs. She is also the owner of Parnassus Books, which, like the festival, is one of the tent poles that supports the literary life of Nashville. When one of those tent poles takes a hit, it leaves the whole literary community a little wobbly.
Ms. Patchett had a simple plan for overcoming the paralysis of doom that many of us were feeling in those early chain saw days of DOGE: She would ask the bookstore’s social media followers — some 500,000 people across platforms — to help her raise money for Humanities Tennessee by donating $20 each. If you need to fill a funding gap of hundreds of thousands of dollars, $20 is a drop in the bucket. But together, she explained in her Parnassus video, “We might be able to be the tide that lifts the boat.”
Donations poured in, not just from readers in Tennessee but from those in all 50 states.
According to Tim Henderson, chief executive of Humanities Tennessee, Ms. Patchett’s appeal brought in approximately $70,000 in small donations linked directly to the Parnassus video. But several much larger gifts — including two in the six figures — came in indirect response to it, too, from charitable foundations that understood what the loss of public humanities would mean for a state, and for a country, and were in a position to do something about it.
In the meantime, Humanities Tennessee was carrying out its own fund raising efforts, just as it has always done, although this year with more urgency than ever.
Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams, mother-daughter authors who have been involved with the festival since Ms. Williams was a baby, had already signed on to lead the annual the Authors in the Round dinner, which raises money to support the next year’s book festival. In the wake of the federal funding cuts, they have raised more money than any other dinner in the festival’s history, and their fund raising efforts are ongoing. Why? “We are writers and readers, and we understand the power of coming together around books,” Ms. Randall said simply.
While all this was going on, leaders at Vanderbilt University, which houses one of the most highly ranked creative-writing programs in the country, began to explore the possibility of creating a partnership with Humanities Tennessee, one that would bring Vanderbilt more visibly into the local literary community and simultaneously help Humanities Tennessee continue to serve the public through its hard-won expertise in public programming.
“The Southern Festival Books is an amazing cornerstone of intellectual life and civic discourse in the city,” Cybele Raver, Vanderbilt’s provost, told me. “When the festival’s future was in jeopardy, it was really clear that Vanderbilt had an opportunity to act.”
All these efforts, helped by an emergency one-time cash infusion from the Mellon Foundation disbursed to all the humanities councils, have saved Humanities Tennessee and its flagship book festival this year. There have been wrenching losses along the way, perhaps most visibly to the statewide grant program, which is now on hiatus. But the way Humanities Tennessee was saved, with the entire community working together to save it, has laid the groundwork for surviving the vicissitudes of the future.
The National Endowment for the Humanities was founded in 1965. “That was an incredibly polarized time in the culture, too,” Mr. Henderson pointed out. And yet Ann Patchett’s $20 appeal tells us something about the power of the collective. A dinner where writers and readers come together to talk about fundamental ideas, foundational truths, tells us something about the power of frank conversation across the political spectrum to bridge ideological distances.
And a festival where tens of thousands of people come together to celebrate books — books of all kinds, for all ages — tells us something about the power of storytelling. Especially in a time of terrible fear and sorrow and vitriol, stories remind us of who we are and of how we belong to one another.
It’s too soon to say how long the public arts and humanities, among so many other facets of the public good that are now in profound peril, will survive. Will people part with enough $20 bills to save them forever? Will philanthropic organizations support endangered cultural assets indefinitely? Will a lawsuit by the Federation of State Humanities Councils restore funding until the federal budgeting process returns to normal?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. What I do know is that we need the humanities now, perhaps more than we have ever needed them, because we live in a time when so many of us have forgotten this crucial truth: We are a fangless, clawless, furless species, and we survive only in community.
The 37th annual Southern Festival of Books will be held in Nashville Oct. 18-19. As always, it is free and open to the public.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of three books, most recently “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year.” Her first picture book, “The Weedy Garden,” will be published in February.
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