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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The word Orwellian has been appearing in news headlines of late. This from Vanity Fair. Think Florida Is Already an Orwellian Hellscape? Ron DeSantis is just getting started. Or this Ohio newspaper story about the use of police surveillance cameras had this headline, Dayton Police Want Access to Private Cameras, Orwellian, or Helpful Tools? The impact of George Orwell and his work is the theme of the Deep Water Literary Festival which kicks off today in Narrowsburg, New York. A hamlet that's home to about 400 people nestled near the Delaware River in Sullivan County, about two hours away from New York City.

If you're up for a trip this weekend it will be awash in literary guests including, Marlon James, Lucy Sante, George Orwell's son, Richard Blair with music by DJ Spooky. Radiolab Founder and Executive Producer of More Perfect, Jad Abumrad will also be participating, looking at Orwell's 1984 through the lens of his 14-year-old son. Jad is joining us. Hi Jad.

Jad Abumrad: Hi, Alison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. Plus Aaron Hicklin, Founder and Organizer of the event joins us as well. Aaron, nice to speak with you.

Aaron Hicklin: You too Alison. Thank you so much for having us on.

Alison Stewart: Aaron, where did the idea of the festival come from?

Aaron Hicklin: Well, I have a bookshop which was a long held passion of mine in the same town Narrowsburg, and in 2018, I decided to launch a festival. I wanted to break away from the convention of book festivals in which an author reads from their book, and then people politely line up and get those books signed. That's all great, and I love those festivals, but I wanted to break it out of that mold. We launched it with a focus on The Odyssey, the Emily Wilson translation which was the first one by a woman in English.

We turned it into a marathon reading and performance all around this very tiny town, so we sort of took over the town, 20 venues every hour through the weekend, and we've just followed that up each year with a different theme, a different book, or in the case of this year an entire author's oeuvre.

Alison Stewart: What was it about Orwell you wanted to explore Aaron?

Aaron Hicklin: The language is saturated with Orwellianism. He's everywhere. You can't open a newspaper, read a column without seeing some reference to the ideas and the themes that really preoccupied George Orwell. Some people get it right and some people get it wrong. We thought a festival that really explores what Orwell was thinking and talking about and how those ideas translate into our time through the work of journalists today and writers as well as other practitioners in the arts. What are they doing that exemplifies or accentuate some of the ideas that Orwell had and some of the things that really preoccupied him?

Obviously, we live in a time when his concerns about the rise of totalitarian states, the surveillance society, the use and abuse of language, all of those things are omnipresent now. In a way, he was one of the most prescient authors of the 20th century which is why, even if you haven't read Orwell we know what Nineteen Eighty-Four is about, what Animal Farm is about, but we were also interested in going just a little further and looking at his prose, his journalism. He was a furious journalist, wrote so much, a lot of book criticism, cultural essays, and it's just putting all that out there.

Alison Stewart: Jad, what was your first introduction to Orwell?

Jad Abumrad: Well, I think like a lot of us, I was assigned to read it when I was in high school. Interestingly, that was around the year 1984 for me, so I was reading Nineteen Eighty-Four on the same year that it was supposedly about. There were a lot of articles at that time coming out saying that, "Look at what Orwell predicted 1984 would be like in ha-ha-ha and is he wrong, and it's so silly. We're not in a totalitarian state. Everybody's fine. We can basically do what we want."

My introduction was-- Reading it as a historical artifact, like one of those moments where the past tries to imagine the future and gets it wrong. My reintroduction was watching my 14-year-old, he just turned 14 last week, and he has become deeply rabbit holed by Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is writing his own Nineteen Eighty-Four speculative fiction based on it, and he's invented an entire language based on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Seeing him get pulled in by that was very interesting to me, and so when Aaron reached out and said, "Hey, we're doing an Orwell thing, do you have anything?" I was like, "You know what? my kid is really deep right now, and I would really like to understand why. Why don't I do a thing about 14-year-olds in Orwell?" I'm like, "What's the poll? What's the appeal?"

That's what I'm going to be doing, and I do it very much as someone who doesn't know a lot about Orwell, but is very, very interested in what those kinds of dystopic works are saying to kids these days.

Alison Stewart: Jad, as a parent how has discussing Orwell helped you understand your son more, or how you understand the way your son thinks?

Jad Abumrad: Well, it's been really interesting Alison. He started studying Orwell as part of a larger study in his humanities class. He goes to a school here in Brooklyn. They were doing a dystopic fiction unit, and so, he was watching Minority Report and Blade Runner, and we were watching all that together and that was really great. Then when he started reading Orwell, it was different. Suddenly he had a lot of questions like, "What is fascism? What is propaganda? Why does propaganda work? Why do people go along with Hitler?"

I was like, "Whoa, I die." It's one of those moments where as a parent you feel out of your depth. There is something about Orwell where he-- I mean, it's an amazing novels first of all, but also it somehow poses questions that most dystopic fiction doesn't. It really forces you to ask questions about government, about power, and definitely about language.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Jad Abumrad, of course of Radiolab and Aaron Hicklin, the founder of the Deep Water Literary Festival which kicks off today and goes through Sunday. So many interesting panels. I think we can talk about one or two. Marlon James will be there. He's been one of our get lit with All Of It authors, skilled writer of Afro futuristic sci-fi, and there's a workshop that he's involved with. How will the workshop work?

Aaron Hicklin: Yes. The workshop is really targeted at young people, people between the ages of 12 and 16 or maybe a little older. It's really [unintelligible 00:07:16], what Jad was just talking about there to give young writers, readers, world creators an opportunity to sit down with an author of Marlon James' Caliber, and listen to how he builds his world and then have a go at doing that themselves. I'm pretty sure some of them will probably outdo even Marlon James in Imagination, so I'm keen and curious to see what emerges from that.

Alison Stewart: Rebecca Solnit will be there at the festival with a program called Orwell's Roses, name of her recent book. I love this review of it from Vogue, "Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way. How does Solnit a historian, feminist writer take on Orwell there?

Aaron Hicklin: Solnit came to Orwell by an unusual angle which is, she was reading some of his collective journalism, and came across again and again references to a rose Bush in his garden. He was a great naturalist. He loved nature. I think in all its works right through to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four you see his love of the environment, of the countryside. It really comes through.

He was never that happy when he was living in London. He liked small towns. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four on an island in Scotland, Jura. I think Solnit felt a simpatico with Orwell's sensibility and his depth of feeling for nature. She went on a journey to track down this rose bush in his garden in England. Goes on a journey herself, a very Orwellian kind of journey to the flower industry, the industrial flower industry in Columbia, and takes a look at the conditions of the flower industry there, what people have to go through in order to earn a pittance, so that we can have flowers on our tables, roses on our tables. That's very like what went down and out in Paris and London or on the road to Wigan Pier. This sort of immersive journalism where he wanted to find out how other people lived, how working people lived, and he immersed himself in their world, and she does very much the same.

Alison Stewart: The name of it is the Deep Water Literary Festival. It starts today, it goes through Sunday the 18th. Jad Abumrad will be discussing Orwell with his 14-year-old son, and Aaron Hicklin is the founder of the festival. Have a wonderful festival.

Aaron Hicklin: Thank you so much.

Jad Abumrad: Thank you.

 

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