By Vicki Prichard
NKyTribune reporter
Author Rick Bass returns to Northern Kentucky University to discuss and read from his new book, the critically acclaimed The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes, on Aug. 22 at NKU’s Budig Theatre.
Bass, who last visited northern Kentucky to read and reflect in 2016, is known for his writing on the environment as well as his own environmental activism. A master of the short story, Bass has authored nonfiction and novels.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Bass studied petroleum geology at Utah State University. He began writing short stories during lunch breaks as a geologist in Jackson, Mississippi. His fiction has received O. Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His stories, articles and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other national and international publications.
Traveling Feast was penned at a turning point for Bass, a chapter in life which will resonate with many: he’s in his mid-fifties, an empty-nester, and his long marriage has come to an end. He decides to set out to prepare a meal for the authors who have mentored or shaped his writing and his life. In the spirit of paying it forward, Bass brings young writers along with him on this journey – and it is indeed a journey – so that they too might have a chance to experience and learn from his own mentors as well as lend a hand in the kitchen.
Bass pulls his readers up to the table with some of the finest authors to put pen to paper; among them, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Peter Matthiessen, and John Berger, and, like the young mentors he has brought along with him, we all benefit from the experience; a priceless seat at the table.
Part of Traveling Feast’s magic is the vulnerability that Bass embraces throughout this undertaking of showing appreciation through food, where anything and everything could have gone wrong. Throughout the book, Bass and his traveling companions/fellow chefs managed a blend of admiration, appreciation, and maybe an unspoken fear that the kitchen just might go up in flames.
“We were fearless, or rather, our ambition was larger than our fear,” says Bass. “We kept thinking we would nail it. And sometimes we did. But even when we didn’t, the objects of our affection understood we were trying our best. And only one was a thing really bad – inedible. Well, twice. Yea, the turkey. I forgot about that.”
That fearlessness was evident in the conversations – the inquiries – that took place around the table. It was John Berger who offered one-word wise counsel to Bass’s question of what one must have at this chapter in life: “Courage.”
“It was good so good to hear John say that – one needs courage to write well at any stage – to reach deeper, to not be satisfied, to be one’s harshest own judge, to know that even when one is doing one’s best, one might be able to reach a bit deeper yet,” Bass says in an email interview. “Anyway, I always thought of middle age and old age as being over the hump. I had been denying the idea that it takes courage to go into old age, to give up things. How could I have not seen or known that?”
The event, sponsored by NKU’s Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement and the Friends of Steely Library, is free and open to the public. It takes place from 12 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Reservations are requested at An Hour with Rick Bass.