Yesterday, I decided to do a day trip to Danville, Kentucky (a smidge under three hours away), where author John Green would be interviewed at the Norton Center for the Arts at Centre College. Admittedly, I had no idea there was a college or this beautiful Norton Center for the Arts. And I certainly had no idea such a well-known author like Green would go there (I also didn’t know he’s only three hours away, as a resident of Indianapolis). But what a joy learning and experiencing Danville, the birthplace of Kentucky, turned out to be! As for the reason I went, Green was delightful and resonant, and well-worth the price of admission.
I arrived in Danville at quarter to 11 a.m., with the Green show starting at 7:30 p.m. Suffice it to say, I had some time to explore! My first stop: Burke’s Bakery on Main Street for some decadent treats! Sometimes at a new place, I get flustered on what to order, so I wasn’t exactly thinking straight when I ordered two quite messy treats, a chocolate donut and some sort of white powdery cream donut. They were good, though. I also hadn’t had coffee yet, so I went ahead with their 80-cent coffee, but it didn’t have all the, uh, accoutrements I needed. Fortunately, Danville has two fancy coffee places, Dry Stack and The Hub Coffee House, nearby. Let me elaborate on “nearby.” What I quickly learned that’s great about Danville is how walkable the heart of the town is! After Burke’s Bakery, and driving as I did, I was just happy to walk about, and it was a beautiful fall day in which to do so.
At the Hub Coffee House, I nabbed a fall pumpkin latte (hot) and then kept walking. I had no destination in mind; I was just exploring and sight-seeing. I stumbled upon Centre College itself and Norton Center for the Arts, where they had a free exhibit by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Jon Cherry. His works documents various events, including COVID-19, protests and riots, storms, and politics, all with the aim of getting at, “What does it mean to be an American?” He won as part of his collaborative work on covering the January 6, 2021 attacks on the United States Capitol, so, those images are featured, too. To be an American, as Cherry alludes to and evinces in his photography, is to struggle against and perhaps accept contradictions and nuances. I thought it was a neat exhibition.
Keeping in mind that I visited Danville on a Monday, a few options were unavailable, such as the McDowell House Museum (the 1800s home of the pioneering surgeon, Dr. Ephraim McDowell) and the Wilderness Trail Distillery tour.
But the Art Center of the Bluegrass was open and also free to explore. The main exhibit is the Glass Museum featuring glass artist Stephen Rolfe Powell’s collection. Admittedly, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, I don’t find glass art all that appealing. I respect it, and am awed by it, from a technical standpoint, but it doesn’t move me in the way other art does. Still, I found it fun to walk through, especially because Powell was known for giving provocative titles to his pieces, which made me laugh. As examples: Lascivious Vertigo Sniffer; Winking Manic Tease; and Gyrating Jailhouse Pelvis. Upstairs, there was a smaller room featuring the work of Danville artist, Tony Richardson, who works with graphite and oils to make portraits. He explicitly intends his work to be “realistic, straightforward, offer no messages, and require no interpretation.” Because it was so straightforward, the work didn’t particularly appeal to me, but I am, again, impressed by the technical prowess, especially with graphite.
After that, I explored some more, including the war memorials and other historical markers, concluding with a walk through Constitution Square Historic Site (opposite of Burke’s Bakery). An open-air museum, the park tells the story of Kentucky statehood in 1792, with 1932-replicated cabins of the first courthouse, jailhouse, and so forth. Between those replicas and the beautiful fall weather with colorful leaves, it was such a picturesque jaunt through history. Also, I always find it amusing to think how “western” Kentucky used to be in those early days of our Republic. The statue at the heart of the site depicts two friends embracing, representing the Commonwealth’s motto, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”
(Side bar: As shown above, there is a super cute wooden Little Free Library in front of the Visitor’s Center, so naturally, I nabbed a history book that happened to be in there. As I continued walking through the site, someone shouted me down, and holding a professional camera, asked if they could take my photos, with the book appropriately as a prop, to practice, as their previous experience had only been with shooting guns (heh) for a gun magazine. It ended up being a very random, somewhat bizarre interaction!)
At that point in the afternoon, I was ready to put my feet up and relax, and especially hydrate. The perfect spot ended up being the absolute gem of Danville: the Boyle County Public Library. The entrance has a gorgeous rotunda, with this remarkable upside down display of balloons, followed by three floors of gorgeous architecture and art exhibits (of the American Girl doll!). I just could not get over how stunning this library was! It was a perfect opportunity to refresh and (literally) recharge with my own book I brought. Naturally, I couldn’t resist the almost-too-good-to-be-true book sale near the rotunda, where you could fill up a paper bag with as many books as you wanted from a specific cart all for $1! In other words, I came to Danville with my current book I’m reading, and left with six books, including my Little Free Library book and Green’s newest.
After a couple hours, I headed back to The Hub for my second coffee of the day, their delicious H Potter: English toffee, butter rum, and caramel. Iced, this time. It hit the freaking spot and helped energize me for the next couple of hours. And I have to add, The Hub was not only a perfect spot to continue reading, but for my second round of coffee, it’s a pleasantly affordable place. I probably spent the equivalent of what a Starbucks venti would cost me on two medium drinks from The Hub. (Also, for those who would like a bite to eat, The Hub does have a fairly extensive lunch menu.)
After The Hub closed at 5, I met my college and her husband at The Main Street Branch Pizzeria, which is inside an old bank with an actual vault you can eat inside, and of course, the pizzas are themed around this concept of banks and bank robberies. I had their loan officer, which is contains “mozzarella, ricotta, and parmesan cheeses with garlic and olive oil with an alfredo sauce.” It was delicious and exactly what I needed after really only having two donuts and two sugary drinks all day. I also enjoyed two light beers and an espresso martini (the latter of which I think was a good idea to power me back home later that night!).
Then, it was time for John Green at Norton Center. Of course, I bought his newest book in the lobby, Hollywood, Ending, which has ostensibly been billed as his first adult fiction book, albeit Green later deadpanned that the characters are 23, only six years older than his usual YA characters.
Green was interviewed by Stacey Peebles, a professor of English and director of film studies at Centre College. She notably specializes in Cormac McCarthy, which he’s obviously a very different vibe from Green’s style and work. The interview lasted for about 60-ish minutes, covering his wide array of work, both fiction and nonfiction, as well as his YouTube work with his brother, Hank, and his public health advocacy. Green was funny, self-effacing (saying he still has the same car and house after the success of The Fault in Our Stars, so nothing really fundamentally changed, although everything changed), and poignant and insightful about his writing process, the way he thinks about art and how to convey pain without being exploitative per se, and the way in which people engage with art. Green’s drive, among others, is to unpack the weirdness of being human. Of being a conscious person interacting with other conscious persons. It’s inherently weird.
There were two additional takeaways that particularly resonated with me. Green quoted Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s “The Palace” poem, “Art is where what we survive survives.” That’s been Green’s experience; his art is an expression of what he’s survived, and indeed, is a vessel by which he survives. It’s self-reinforcing in that way. The second takeaway was his brief meditation on poet and essayist Donald Hall’s essay, “The Third Thing.” Hall talks about what makes a marriage last is the power of the third thing, which is to say, experiencing art, beauty, the world together; ergo, a marriage isn’t so much looking at the other person, but that third thing together. It’s a deeply rooted kind of companionship. It goes back to Green’s point about the weirdness, and the loveliness, of being a conscious human with another conscious human. This also reinforced Green’s broader point of how profound it is to all be sitting in a movie theater together watching a movie, or indeed, all sitting together at Norton Center listening to an author. How awesome is that?
After Peebles’ questions, she turned it over to the audience to ask questions. I had been thinking of my question all night, and rehearsing it in my head, but there was no way I was going to try to project my voice from where I was sitting in order to ask it (they weren’t providing audience members with microphones). However, if I was able to ask John Green, or any author, a question, my question would have been, “One of my favorite sections of a book is the Acknowledgements because it often demonstrates just how collaborative a process bringing a book to life truly is, so, my question is, how much of your original draft survives that collaborative process and is published?” I would really just love to pick an author’s brain about how many drafts they go through, how many different people have feedback and input into it, who he has as beta readers and where along this process are they reading it, and so on.
Overall, Danville, and my night with Green, was well-worth the day trip. I look forward to coming back to Danville to experience some other things I couldn’t on account of it being a Monday, and certainly, to other artistic offerings at the Norton Center.
