Get lit

With literary pub crawls putting pages on informal stages from New York to San Francisco, it was only a matter of time before Reno got in on the act.

After all, “this is clearly a town that loves its crawls,” says Karen Wikander, program coordinator with Nevada Humanities, which is putting on a lit crawl of its own on July 19 as part of the 2014 Artown festival.

After last year's Artown literary scavenger hunt, which took participants several weeks to complete, Wikander and local author Mark Maynard set out to create a shorter, more social literary event that would showcase local authors and local venues.

“Mark and I, as children of the '80s, both loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books, so we decided to follow that method,” Wikander says.

The event kicks off at Sundance Books and Music at 5 p.m. for the “prologue,” where crawlers will receive a map of venues and the schedule of live readings from up to 30 local authors, who will be reading aloud from their books. From there, crawlers choose their own path—which genre and author do they want to hear from next? Fiction, nonfiction, young adult (YA) fiction and poetry will all be represented.

“We'll have different genres at each venue,” Wikander says. “If you want to just listen to poetry all night, you can do that at a variety of venues, or if you just want to stay at Sundance the whole time, you can. But we hope people really move around.”

Aside from Sundance, venues include Liberty Fine Arts Gallery, the Great Basin Community Food Co-op, Tavern 1864, Reno Public House and Craft, which will host the “epilogue” at around 9 p.m. Though the word “crawl” implies that booze will accompany books throughout the evening, the inclusion of YA authors implies that this is not a 21-and-over event; several of the venues are family-friendly.

In one of the two Liberty Fine Arts spaces dedicated to the event, local improv troupe The Utility Players will lead a literary trivia game throughout the night. And for crawlers hoping to immerse themselves in the literary world, there will be a costume contest. Dress as your favorite author or literary character. Winners will be announced during the Craft epilogue.

As of this writing, among the 25 Northern Nevada authors confirmed to read and sign books (which will be on sale at Sundance) during crawl are Christopher Coake, Patty Cafferata, Tracy Clark, Alicia Barber, Gailmarie Pahmeier, Scott Neuffer, Jared Stanley and, of course, Mark Maynard.

“We just want to see what kind of response we get,” Wikander says. “If it really takes off, we hope to expand it to more venues and more hours next year.”