Black Mountain Institute celebrates 10 years of literary discussion

You could evaluate the first decade of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute in terms of speakers who spoke, fellows who wrote and literary journals published.

But here’s another, even more relevant if trickier to quantify, metric to use: The number of ideas — about writing, literature, life, love, jazz music and even mixed martial arts — that the Black Mountain Institute gave to Southern Nevadans to ponder.

On Monday, the Black Mountain Institute celebrates its 10th anniversary with “The Writer in the World: Celebrating 10 Years of the Black Mountain Institute,” a free program in the Student Union Ballroom at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Writers who are scheduled to participate include Wole Soyinka, Cheryl Strayed, Charles Bock, Tom Bissell, Vu Tran and Olivia Clare. For more information and to register, visit the institute’s website (blackmountaininstitute.org, which also will stream the event live).

Joshua Wolf Shenk, the institute’s executive director, says the writers will reflect on these questions: “How does the writer engage the world around us, and how do we think about our work in relation to a duty or an opportunity to affect or reflect public understanding?”

The writers’ answers will be presented in whatever form they wish — an essay, a story, traditional speech, a poem — and in the form of original pieces commissioned by the institute, Shenk says. “I’m going to be curious to see what the writers say as much as anybody.”

Throughout its first decade, the Black Mountain Institute’s mission has been to explore the world of literature and ideas via panel discussions, workshops and other programs open to the public. It also has hosted authors via fellowships, published a literary journal and created other forums to encourage the exploration and exchange of ideas.

One of its longest-running programs has been the City of Asylum, which welcomes writers “who are imperiled in the world and being censored or threatened or had a legitimate fear for their lives,” Shenk says, “bringing them to Las Vegas and offering them refuge.”

Carol C. Harter, former UNLV president and founding executive director of the Black Mountain Institute, recalls that some thought creating an institute to celebrate writers and writing in Las Vegas was an iffy prospect. But, she says, “I really thought we had a perfect niche here that you wouldn’t have in some other cities … where you’d have much more competition.”

More importantly, Harter says, “I think there were a lot of people in Las Vegas who had a real desire to be engaged in intellectual debate and discussion.”

Over the years, Black Mountain Institute certainly has hosted writers with whom the average reader might not be familiar. But in its quest to showcase ideas, it also has mounted programs that turned out to be popular among a broad swath of Southern Nevadans.

A program about whether Jesus was married, for instance, and “we’ve had jazz programs and how poetry and jazz interweave, and we’ve had wonderful audiences,” Harter says. “We had an Irish program with literature and photography and music, and there was a packed house. People were on their feet, dancing.”

Shenk says that, from the start, “we wanted to reach out to people who are not necessarily academics, but who had a real thirst for intellectual debate and discussion on subjects of broad appeal.”

Meanwhile, some of the writers who have been associated with Black Mountain Institute “have become really well-known,” Harter says, including “Walter Kirn, Harriet Washington and Tom Bissell, just to name a few.”

Shenk became executive director of the Black Mountain Institute in August 2015. It’s one of his goals to increase interaction between institute fellows and visiting authors and the community. He senses that members of the community do know Black Mountain Institute and have an appreciation for it, even if they don’t necessarily hold “a deep understanding what we do.”

They do know about “the first, essential piece, which is that we are doing something for Las Vegas no one else is doing,” he says. “They recognize that alongside The Smith Center and KNPR and a handful of institutions, that we’re providing an outlet for people to plug into and connect with the electrical system of national and international culture.”

They also recognize that the Black Mountain Institute exists primarily for the local community, Shenk says.

“We’re not turning any tourists away, but we are not creating a spectacle for the amusement of our guests,” he says. “We are about surveying, educating, drawing into conversation with our core community.”

The Black Mountain Institute is “an outward-facing project,” Shenk says “Our core community is the writers and readers of Las Vegas. And some of them are coming to work in our building every day and some of them are across town, and we’re building outward from that core community, reaching out to people and anyone who has an interest in the life of the mind.”

Read more from John Przybys at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com and follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.