As a boy growing up on his family’s farm in upstate Illinois, Bruce Dinges loved going shopping with his mom.
Well, not shopping, exactly.
“My mom would go into town to get groceries every Saturday,” he recalls, “and every Saturday she would drop me off at the old Carnegie library in Mendota. I’d head downstairs to the children’s section and stay there until she was done and ready to head home. I still remember the librarian, Mrs. Heiman. More than anything, I remember the books. I just loved being surrounded by all those books.”
For the record, he still does, which may explain why Dinges has been an integral part of Tucson’s literary community for more than 45 years.
The former editor of the Journal of Arizona History, Dinges still reads more than 100 books a year. The contact list in his cell phone looks like a Who’s Who of Southwestern literature, and his role in local letters could again be seen at last month’s Tucson Festival of Books.
People are also reading…
Dinges curated and then moderated a remembrance of former Tucson author Larry McMurtry, a session that featured biographer Tracy Daugherty and McMurtry’s longtime friend, Diana Ossana.
Dinges knew McMurtry – “I ran into him on the street one time in Archer City, Texas” – and still knows both Daugherty and Ossana.
Such connections are hardly coincidence.
Since moving to Tucson in 1978, Dinges has befriended most of the top authors who’ve lived here, from Barbara Kingsolver and Chuck Bowden to J.A. Jance and Luis Urrea.
“I just like good writing and good writers,” Dinges said, simply, and even now – at age 76 – he is a regular at bookstores and book events across Pima County.
Dinges’ credits read like an author, bookseller or librarian, but in truth he is a historian.
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved history,” he confessed. “Even at that library in Mendota I would read every biography I could get my hands on. I decided pretty early-on that’s what I wanted to do, study history.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree at Northern Illinois University, Dinges decided to pursue his graduate degrees at Rice University in Houston … arriving shortly after McMurtry had left the faculty.
At Rice he studied under Frank Vandiver, a well-known historian who believed the best works of history were not so much academic as conversational.
“He believed in storytelling,” Dinges said. “He wanted us to find good stories and tell them in a way that people would remember.”
So when he arrived in Tucson to serve as the assistant editor of the University of Arizona’s quarterly journal, Arizona in the West, Dinges began looking for good stories.
“As it turned out, that was the perfect job for me and Tucson was the perfect place,” Dinges said. “From the minute I stepped foot in Tucson, I knew it was a book town. There were so many great authors living here. There were so many bookstores. I was looking for good stories, and there were good stories everywhere I looked.”
That quest continued when Dinges became the editor of the Arizona Historical Society’s Journal of Arizona History in 1985.
Dinges remembers meeting Kingsolver at a book-signing he attended at WaldenBooks in Tucson Mall.
“She had just published ‘The Bean Trees,’ and there were three people there … two older women and me. I still have the book she signed.”
He remembers reading “Hour of the Hunter“ by Bisbee’s J.A. Jance. “I thought it was really something,” he recalls. “She wasn’t real well-known then, but I kinda thought she would be.”
Dinges would visit Booked Up on North Stone Avenue to chat with the bookshop’s owner, McMurtry.
“There was a time you could keep busy just reading Tucson authors,” Dinges recalled. “Kingsolver, McMurtry, Andrew Greeley, Chuck Bowden – Tucson wasn’t that big a place, but there were all those great writers here.”
One of them, it turned out, was Dinges. During his 32-year tenure at the Arizona Historical Society, Dinges produced 128 quarterly journals and more than 500 articles. He also edited and published some two dozen books, among them “Arizona 100: A Centennial Gathering of Essential Books on the Grand Canyon State.”
Dinges retired from the historical society in 2017, but he continues to recruit authors for the Tucson Festival of Books — a role he has played since its inception.
As a reader, he is delighted the festival has continued to bring so many bestselling authors to Tucson. As a historian, Dinges looks at the festival through a wider lens.
“I think future historians will look at the festival as a sterling example of reading as a communal experience,” he said. “It’s a space where a diverse group of people are united by their shared joy of the written word. Especially now, as divisive as things seem to be, that’s really worth celebrating.”
FOOTNOTES
Dinges’ favorite book about Tucson? “Yes Is Better Than No“ by Byrd Baylor. “I don’t know if you could write that book today, but I still love it. And you can never go wrong with ‘Going Back to Bisbee‘ by Richard Shelton.”
Last month’s Tucson Festival of Books attracted crowds totaling 130,000 people, festival officials reported. The event record is 135,000, set in 2019.
The bestselling book this year was “Zilot,” a picture book by Bob and Erin Odenkirk. Five of the 10 bestsellers were books written for children. The No. 1 adult book was “Three-Inch Teeth“ by C.J. Box.
Tucson will not soon forget Syrena Arevalo-Trujillo, the owner of Barrio Books. After battling serious health issues for much of her life, Arevalo-Trujillo died April 1 at the age of 33.
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