IU Indianapolis festival celebrates Ray Bradbury, stokes imagination

Ray Bradbury (Alan Light photo)

The Ray Bradbury Center at Indiana University Indianapolis celebrates the late author as a space-age visionary who championed public libraries, defended First Amendment rights and promoted literacy.

Bradbury’s appreciation of reading heavily influences the annual Festival 451 Indy presented by the center, according to the archives’ director, Jason Aukerman.

“Literacy is our best technology,” Aukerman said. “If you pick up a book, you’re not just dealing with an inanimate object. You are interacting with some of the brightest, most creative minds who ever lived. To burn a book is to burn the author, in Bradbury’s mind.”

The name of the festival, which begins Saturday and runs until Oct. 5, is inspired by Bradbury’s best-known work, “Fahrenheit 451.” The novel published in 1953 depicts a dystopian society in which books are outlawed and burned by “firemen.”

In 1993, Bradbury told The Seattle Times, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Multiple events scheduled for Festival 451 Indy

“Fierce Imagination” serves as the theme for the fourth edition of Festival 451 Indy, which also will mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of “The Martian Chronicles.” Bradbury compiled previously published short stories for “The Martian Chronicles,” which sold more than 3 million copies between 1950 and 1979.

The festival’s roster of events focused on reading and writing includes:

• An author talk featuring Mary Robinette Kowal, a North Carolina native known for the novels “The Spare Man,” “Ghost Talkers” and “The Glamourist Histories” series. Kowal will appear Sept. 11 at IF Theatre, 719 E. St. Clair St. For more information about the free event, visit eventbrite.com.
• A writing workshop titled “Letters from the Edge.” This free event is scheduled Sept. 6 at Indy Type Shop, 2621 Shelby St. For more information, visit eventbrite.com.
• A “Multilingual Read Aloud” featuring community members as they share stories in languages from around the world. This free event is scheduled Sept. 26 at Indy Reads, 1066 Virginia Ave. For more information, visit eventbrite.com.
• A dramatic reading of “The Halloween Tree,” a 1972 fantasy novel by Bradbury. Indianapolis-based actor Ben Asaykwee will read “The Halloween Tree” Oct. 2, 4 and 5 at the District Theatre, 627 Massachusetts Ave. Admission ranges from $28 to $48. For more information, visit indydistricttheatre.org.

Festival 451 Indy also includes a screening of 1983 film “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” an adaptation of Bradbury’s novel published in 1962. Kan-Kan Cinema, 1258 Windsor St., will show the movie on Sept. 14. Admission is $12. For more information, visit kankanindy.com.

Maintaining an archive

Aukerman said the Ray Bradbury Center has a distinctive connection to “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” thanks to the author’s daughters donating 31 filing cabinets of Bradbury’s belongings after his death in 2012.

“When you’re working in a collection that is as vast as ours, you never really know what you’re going to find,” Aukerman said. “Mr. Bradbury had a very reactive filing system, which is my polite way of saying he didn’t have a system. It’s really 150,000 pages of disordered or loosely ordered content.”

One of the gems in the collection is a VHS tape marked “Something Wicked” in Bradbury’s handwriting. Aukerman said a viewing of the tape revealed an early version of the movie featuring different scenes and music than what appeared in the final cut.

While the VHS tape was unearthed during a researcher’s mission to find items related to “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” the archives also boast prominent memorabilia such as a Daytime Emmy Award (for a 1994 animated adaptation of “The Halloween Tree”) and a jar of mysterious contents used as a prop in a 1964 episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” based on a script co-written by Bradbury.

The author grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, and had minimal connections to Indiana. (He visited Fort Wayne in 1988 for the world premiere of a musical adaptation of “Fahrenheit 451,” and he shared a Clowes Memorial Hall stage with “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams for a lecture in 2000.)

IU Indianapolis is home to the Ray Bradbury Center thanks to the efforts of two Bradbury scholars who taught at the school. Jonathan Eller and Willam Touponce, who collaborated on a 2004 book titled “Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction,” co-founded the center in 2007.

Toupounce, who died in 2017, served as the center’s director until 2011. Eller’s tenure as director spanned 2011 until his retirement in 2021.

Aukerman now oversees the center, which occupies part of the first floor of Cavanaugh Hall. Beyond the 150,000 pages of documents, the center includes a library of more than 4,000 volumes and a faithful reconstruction of Bradbury’s office where he worked in the basement of his Los Angeles home.

Aukerman and Carrie Cooper, the center’s assistant director, devote part-time hours to the archives, which have been appraised at a value of more than $7 million, Aukerman said.

The center’s day-to-day resources are limited, he noted. “We really need to hire a full-time archivist to get the collection processed,” Aukerman said.

Meanwhile, the center’s most pressing need involves basic preservation. Because of the possibility of a plumbing emergency elsewhere in the building, Aukerman said items in the Bradbury collection routinely are covered in plastic.

“We’re getting ready to move the collection to a safer part of campus, but we need to raise money for that,” he said. “In October, we’re going to start a crowdfunding campaign to hopefully get the seed money.”

The festival’s partners include Indy Reads, Kan-Kan Cinema, Indy Type Shop, IF Theatre, the District Theatre, Tomorrow Bookstore and IU Indianapolis student-run magazine Genesis.

For more information, visit festival451indy.substack.com.