Words rule during the Vegas Valley Book Festival

For anyone who’d suggest that Las Vegas isn’t a cultural sort of place, here’s an irrefutable, no-further-explanation-needed retort:

The Vegas Valley Book Festival, which kicks off its 13th edition Thursday in downtown Las Vegas and at the Clark County Library for a three-day celebration of the written, spoken and illustrated word.

Opening keynote speaker will be B.J. Novak, an actor, director, producer and screenwriter who wrote an acclaimed short story collection and, more recently, a decidedly offbeat children’s book. He will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road.

Closing keynote speaker will be Aimee Bender, whose fantastical short stories and novels take a sideways view of the real world. She will speak at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Historic Fifth Street School Auditorium, 401 S. Fourth St., in a program presented by the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute.

FINDING HIS VOICE

Novak finds Las Vegas a good place to write.

“The past couple of years, I’ve occasionally gone to Vegas during the week just to write, when hotel rooms are cheap and you can really focus during the day. There’s really nothing going on in Las Vegas on Monday or Tuesday, but I’ve found it a great place to write.”

Novak, 35, started making weekend trips to Las Vegas now and then after moving to Los Angeles at age 22.

Two stories in his debut collection, “One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories,” were written during Las Vegas writing visits. One is about an intervention that is set in Las Vegas, and the other imagines Elvis Presley faking his own death and making a living as an Elvis impersonator here.

That collection of comedic short stories earned raves from critics. A few weeks ago, Novak’s second book, a children’s book called “The Book with No Pictures,” was released, again to favorable reviews. The title describes it perfectly.

But writing books is just part of Novak’s creative activities. He also acts — roles in “Saving Mr. Banks,” “Inglourious Basterds” and “The Office” are among his credits — directs, produces and does stand-up comedy.

Is his success in such an array of disciplines the result of a plan or just happenstance?

“I really feel it’s all the same thing I do, and that what allows me to do that is there are so many things that are, technically, a little bit different from each other.”

“I sort of learned over the years that your voice is your voice,” he adds, and it all comes down to expressing his own view of the world in whatever discipline seems most suitable at the time.

But, Novak adds, “I would say that the book has been, by far, the most personally complete, in that you can directly say everything you want to say and have control of everything you want to control. There’s nothing between you and the reader.”

Given our current universe of abbreviated tweets and Facebook updates, is using words on a page to express ideas, perhaps, a quaint, even endangered, art?

Not at all, Novak answers.

“I think text is actually in much better shape than people think.”

Remember, he says, when some experts were predicting that video was the way in which we’d all eventually communicate?

“We were always going to be videochatting with each other and downloading video,” Novak says. “And the reality of it is, if someone Facetimes you on the phone, it’s almost by accident. Nobody really wants to do that. Nobody wants to listen to a voice mail. What we want is a text message. It’s a preferred communication now.

“I think text has become more central to our lives than ever before. People probably read and write more text in a given day than any other time in human history. So I think short-form writing, whether it’s poetry or comedy pieces, are likely to have a really great run in the near future.”

Novak says that, for him, a piece always begins with the idea. Then, it’s about expressing the idea in its most appropriate form, rather than trying to shoehorn it into a specific discipline. His children’s book, for example, grew out of the seemingly revolutionary idea of writing a book for kids that has no illustrations.

“I love reading to kids,” Novak says. “It’s my favorite way to connect. If I’m at the house of a friend with kids or a family gathered for Thanksgiving and kids are around, I’ll always go right to the kids and say: ‘What’s your favorite book? Can I read you a book?’ because books have always been my way of connecting.”

In reading many children’s books over the years, he thought it would be interesting to write a book in which the parent or adult who is reading it becomes, in effect, a performer playing to a one-person, child-sized audience.

“A book is a funny thing,” he says. “It occurred to me they’re handing you a script and they’re making you perform for them. It’s like they’re (big-time movie producer) Harvey Weinstein and you’re an actor for hire.”

Novak made a mock-up of the book with paper clips and glue, he says, and “my agent sent it to about 10 children’s publishers, and a few didn’t get it, but most of them did.”

Kids, it turns out, “are very curious when they see this book,” Novak adds. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be up to something.’ ”

EXPLORING THE DREAM WORLD

Variations of the word “surreal” come up often in reviews of Aimee Bender and her work. But that’s probably to be expected when an author’s books involve such things as a romantic high school encounter between an imp and a mermaid and a boyfriend who turns into a salamander (her short story collection “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt”) or a girl who can “taste” other people’s emotions (her novel “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”).

And, it turns out, Bender is OK with the word — or “fantastical” or “magical realism,” among others — being used to describe her work.

“Surreal” is “a complicated term,” Bender says, but “I guess what it means to me is … it’s really about the world of dreams, and not dreams as aspirations, but dreams as strange stories we make up every night as we sleep. I guess that’s meaningful to me.”

There are storytellers who “tell of life as we live it and other sorts of waking states,” Bender says, and others who explore “the other shadow underside, where it’s less conscious and less immediately familiar, but there’s something that we recognize in this strangeness. And that is kind of where my work comes from.”

Bender says she was interested in the more off-center face of reality even as a child. She loved reading fairy tales and mythology, and adds: “It was a hard adjustment when I hit high school and everything was realism. I thought that meant all adult life was realism.”

Bender’s mother was a choreographer and her father a psychoanalyst, which was, she says, “a potent combination, I think, for a writer.”

Even in his work, her father delved into the unconscious, “talking to people, helping them think about dreams in the service of making someone better,” she says. “With me, it’s more in the service of art.”

Why does she write what she writes?

“For the surrealism part of it, I think it’s more like something you’re born with, like hair color or eye color,” she says. “It feels so primal to me how I respond to the idea of metaphor, to see something presented in a way that’s kind of metaphorical, even if I can’t quite understand what the metaphor is.

“For example, if I’m in a museum, I’m so drawn to abstract paintings or a sculpture, and I’m not always going to go into the room of realistic photographs. I can appreciate it and value it, but I don’t feel the same way as seeing a mobile spinning.”

“I love writing,” Bender adds. “I love stories and words. I guess the main thing is kind of discovering (a story) as it goes, surprising myself, seeing what happens, discovering new characters, discovering new moments. So I think it’s just a great mystery in the process of writing, and that is kind of a wonderful thing.”

Bender’s most recent short story collection, “The Color Master,” was a 2013 New York Times Notable Book. Besides writing herself, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.

Does her teaching affect her writing, or vice versa?

“It doesn’t directly affect my writing,” she says. “It kind of keeps me honest, because then I do try to do things I’m saying. It’s a bad feeling when I’m up in front of the class and I say, ‘I’m not doing that.’

“And I like it because the connection is social, and writing is a very solitary life. So I like the combination of both. I’m not a writer who can spend eight hours a day (alone) writing. That’s not me.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.