Why did the National Steinbeck Center (NSC) want to participate in the Big Read?
ABBY PFEIFFER: Well, obviously, The Grapes of Wrath swayed us in that direction. We, as an institution, had not ever taken on a one book, one community initiative, and so that gave us a chance to use the backing, not only financial, but name and logo backing of the National Endowment for the Arts, to launch this program and let it be our pilot. NEA: What was the scope of NSC’s Big Read? PFEIFFER: We had 44 events. What we ended up doing is pulling our marketing person and our grant writer onto the project, a third to half time for a couple of months. So this whole organization jumped in with both feet. LORI WOOD: One thing that made it so large was our decision to extend the campaign throughout Monterey County. Had we concentrated here in the Salinas area, we probably wouldn’t have had the same number of events, but we extended our outreach to libraries throughout the whole county, to schools, to extended areas of the county that were beyond the geography of Salinas. PFEIFFER: The prog
