Between Produce and Poetry: The Unexpected Art of Meeting Authors at the Grocery Store
Consider the fluorescent light. The way it flattens everything beneath it—the stacked cans, the refrigerated displays, the tired faces of evening shoppers. Now imagine this same light falling on the pages of a book, on the hands of its author, on the small gathering of curious onlookers paused between their errands. The grocery store—that most utilitarian of American spaces—becomes, for a moment, something else entirely. Something unexpected.
The National Authors in Grocery Stores Program, now expanding to Western states, occupies this precise intersection of the mundane and the meaningful. It places literature where we least expect it, creating moments of cultural encounter in aisles typically reserved for the most practical of human activities. There is something quietly revolutionary about this juxtaposition—about finding art in the spaces we've designated for commerce, for necessity, for routine.
What happens when we encounter literature not in the sanctified quiet of a bookstore or library, but between selecting produce and remembering what brand of cereal the children prefer? What new readers might discover themselves in this context? What conversations might begin?
The Unexpected Canvas
The grocery store represents perhaps the most democratic of American spaces—nearly everyone, regardless of class, education, or cultural background, must eventually pass through its doors. Unlike museums, concert halls, or even bookstores, the grocery store makes no implicit claims about who belongs there. It demands no cultural capital to enter, no prior knowledge to navigate. In this sense, it offers something precious: a truly level playing field for cultural encounter.
When the National Authors in Grocery Stores Program brings writers into this space, it disrupts our expectations about where art happens and who it's for. The program, now expanding throughout Western states, places literature directly in the path of people who might never step into a bookstore or attend a reading. It removes the intimidation factor that sometimes surrounds literary events and replaces it with the comfortable familiarity of everyday shopping.
There's a particular quality to attention in a grocery store—distracted, practical, focused on completion rather than contemplation. Yet this very quality creates opportunities for surprise, for the unexpected pleasure of discovery. A shopper turns a corner seeking pasta sauce and encounters instead a novelist discussing their craft. The unexpectedness of this encounter might open doors that more formal literary settings inadvertently close.
The grocery store setting also transforms the nature of the interaction between author and reader. Gone is the formality of the podium, the separation of speaker and audience. Instead, conversations happen at eye level, often one-on-one, in the shared space of daily life. The author becomes not a distant figure but a neighbor, someone who also needs milk and bread, who also navigates the mundane world of shopping lists and weekly budgets.
Literature Beyond Boundaries
The texture of daily life in Western Colorado—its particular rhythms and concerns—provides rich context for this literary experiment. Here, where communities are often spread across vast distances, where cultural institutions may be fewer and farther between than in urban centers, the grocery store takes on additional significance as a gathering place, a hub of community life. The National Authors in Grocery Stores Program recognizes and builds upon this reality.
There's something particularly fitting about this program's expansion to Western states, where landscape has always shaped both literature and daily life. The West has long inspired writing that grapples with space, distance, resource, and community—themes that resonate differently when discussed beside displays of local produce or regional specialties. The grocery store itself becomes a text to be read alongside the author's work, each informing and enriching the other.
This program joins other innovative approaches to artistic engagement throughout the region. While Glacier National Park selects artists for its Artist-in-Residence program—offering "four weeks of focused time to creatively explore the natural and cultural resources of this inspiring landscape"—the grocery store program inverts this model. Rather than sending artists into nature, it brings them into the commercial spaces where people gather, creating unexpected moments of reflection within the flow of everyday life.
The timing feels significant as well. As Glacier National Park notes regarding its own Artist-in-Residence program: "We deeply value the history and impact of the Artist-in-Residence (AiR) program. However, the future of this program in Glacier is uncertain." In this context of institutional uncertainty, grassroots programs that bring art directly to people take on additional importance. They create resilient networks of cultural engagement that can persist even as more traditional programs face challenges.
The Politics of Presence
There is an implicit politics to this placement of authors in grocery stores—a statement about who deserves access to literature and where cultural exchange belongs. By bringing authors out of bookstores and libraries and into spaces of everyday commerce, the program challenges assumptions about the proper place of art in American life. It suggests that literature belongs not just in dedicated cultural spaces but in the midst of ordinary experience.
This democratization of access matters particularly in regions where bookstores may be scarce, where libraries may have limited hours or collections, where the infrastructure of literary culture may be thinner on the ground. The grocery store becomes not just a convenience but a necessity—a way of ensuring that literature remains accessible to all, not just to those with the privilege of proximity to cultural institutions.
The program also challenges our assumptions about attention. In an era when we're constantly told that attention spans are shrinking, that deep engagement with text is endangered, the grocery store setting offers a different perspective. It suggests that meaningful encounters with literature can happen in fragments, in moments stolen from other tasks, in the interstitial spaces of busy lives. It honors the reality that for many people—particularly working parents, the elderly, those without reliable transportation—formal literary events may be inaccessible not because of lack of interest but because of practical constraints.
Look closer at what happens in these encounters. A child trailing behind a parent's shopping cart stops, curious about the small gathering, the displayed books. An elderly shopper pauses, perhaps reminded of books they've loved, perhaps discovering a new author for the first time. A teenager, dragged along on family errands, finds unexpected connection with a writer whose work speaks to their experience. These moments may be brief, but they create openings, possibilities, connections that might otherwise never form.
The Future of Cultural Encounter
As the National Authors in Grocery Stores Program expands throughout Western states, it joins a broader ecosystem of innovative approaches to cultural engagement in the region. The Sherbino in Colorado launches its "Writers Room: Sketch Comedy" program. The National Western Stock Show prepares its Kick-Off Parade featuring "more than 30 longhorns, along with horses, cowboys, cowgirls, tractors, marching bands and floats." Glacier National Park continues its Artist-in-Residence program for now, selecting artists for 2024 and 2025 despite uncertainty about the program's future.
Each of these initiatives, in its own way, grapples with questions of access, tradition, and innovation in cultural programming. Each seeks to meet people where they are—whether that's at a comedy workshop, a parade route, a national park, or the cereal aisle. Together, they suggest a region actively reimagining the relationship between art and everyday life, between cultural production and community engagement.
The grocery store program offers particular promise in this landscape. Its low overhead and flexible format make it adaptable to communities of various sizes and resources. Its placement in essential businesses ensures accessibility. Its unexpected nature creates opportunities for genuine surprise and discovery. As traditional cultural institutions face increasing financial pressures and uncertain futures, this model of bringing art directly to people in the spaces they already inhabit may prove not just innovative but necessary.
There's a word in Portuguese—saudade—for the presence of absence, for the way something not there can still be felt. Perhaps there's something similar happening in these grocery store encounters: the presence of literature in a space not designed for it creates a productive tension, a heightened awareness of both the literature and the space itself. We see the grocery store differently because an author is there; we see the author differently because they're in a grocery store. This mutual transformation—this making strange of the familiar—is where art so often begins.
Consider the hands that will open these books, purchased between errands, read in stolen moments. Consider the conversations that will start in checkout lines, continue in parking lots, resonate in homes. Consider the child who might, decades later, remember the day they met an author next to the breakfast cereals, the way it made literature feel possible, accessible, alive. History rhymes here, in the unexpected meeting of commerce and culture, in the small revolutions that happen when art appears where we least expect it.