📚 Literary Liberation: Greg McNamee Celebrates Tucson's Booming Book Festival
130,000 readers prove print isn't dead in the digital desert
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
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Tucson has an interesting problem with its airport ✈️ - even though it just had its busiest day in 17 years 📈, many local people still drive to Phoenix 🚗 to catch flights. This hurts Tucson's chances of getting more direct flights to different cities 🌍. Meanwhile, the Tucson Festival of Books has become huge - the third largest in America! 📚📖 People from all over come to meet authors 🖊️ and buy books, showing that even in our digital world, physical books are still important. A travel expert also shared some cool places to visit in Arizona 🏜️ that most tourists don't know about, like parts of the original Route 66 where you might see giant California condors flying overhead 🦅.
🗝️ Takeaways
✈️ Tucson International Airport experienced its busiest day in 17 years with over 9,000 passengers, showing the potential for local air travel growth
💸 40% of Tucson-based travelers choose Phoenix's airport over TUS, creating a vicious cycle that limits direct flight options for everyone
📉 Southwest Airlines is abandoning its signature "bags fly free" policy by May's end, succumbing to market pressures and activist investor demands
📚 The Tucson Festival of Books has grown to become the third-largest book festival in the United States with 335 authors and 130,000 expected attendees
📖 Younger readers are rediscovering physical books, part of a broader return to "old media" including vinyl records and cassettes
🚗 The longest surviving section of original Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman offers a glimpse of California condors and authentic Western landscapes
Flying Local & Literary Liberation: How Tucson's Airport Dreams and Book Festival Boom Reflect Our Community Values
In the sweltering embrace of the Sonoran Desert, where corporate America's tentacles rarely extend without the promise of tourist dollars, Bill Buckmaster's radio program stands as a defiant oasis of genuine community discourse.
The March 13, 2025, broadcast peeled back the layers of Tucson's transportation infrastructure and cultural landscape, revealing the hidden costs of convenience and the unexpected blossoming of literary passion in our digital age.
Sky High Struggles: The Colonial Economics of Airport "Leakage"
Brian Kitt, Deputy Chief of Strategic Marketing and Air Service Development at Tucson International Airport (TUS), arrived with news that should have had Tucsonans cheering from their adobe rooftops. The airport recently experienced its busiest day in 17 years, with over 9,000 sun-seeking students and spring breakers flooding the terminals.
"It seems like the whole campus of the University of Arizona decided to fly out of TUS," Kitt remarked with palpable pride, "which is what we've been working on for all year."
But beneath this momentary triumph lurks a persistent colonial economic relationship that has Tucson playing second fiddle to its northern neighbor. The phenomenon known innocently as "leakage" – where approximately 40% of Tucson-based travelers abandon their local airport for Phoenix Sky Harbor – represents nothing less than an extraction of resources from our community.
Because nothing says "supporting local" quite like driving two hours north to hand your travel dollars to Phoenix, right?
"We have to just keep explaining why it's important to fly out of Tucson because flying out of Phoenix will not get us any more service," Kitt emphasized, his frustration evident. "The airline can see that you're based in Tucson, but they really don't care. They see that you chose to fly out of Phoenix, and they're perfectly happy to serve you out of Phoenix if you are, but it doesn't do our local market any good."
This self-defeating cycle has become so normalized that many Tucsonans don't question the two-hour pilgrimage to Phoenix, even as they lament the lack of direct flights from their hometown. Such is the insidious nature of capitalist conditioning – convincing consumers that individual "savings" trump community investment while the collective costs remain invisible on our balance sheets.
Who needs direct flights when you can enjoy the scenic Interstate 10 parking lot experience twice in one trip?
The discussion ventured into Southwest Airlines territory, where Kitt revealed how market pressures have forced the once-maverick carrier to abandon its signature "bags fly free" policy. After decades of operating exclusively through its own website, Southwest recently began listing flights on online travel agencies, only to discover their bundled pricing made them appear less competitive.
"What happened was they opened up to all the online travel agencies with their bundled product, which includes bags. And they found out that they were not being listed as the cheapest fare because people search by fare," Kitt explained. "Southwest is not the cheapest. They always, in most cases, built the bags into their price, and that worked as long as people were loyal and just looked at Southwest.com."
The capitulation to activist investor pressure and the race-to-the-bottom pricing model reveal how even the most distinctive brands eventually succumb to the homogenizing forces of late-stage capitalism. By May's end, Southwest's heart logo will beat hollow as its identity melts into the indistinguishable corporate airline blob.
Pour one out for the airline that once dared to have a personality beyond "we also hate you."
Literary Liberation: Tucson's Book Festival Defies Digital Dominance
As if to counterbalance the dispiriting airport economics, the conversation shifted to a rare example of cultural flourishing in our Amazon-dominated landscape. Writer and editor Greg McNamee joined Buckmaster to preview the Tucson Festival of Books, now the third-largest literary gathering in the United States, with an expected attendance of 130,000 visitors.
"When I moved to Tucson, this is my 50th year in Tucson, I worked in a bookstore," McNamee reminisced, highlighting how Tucson has always been a "hugely bookish town" despite the dominance of online sales.
The festival has become a beacon for literary figures across the nation, featuring approximately 335 authors, including Edward Burns, Marcia Clark, Billy Collins, Anne Hillerman, Sebastian Junger, and Mexican crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, whose latest work explores the revolutionary legacy of Pancho Villa – a figure whose complexity has been flattened by both American and Mexican nationalist narratives.
Nothing says "cultural resistance" quite like 130,000 people gathering around actual books in the age of TikTok attention spans.
Perhaps most heartening was McNamee's observation about younger readers reclaiming printed books after a digital detour. "Now the younger people, let's say 40 and younger, they've rediscovered old media, so LP records and cassettes. And now books," he noted. "I go to bars and at coffee houses and things like that. And young folks are reading, sitting, and reading books. And it just does nothing but make me very happy."
This renaissance of the physical book represents a small but significant resistance to the screen-mediated experience that corporate interests have so aggressively pushed. The tactile connection to ideas, the absence of surveillance capitalism's tracking, and the community of shared reading experiences – represent tiny revolutions in how we consume culture.
Arizona's Hidden Narratives: Beyond the Colonial Gaze
The show concluded with McNamee discussing his contribution to the new edition of Frommer's "Arizona and the Grand Canyon" travel guide, where he attempts to direct tourists beyond the well-trodden paths and commercialized experiences.
He highlighted the most extended surviving section of original Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman, where visitors might glimpse California condors – those magnificent living dinosaurs who nearly vanished from our skies due to DDT poisoning and habitat destruction, now making a fragile comeback through intensive conservation efforts.
McNamee's recommendations subtly challenge the colonial tourist gaze that has long defined Arizona travel – the quest for sanitized "authentic" experiences and Instagram-friendly vistas. Instead, he points travelers toward Flagstaff's evolving food landscape and Yuma's complex historical narratives at sites like the territorial prison, inviting a deeper engagement with the land and its layered histories.
Because Arizona is more than just the Grand Canyon and golf courses surrounded by wasteful water usage in the middle of a climate crisis, folks.
The Invisible Connections
These seemingly disparate topics—airport economics and literary festivals—share invisible threads that bind our community's present to its possible futures. Both stories reveal how individual choices, multiplied across a population, create vicious or virtuous cycles that determine what kind of community we become.
When we drive to Phoenix to save $50 on a flight, we unknowingly vote against our own city's transportation infrastructure. When we attend a book festival instead of streaming another forgettable series, we cast a small but meaningful ballot for literature's continued relevance in our cultural conversation.
These choices matter particularly in places like Tucson, where the gravitational pull of larger economic centers constantly threatens to strip smaller communities of their resources, talent, and distinctive character. Each flight booked from TUS rather than PHX represents a tiny act of resistance against the centralizing forces that would reduce Tucson to a satellite of Phoenix, just as each physical book purchased locally helps sustain our independent bookstores against Amazon's monopolistic ambitions.
The Tucson Festival of Books stands as robust evidence that communities can create cultural institutions that rival those of much larger cities. At the same time, our struggling airport reminds us that this promise remains fragile and contingent on our collective choices.
Building the Tucson We Want
The path toward a more vibrant, connected Tucson isn't complicated, but it does require conscious effort. Fly from TUS whenever possible, even if it means paying a modest premium. Attend community events like the Festival of Books. Purchase from local businesses rather than defaulting to corporate chains or online giants.
These aren't just feel-good gestures—they're investments in the kind of community we want to inhabit. They're recognition that "convenience" and "lowest price" are often Trojan horses concealing the longer-term costs of disinvesting in our local infrastructure and culture.
The story of our city is written daily through thousands of small decisions. Will we author a narrative of a distinctive desert community with a thriving culture and strong connections to the wider world? Or will we surrender to the homogenizing forces that would render Tucson indistinguishable from any other sun-belt sprawl?
The choice, as they say, is ours. And it starts with simple questions: Where will you book your next flight? Which local author will you discover this weekend? How will your individual choices help write our collective story?
Share your thoughts in the comments below: Do you think Tucson's airport can ever compete with Phoenix without massive public investment? And have you rediscovered the joy of physical books, or are you firmly in the e-reader camp?
Quotes:
"We have to just keep explaining why it's important to fly out of Tucson because flying out of Phoenix will not get us anymore service. The airline can see that you're based in Tucson, but they really don't care." - Brian Kitt on how airlines view Tucson's "leakage" problem
"If you bumped all of our numbers up by 30%, suddenly we have a lot of business cases that make very good sense." - Brian Kitt on what would happen if half the people currently flying from Phoenix chose TUS instead
"The activist investor who came in and rattled the cages and bought some stock and forced changes in the board was on that path and he got what he wanted. And as soon as the stock price pops up more, and he'll be out of there and all the damage will have been done to the brand." - Brian Kitt on Southwest Airlines' changing business model
"Young folks are reading, sitting and reading books. And it just does nothing but make me very happy." - Greg McNamee on younger generations rediscovering physical books
"It's the longest surviving section in Arizona. Original 66." - Greg McNamee describing the historic Route 66 segment between Seligman and Kingman
People Mentioned:
Bill Buckmaster - Host of the Buckmaster Show, radio personality with 37 years in Tucson radio and TV who described himself as someone who "did not get off the bus yesterday"
Brian Kitt - Deputy Chief of Strategic Marketing and Air Service Development at Tucson International Airport who revealed: "We were the largest unserved market in the country by a ULCC, meaning an ultra-low cost carrier, which Frontier is one"
Greg McNamee - Writer, journalist, editor, photographer and publisher who has written or edited 45 books and observed: "Tucson is a hugely bookish town. I wish we had more walk-in bookstores"
Edward Burns - Actor and writer appearing at the Tucson Festival of Books, described by McNamee as "one of those kind of New York Irish guys who's been in a zillion films you'd know his face, but maybe not his name"
Luis Urrea - Author and founding member of the Tucson Festival of Books who will appear on a panel with Edward Burns
Marcia Clark - Former prosecutor in the OJ Simpson trial, now an author with a new book about a 1953 trial
Jeffrey Toobin - Legal analyst who covered the OJ Simpson trial for the New Yorker, appearing at the festival
Billy Collins - Former poet laureate of the United States, described by McNamee as "perhaps the most widely known poet of a kind of a Robert Frost popular level in the United States today"
Anne Hillerman - Author continuing her father Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee novels, which have been adapted into the "Dark Winds" series on AMC
Tony Hillerman - Late author of the Leaphorn and Chee novels, described by Buckmaster as "a kind and gentle man" whom he had interviewed several times
Sebastian Junger - Author of "The Perfect Storm" appearing at the festival with a new book about his near-death experience
Paco Ignacio Taibo II - Mexican writer described by McNamee as "probably the foremost crime writer in the entire Spanish language today" who has a new book about Pancho Villa
Hampton Sides - Author appearing at the festival, mentioned by Buckmaster as "one of my favorite writers"
