Writers make interesting celebrities. On one hand, they love people: their characters, who the writer knows so intimately and so well. On the other, all that time, sometimes years, an author spends with those characters takes place in the mind, alone in a room. Authors aren't necessarily people people, and often aren't. Some of the most famous and acclaimed authors, Salinger, McCarthy, DeLillo, are completely reclusive, refusing any interaction with their readers, from book tours to simple interviews.
Last weekend, I got to go to the Decatur Book Festival with a few of the other Avid Bookshop booksellers. The AJC (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Book Festival has been going strong since 2006, and is now one of the biggest independent book festivals in the country. It takes place over three days, Friday through Sunday, and this year's festival, the 8th, featured over 500 authors and brought over 85,000 readers to downtown Decatur. My friends and I got to meet and listen to authors talk about their work specifically, and more generally, what it means to be a writer these days. These authors aren't the ones sitting alone in a room thinking only of plot and characters. They are thinking about the person who's going to be reading what they are writing, and what their words will mean to them.
During the day we saw panels with Newberry and Caldecott Honor winners, a discussion about writing between twin brothers and authors Lev and Austin Grossman, a panel about self discovery in fiction with Jill McCorkle and Jennifer Haigh, and a fascinating talk about writing intimacy and memoir with Beth Kephart and Stacey D'Erasmo, whose novel A Seahorse Year I now can't wait to read. It wasn't only a pleasure to discover new writers and novels, but to discover that those writers think about us readers, and care about us much more than I realized.
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Saturday night we had the "opportunity" to volunteer for the festival at their VIP Party. I was assigned to work at the wine table, and even though I don't know anything about wine (please don't ask me which is drier, I have no idea). I got to serve some of the authors I'd seen earlier in the day, and when he came up to the bar asking for a glass of white, I got to meet David Levithan, one of my favorite Young Adult authors who I would miss seeing the next morning. Getting to talk with him was fantastic. Not only is he a great writer (his new book Two Boys Kissing is amazing), but he's also just fun to talk to. He treated me like we'd been friends for a long time, and while we were talking, I realized that writers are people too, they're just like everyone else, only they are usually better writers.
--Tyler
