Iowa City Book Festival Draws Big Crowd

The south patio of the University of Iowa Main Library was filled with book lovers young and old Saturday, despite a rainy morning that turned hot and muggy in a hurry.

Iowa City Book Festival goers were able to choose from a variety of activities inside and out.Topics of presentations from authors and speakers ranged from writing tips to civil war diaries, mystery novels, and science fiction.

In her presentation, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Berg, who wrote "Once Upon a Time, There Was You," explored the nuances of being a full-time writer. Her visit included answering questions from a packed house at the Shambaugh Auditorium in the UI library.

"When people ask about how I write or how anybody writes for that matter, I always get a little nervous because I think it's like asking how you fall in love," she said. "It's so deeply personal, and so highly individualized.

"It's so important that you honor your own way and your own instinct."

"I think it's fine to listen to other people's ideas or stories but in the end you have to follow your own way," she said.

Outside, The Wild Helpers, a kids' group from Iowa City and Grinnell, helped themselves to snow cones in between manning their booth, which spread the word about their book drive for the Reach Out and Read program.

Iowa Citian Susannah Middaugh was one of the hundreds who braved the hot weather to peruse the books and information provided in the more than 30 booths outside, like The Haunted Bookshop of Iowa City. Middaugh also caught presentations inside, including a "short story" and "importance of place" workshop.

Out-of-town visitors included Catherine Snow, who picked up an Iowa City Book Festival T-shirt from a booth that contained local printers "T shirt Booyah."

Snow also saw Author Bonnie Jo Campbell, who wrote "Once Upon a River," a novel about domestic struggles in the Midwest.

"When I found out the family reunion was happening the weekend of the festival, it was a must-do," Snow said. "Of course choosing a few of the events to go to was the most difficult part."

Like many of the speakers, Campbell was also onhand signing her book -- her latest novel.

"It was a great crowd in there and it's all different ages, which makes it extra fun - people had good questions," she said. "Talking with Heather Gudenkauf was fabulous because, she and I, in some ways we are doing the same thing, we're writing about troubled families, but we have really different ways of going about it. So we're working toward the same goal, but our process was really different. so that was really fun."

Novel Iowa City, an experimental novel project that will continue until Sunday at 5 p.m., is another part of the festival. Anyone can contribute lines to the book and help with the writing process using the #icbn hash tag on Twitter.

Parts of the Twitter novel were printed on pages and handed out at the festival as well, with UI Curator Gary Frost placing the text.

"It's a novel written on Twitter, and they just took a few Tweets and that's just part of what they are printing here. It's a keepsake," said Sara Sauers, who teaches printing at the University of Iowa Center for the Book.

"Some of it is hand set, letter by letter," she said. "It's much slower than Tweeting. I think the (Iowa City Book) Festival had the idea to bring letter presses to the Twitter Age."

The festival continues into Sunday.