BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Literary Festival is coming to town again in October, and 2011 marks its 10th anniversary.
This year, for the first time, workshops will be offered for fiction writers and poets, in conjunction with Marlboro College. These workshops will be hosted by fiction author Nicholas Delbanco and poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont.
Co-founders Suzanne Kingsbury and Sandy Rouse told The Commons about who and what to expect during this year's much-anticipated festival.
Rouse, the festival's co-chair, discussed the theme and atmosphere of the 10th anniversary event, which has a theme of “Looking Back and Looking Forward.”
“The festival last year told the story of us; this year's festival has a theme of memory running through it: how memory defines who we are and how memory shifts with time and perspective,” she said.
Janis Bellow, widow of Saul Bellow, who appeared at the first festival, will appear in conversation with author Benjamin Taylor, who edited Saul Bellow: Letters, published late last year.
Also looking back is Julia Alvarez, another former guest. Alvarez, a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, was just named the 2011 recipient of the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Looking forward, Rouse said there will be a number of young new literary lights such as Teju Cole, Anthony Doerr, Kevin Young, and Monica Youn.
Cole was named to The New Yorker's “20 under 40” list last year. His novel, Open City, is brilliant and has been critically acclaimed worldwide. Doerr's collection of stories, Memory Wall, won the 2011 Story Award. Young and Youn are both National Book Award finalists and represent the new face of poetry.
“The festival this year has a different feeling, much more international and multicultural,” Rouse said.
“I am really looking forward to meeting the Canadian authors, Monique Proulx and Kathleen Winter, representing the Blue Metropolitan International Literary Festival in Montreal,” she said.
“Also, I'm very excited to meet Tom Bodett and Roy Blount Jr.,” she added. “I am a huge fan of 'Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!' on NPR.”
Bodett, a radio personality, lives in Dummerston.
Rouse also says her personal favorite memories of the last 10 festivals are “too many to name.”
But she named some.
“People were so excited to hear John Irving and he was so great but the weather was not - [it rained] inches of rain that day.,” she said.
“Grace Paley marching up Main Street with the audience following her up to the Centre Congregational Church after a power failure at the Latchis. Seeing the Congregational Church full of spellbound people, even sitting on the floor, listening to newly named 2011-2012 U.S. Poet Laureate, Philip Levine. Watching the elementary school students so engaged as they listened to Janice Harrington and the great Ashley Bryant.”
Kingsbury, who has collaborated with Krouse and Wyn Cooper on the Literary Festival, echoed Rouse's enthusiasm over the diversity and the international aspects of the festival.
“It's amazing the range of authors we have,” she said. “The global world is coming to our small town in two weeks!”
Cooper as well has been busy preparing for the festival.
“I have invited six authors, am setting up the author dinner, helping with the author reception, fundraising, communications, troubleshooting, and have started writing workshops in both poetry and fiction, both of which are full and even have waiting lists,” Cooper said.
Cooper says he knows all the authors who are guests this year, and he is looking forward to meeting up with fiction writers Richard Bausch, Nicholas Delbanco, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, and Young.
“Richard Bausch is a writer's writer, a fiction writer whose stories and novels are so powerful it's almost humbling to read them,” Cooper said.
Bausch, he said, “writes like no one else, and is a pleasure to be around.”
Cooper said he attended a writer's conference with Bausch last year in Washington, “and at one point during the evening, he told 39 jokes in a row to an increasingly larger circle of writers that kept gathering around him.
“Richard and Nicholas (a.k.a. Dick and Nick), are reading together on Saturday, Oct. 15 at 3 p.m. I look forward to their reading the most.”
Cooper is also high on Beaumont, “a dynamic poet from New York City who is also teaching our poetry workshop.”
He described Beaumont's poems as “by turns narrative, lyric, and always magical. She can turn a toothpick into a mystical experience. I've taught and read with her before, and she's a force of nature.”
Another highlight for Cooper will be seeing Kevin Young, who he calls “one of the bright lights of contemporary American poetry.”
Young's newest book is Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, which Cooper describes as “a 200-plus page epic poem about the Africans who mutinied on the slave ship Amistad. It's a tour-de-force, an ultimately enlightening book.”
Cooper has been a principal organizer of the festival since the very beginning, but he said that this year will be his last year in that role.
“The first year, I was on my honeymoon on a boat in Italy. We stopped in Verona and I checked my email, only to discover I'd been invited to read at the festival. The email informed me that so far Saul Bellow and Galway Kinnell had agreed to participate, so I knew I was in stellar company.”
After Cooper returned to Vermont, “I asked what I could do to help, and have been volunteering ever since.”
Ruth Allard, who co-chairs the festival with Rouse, claims that “if it were possible, I would attend every single event.”
She lists her favorite guest authors as Rita-Williams Garcia, Kathleen Winter, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Lenelle Moise.
“I love watching the authors and audiences interact at festival events,” said Allard. “Readers and writers each have important roles in a print culture, but both roles are frequently solitary.
“A wonderful kind of energizing alchemy happens when the two share the same space and explore life's big questions through the characters and stories in new books.”
She said she is particularly looking forward to hearing Williams-Garcia.
“I love each of the the three young sisters in her award-winning book One Crazy Summer, and I appreciate getting to know the Black Panthers through their daily human service and social change work, because when I was growing up, I only heard about them in the context of a handful of violent episodes that rocked the national news.”
Allard is also eager to meet Winter, a Canadian author, “whose first novel Annabel sensitively deals with another topic that tends to be sensationalized - a child with mixed gender.”
She called Urrea “charming and funny, and he tells incredible stories, many of which are both unbelievable and true.”
Moise, a spoken-word poet, is another Allard favorite.
She said she saw Moise perform at Smith College, “and the people who come to her event Saturday evening are in for an electrifying experience.”
And also not to be missed, she said, is David Macaulay, author of The Way Things Work, “an extraordinary artist who is adept at explaining complex architectural and anatomical concepts to people of all ages.”