We started the Brattleboro Literary Festival out of love for our local community and the wider literary community of writers, readers, literary nonprofits, and booksellers. It's that same love that has led us to make a difficult decision.
Due to the uncertain, evolving situation related to the COVID-19, and to protect everyone's health, the 19th annual Brattleboro Literary Festival slated for Oct. 17 through 20 will become a virtual, online event.
From nearly 19 years of presenting this festival, we know how much this event means: meeting the amazing authors, hearing the conversations, and coming together as a community around the joy of books and reading - the life of the mind and imagination.
While we won't gather in person this year as planned, we hope to help sustain you during this difficult year with a reimagined, exciting online festival. We believe this virtual festival has the potential to convey the same spirit of inventiveness and creativity to an even-wider book loving community.
Doing the festival outdoors wasn't an option because it is too late in the year.
It's one thing to mount an exhibit in an art museum, with people gathering to share some excitement over artwork. In our case, we gather to watch people speak, sprinkling droplets into the air in an enclosed space.
So it doesn't feel very safe, and I don't know that that festival goers would feel safe enough to want to physically come to the festival.
Even if they did, no guidance has come from the state about any kind of large gathering - we are still in the “no large gathering” mode. Fall would be the first time that the state would be able to look at that policy. Obviously, we couldn't wait until September to decide.
The schools are back in the fall, but we have a lot of older guests. Certainly, they would be at risk and if you have the combination of bringing in outside people from other states, it doesn't feel very safe.
The other thing is we have a lot of writers coming up from New York who take the train, I guess the train is still running, but six hours in a mask? I don't see a lot of writers wanting to sign up for that.
Even in October, it would be a harder sell to do anything live. Who will want to come up and stay in a hotel that can only have 50 percent of its capacity? Could we even find enough hotel rooms? Even the restaurants that are half full - to try to have that full Vermont experience in this kind of environment, I think a lot of writers would prefer to save that trip for better times.
Many literary festivals have already changed to an online format for the fall. The National Book Festival has gone online. A lot of the big book fairs are cancelled. A lot of the big festivals this spring either cancelled or went online. Some of these events are held outdoors or a combination of outdoors and indoors.
I couldn't believe the Tucson Book Festival just canceled the event. I guess they were leery about the idea of having that many people together.
The other factor is the travel because we can't really bring people here from New York City and Boston right now, where we have a lot of our invitations. We have offers extended to Chicago and North Carolina, and right now our state won't even allow those people in. And the idea of quarantining for two weeks? There's no way we can have an author come here and do so for two weeks before the festival.
I think it'll be great online. We had a pretty good author lineup already set before this hit, and we are continuing to add to it, so it'll be amazing.
And now that we'll be online, we can offer a really interesting lineup with many more international authors.