BRATTLEBORO-For more than two decades, Sandy Rouse has unflinchingly led the Brattleboro Literary Festival, the annual October event she co-founded.
Rouse still - with a troupe of volunteers and supporters - researches writers, negotiates appearances, and pays the bills. She provides the perennial glue to sustain this mainstay among the town's many arts offerings, which returns Friday through Sunday, Oct.18 to 20, at sites throughout downtown.
Known for honoring both emerging and award-winning authors, the Festival has hosted a long line of literary luminaries over the years, among them Julia Alvarez, Russell Banks, Ken Burns, Teju Cole, Anthony Doerr, Mark Doty, Julia Glass, John Irving, Tracy Kidder, Paul Krugman, Min Jin Lee, Ada Limón, Colum McCann, Claire Messud, Dinaw Mengestu, Grace Paley, Tom Perrotta, Robert Pinsky, Richard Russo, Elizabeth Strout, and Isabel Wilkerson.
The 2024 lineup promises continued depth and breadth. According to the festival's media release, audiences will have access to "40 authors, among them National Book Award winners and finalists, two 2024 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honorees, New York Times bestselling authors including an Obama 2024 summer pick, the daughter of two Hollywood legends, the daughter of a 1960s rock icon, and a Newbery award winner."
Put the Vermonters ahead
As always, though the list of authors from New York City and beyond is long, Vermont authors are well represented in a range of categories.
Green Writers Press (GWP) founder Dede Cummings notes that Rouse "always invited the local writers' group, Write Action, to be part of the festival, and she graciously extended an invitation for my local publishing company, founded in 2014, to be featured annually."
The local book publishing company will host its 2024 event at 118 Elliot on Oct. 19 from 4 to 5 p.m., when authors from throughout the state will read from several of the Brattleboro imprint's recent publications.
Authors include poets Julia C. Alter, Ray Clark, and former poet laureate of Vermont Chard deNiord; writer/editor Jackson Ellis, novelist Brad Fawley, and Eve O. Schaub, who wrote the introduction to Susan Weiss' art photography collection The Orchard.
Other Vermont writers on the roster:
• M.T. Anderson, who has, according to mtanderson.com, "written stories for adults, picture books for children, adventure novels for young readers, graphic novel adaptations of ancient French tales, and several books for older readers (both teens and adults)." Known also for nonfiction, satire, and science fiction, the award-winning Anderson will read from a new novel for adults, Nicked.
• Sarah Stewart Taylor, author of the Sweeney St. George series, the Maggie D'arcy mysteries, and Agony Hill, the first in a new series set in the 1960s in rural Vermont, where she now lives a farm life. Having been nominated for several awards, including the Hammett Prize, her mysteries have appeared on numerous best-of-the-year lists.
• Pablo Medina, who is on the faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, among other honors and awards. Author of several poetry collections as well as novels, translations, and a memoir, he lives in Williamsville.
• The daughter of Cuban exiles, Leslie Sainz of Middlebury authored the collection Have You Been Long Enough at Table. The recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, she's been read in a wide range of prestigious journals and has received scholarships, fellowships, and honors of note.
• Neil Shepard splits his time between living in Johnson and New York City. The recipient of several awards, he's created nine books of poetry, and he wrote Vermont Poets and Their Craft. A teacher as well, for eight years he directed the writing program at the Vermont Studio Center- which he also founded - and, for 25 years, he edited the literary magazine Green Mountains Review.
Another guest at the festival will be Major Jackson, who's authored six books of poetry, including, most recently, Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others, and he is currently a member of the faculty of Vanderbilt University.
Other poets in the festival include Edgar Kunz, Jessica Fisher, and January Gill O'Neil.
A fiction-centric lineup
"It's a pretty heavy fiction lineup this year," says Rouse, noting that 16 such authors will be featured.
Some among them, in addition to the Vermonters, are:
• Marie-Helene Bertino, amply awarded author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell and Sewanee artists colonies, among other honors, and she's the Ritvo-Slifka writer in residence at Yale University.
• Zain Khalid, a 2024 "5 under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2024, authored his debut novel Brother Alive, which won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and others; his writing has appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker.
• Amitava Kumar has authored several works of nonfiction and four novels. Immigrant, Montana appeared on the best-of-the-year lists at The New Yorker and The New York Times.
• National Book Award Winner Sigrid Nunez will present with her new novel, The Vulnerables. Among her previous eight books: A Feather on the Breath of God, The Friend, and What Are You Going Through: A Novel. The recipient of numerous awards, Nunez also wrote Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag and has seen her books translated into more than 30 languages.
• Festival presenter Roxana Robinson, an award-winning author of six novels, including her new work Leaving, has been read in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other publications. Recipient of multiple awards and coveted spots, she's served on the Boards of PEN (Poets, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists) International, and the Authors Guild.
• Adelle Waldman authored the novels Help Wanted, which was featured on Barack Obama's 2024 summer reading list of 14 "must reads," and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which appeared on best-of-the-year lists by several highly-regarded publications.
• Writer, musician, and educator Tyriek Rashawn White, also a 2024 NBF "5 under 35" honoree, has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the New York State Writers Institute, and Key West Literary Seminar, among other honors.
He is the media director of Lampblack Literary Foundation, which provides mutual aid and various resources to Black writers across the diaspora, and he has authored the widely praised We Are a Haunting.
• Brad Fox will present on The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths, his unique hybrid of science fiction, history, and poetry, which was selected as a 2024 science and literature honoree by the National Book Foundation. A writer, journalist, and translator, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications.
Just the facts...
In the realm of nonfiction, Rouse adds that on the political side, Jeffrey Rosen will present from his new book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
A law professor at George Washington University, he's a contributing editor for The Atlantic, was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Other nonfiction writers on the festival bill include:
• Emmeline Clein and Anna Shechtman will be paired to talk about their inquiries into eating disorders. Clein, who's been read in The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, The Nation, Smithsonian, and others, will pull from her memoir, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm.
Shechtman, a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University and a crossword puzzle writer for The New Yorker and other publications, will excerpt from her latest book, The Riddles of the Sphinx, which Literary Hub describes as a "memoir of recovery from anorexia and a group biography of the women who developed crossword puzzles."
• A popular touring comic, Gary Gulman will present from his first book, a 2023 memoir: Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the '80s, in which he describes his youth and his battle with mental illness. A favorite late-night guest and creator of four comedy specials, including HBO's The Great Depresh, an acclaimed look at mental illness, Gulman was previously a scholarship college football player, an accountant, and a high school teacher.
• Vocalist, teacher, artist, and writer Melissa Newman will be present with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, Head Over Heels: A Love Affair in Words and Pictures, a 2023 coffee table book she authored about her parents.
• Moon Unit Zappa will excerpt from her memoir Earth to Moon. Daughter of legendary musician Frank Vincent Zappa and his second wife, Gail Zappa, she appeared in her father's career-defining music video, "Valley Girl," at age 14, which helped jumpstart her own career as an actress, writer, comedian, artist, businesswoman, and podcaster.
• Lyn Slater's bio describes her as a cultural influencer, model, writer, content creator, and former professor. She'll present from her new book, How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon.
• Natalie Dykstra will present at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center from her new book Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which won an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• Also in the nonfiction lineup, Kenyan-born Sunil Amrith, professor of both history and the environment at Yale and a MacArthur genius fellow, will read from The Burning Earth, which publisher W.W. Norton bills as a "brilliant, paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, over the last 500 years."
How it all began
Rouse, who was a corporate benefits manager in Dallas, recalls happily leaving Texas behind in 1999 and coming to Brattleboro to buy a bookstore, The Book Cellar, on Main Street. She owned and operated the store for five years before moving on - and before it was destroyed in the Brooks House fire of 2011.
She was on the Economic Development Committee of the board of Building a Better Brattleboro (BABB), now known as the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, and says that Donna Simons, founder and president of BABB, was a neighbor to Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and playwright Saul Bellow and his wife, Janis Freedman, who had a weekend place in Halifax.
"They were having dinner one weekend when Bellow mentioned he would like to do something nice for the town; so we were trying to dream up an event that would be suitable for somebody of that stature," Rouse recalls.
And so the Brattleboro Literary Festival was born in 2002, the brainchild of Rouse and co-founder Dick Burns, who managed the former Collected Works Bookstore on High Street.
Twenty-eight authors appeared in that inaugural event, among them Bellow, in what ended up being his last public appearance.
An immediate and lasting success, the Festival has become one of the premier book festivals in the Northeast. Even offering events virtually for two years during the pandemic, it's the oldest continuously running festival of its kind in New England, and it was listed in Yankee's 2019 roundup of the region's top 10 literary festivals.
The content of each festival, Rouse says, is "mostly curated."
"We do have authors who wander across our desk from publishers, submissions from authors themselves, and suggestions from local friends of the authors," she explains, but she notes that the lineup is primarily the work of a selection committee.
This year's committee included Shari Altman, Jenny Altshuler, Tom Bedell, Steve Budd, Jerry Carbone, Elizabeth Catlin, Robbie Gamble, Stephanie Greene, Starr LaTronica, Tim Mayo, Eileen Parks, Tim Weed, and Rouse herself.
"We also use reviews from Kirkus or Publishers Weekly or other major literary pubs as a filter for our selection process," Rouse said, adding that "we don't host self-published authors [...] the bookselling is too complicated."
The Festival is funded each year, beyond an impressive list of donors, by grants from various sources such as Vermont Humanities, the Windham Foundation, the Vermont Arts Council, the Thompson Trust, the Stepanski Family Trust, Brattleboro Community Television, The Porch Café, Vermont Mutual Insurance Group, Ben & Jerry's, and Poets & Writers. In-kind contributions haven't been part of the mix.
With the exception of presentation space at the Brooks Memorial Library, "we pay for everything," says Rouse. "We pay for authors' hotel and travel, for locations; we hire production people; we have printing costs - programs and posters."
Volunteer driven
As with most book festivals, authors presenting receive no honoraria. And, as with many arts events and enterprises, volunteers are the backbone, starting with Rouse herself, who has developed and led the festival for over two decades without compensation.
"It's a joy," she says without a hint of self-aggrandizement. "I have a lot of love … I love books," and she loves doing the Festival.
She says "the fact that you're doing something worthwhile and not taking money for it" is the payoff for all the effort to promote reading and literature - and to make literature accessible.
"Each year," Rouse explains, "some 25 to 30 volunteers run the show; tending to festival-goers, answering questions, handing out programs, assisting with book signings."
Cummings was among the first volunteers.
"One of my jobs was to design the poster and program [which was] always a fun way to showcase local artists and explore literary typography," says Cummings, whose career has spanned book design and representing authors as a literary agent.
"Since I am also a poet, I was asked to introduce visiting poets as part of volunteering, and that was always exciting for me. Introducing poet and Iraq war veteran Brian Turner, taking novelist Robert Stone out to lunch, [and] introducing Ken Burns, Madeleine Kunin, and others was an honor for a local writer such as myself."
In terms of audiences, Rouse says that "we have people who come from all over every year" for the Festival.
"One man came from Ohio to the Festival for the first time when he was visiting his son at Marlboro College," she says. "Then he continued to come for 10 or 15 years after his son graduated. When he died, he asked that donations be made in his name to the Festival, so that year we had a number of donors from Ohio.
"We always want to see more attendance," Rouse adds. "We used to get big, good crowds sometimes, but since Covid, our crowds have gotten understandably smaller. Part of that's publicity, and part of it's that people are nervous" about gathering.
With no advertising budget per se, Rouse jokes that "word gets out by rumor."
Early on, the Festival garnered notice in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, as well as in regional newspapers, but Rouse noted that "a lot of papers that used to give us publicity don't even exist anymore."
Even so, attendance has more than held its own since the early years when, Cummings recalls, "the Festival started to draw people from far away in addition to the tri-state region."
"Editors from my days as a book designer at Little, Brown were always talking about trying to get their authors a spot in the annual lineup," she says.
And despite industry changes and a post-Covid world, Cummings notes one constant - that the festival "continues to rebrand itself and draws thousands of book lovers to Brattleboro."
All events at the Festival are public; seating is on a first-come basis. Books will be for sale, at each event where authors will also sign books. For a complete list of authors and a schedule with times and locations, visit brattleborolitfest.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.