From the Editor

The 7th annual New Yorker Festival is coming up, October 6-8, and for an overnight ride on Amtrak for $130 one could cruise Manhattan at 16 or $25 a pop to see  the current circle of writer nobles: Tobias Wolff, Edwidge Danticat, Lorrie Moore, Julian Barnes, TC Boyle, Edward P. Jones, Sherman Alexie, and, as The New Yorker hails them, some of the "vanguard," Yiyun Li and Uwem Akpan, the new nobles come lately to court.

It's quite a cultural show one wouldn't want to miss with the inevitable artist interviews, too -- "In Conversation with" Tom Stoppard, or film maker Pedro Almodovar, or composer Randy Newman, or rocker PJ Harvey.  The Festival looks like a regular glad bag of the arts -- drama, dance, music, and film, with emphasis on the new addition to the performing arts -- literature.

We have our own festival here, too, the "Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming," the 3d annual, a celebration of NC literature and fiction writing from the inside out.  This year Timothy Tyson, Michael Parker, and Linda Beatrice Brown were among the performers honoring the NC litterateur William S. Powell.  Other notable Literary Festivals in the state include the "Carolina Mountains Literary Festival" in Burnsville in mid-September, the "NC Festival of the Book," resurrected in the Spring at Duke from its previous incarnation called "The North Carolina Literary Festival: A Celebration of Writers and Readers" begun in Chapel in 1998, and which had been moved around the Triangle for several years, and the oldest festival in the state (that I am aware of) founded by William Blackburn in 1959 called "The Archive Literary Festival" also held in Durham.

But other states, other regions have their festivals, too.  One of the oldest is the "Deep South Festival of Writers" begun by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1961, and they, too, like all festival organizers, manage to throw in the Zydeco along with the writing.  A smorgasbord of taste and eat, every festival has its own flavor -- the "Gallup Literary Festival" of the eponymous place in New Mexico features Cowboy troubadour poets like Ken Moore and Navajo storytellers with much more flamboyant names, like Blackhorse Mitchell and Dollie Yazzie.  Also having its own flavor, the "Chicano and Latino Writers Festival" of St. Paul, MN, is in its tenth year and has featured Isabel Allende, Luis Rodriguez, Esmeralda Santiago, and Juan Felipe Herrera.

But still, all in all, literary festivals are a fairly recent phenomenon. Internationally it's the same story.  One example of a more eclectic festival (as implied by the word "international" if not the word "festival") is the "Hay Festival" begun Wales in 1988. This festival once hailed by President Clinton as "the Woodstock of the Mind" (I hope he meant it to mean "getting high on culture," but he wasn't being pressured by a prosecuting attorney or the Press at the time, so I don't know for sure).  The Festival moves about the world from London to Spain to Colombia and elsewhere, and among those who have performed there -- Don Delillo, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Harold Pinter, John Updike, William Golding, and others of that ilk.  Speaking of homophonic coincidences, one of the oldest festivals in the UK is the "Ilkey Festival," begun not so long ago in 1973, in Yorkshire, as a result of a postal strike and nothing much else to do.  Writers who have taken the stage there include WH Auden, Maya Angelou, PD James. Ted Hughes, Fay Weldon, John Sergeant, and others of that sort.  And speaking of poets, there's a passel of pure poetry performances, too, again not so long in the tooth.  The oldest and the biggest and the most notablest is the "Geraldine R. Dodge Festival" held up there in the William Carlos Williams state of New Jersey every two years since 1986.

But why so many literary festivals and why so suddenly in the latter half of the 20th century, and picking up speed into the 21st?  Robert Francis, writing for the Canadian online journal Flak, notes the enormous popularity of "Toronto's International Festival of Authors," in its 25th year, and suggests that literary festivals may have come from a basic need for the face-to-face reader-author tango.  He writes, "why are we more eager than ever to see and hear authors in person?  Writers' festivals are a good idea for a host of reasons.  They help market books.  They give writers a chance to escape loneliness and boredom. They offer booksellers, agents, and authors an opportunity to schmooze and network.  But they also do something else, something new in literary history: they bring readers and writers together in an atmosphere that is much more democratic and egalitarian than it was in the past."

I don't know so much about our "democratic and egalitarian" atmospheric needs (as they generally seem to be self-serving when we want them to be), but literary festivals are new in literary history, and I am not too sure that the "schmooze" is just marketing. When an author reads a work in public, it becomes performance with immediate feedback, a manipulation of emotion or nuance, a magic trick with resultant appaluse or squeaking of chairs. Literary writing in performance (not speeches, not sermons, or other kinds of polemics) but novels, short stories, poetry -- the more aesthetic forms -- take on the imperial press of rhetoric, the message mediated between the needs of the audience, what they seek from an author, and the author's own world view (which can carry a cartload of morality, politics, and personal axes). Give the advantage to the audience and pity the poor authors who could be crushed to contradict or disappoint.  However, the sheer growth in number and diversity of literary festivals around the world would indicate that readers, more than ever, are finding what they seek on the printed page, and yet need further satisfaction by meeting or seeing an author in person, to be "in conversation with," to have an author authenticate their  understanding.  Give the advantage to the authors, who at the height of their powers, know best how to make their magic work.