Book Fest

"Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don't want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don't suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right."
— Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You, p. 18

April 2009

Went to a local book festival Sunday. A strong reconnection. Saw a friend who'd been laid off from a local bookstore, the one that inhabited the building where we have our office, and from whom we'd subletted office space for a time. Good people. A good book store. But in order to survive they had to let people go. It was great to be around people whose love of books goes beyond the work of it. He was simply volunteering here.
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Thought about the Northwest Bookfest when it was still down in the giant drafty Seattle pier building in October. Everyone wearing coats even though we were inside. The thick boards and high windows of the walls and roof. Table after table of books from small presses, letter press printers, the booths of booksellers like Elliott Bay, Open Books, Wessel & Lieberman. Sausage, onion, pepper sandwiches off the grill. Heard Studs Terkel interview a 100+ yo woman who still volunteered for the Audubon Society. A vitality of the spoken & written word, of the art of the book, palpable in the conversations, the readers on stage, the mere passing of others touching & reading books.

Poetry and literature in general were huge in Seattle then (no idea what it's like now!). All that tech money and that dramatic landscape feeding a healthy tapestry of writers, poets, artists, craftspeople.
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The festival here was much smaller but still had that pulse. There was no small press room. Mentioning this to the ED of the sponsoring organization, I heard her polite words, "Are you volunteering?" Of course, that is the issue--not only human will, but the immense effort and money to make something like that happen.

I thought about Bumbershoot Book Festival, also in Seattle, and what that took to run. For several years in the early nineties I tended the table for Copper Canyon Press, selling hurts (slightly damaged books) for $5. The first year I was there for four days straight volunteering, absolutely saturated in the people, books, letterpressed broadsides. That was where I first met Chris & Jules whose exquisite letterpress work captured my imagination; at the CCP table, I sold beautiful books on the cheap to interesting and grateful people, drank lattes to stay awake through those long four days.
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Pretty much if I volunteer to help foster a small press component of this local book fest, I can say hello to all sorts of marvelous literary and artistic people, and say goodbye to writing poetry. There is only so much time in a day, a week, a life.

Still, I told her I'd call her in a few weeks.