Book Lovers Unite!

Christina Miller // Blog Writer

I eagerly set my alarm clock the night before, anxiously waiting for the Boston Book Festival. I had never been to the festival before, which made me even more excited. I tried to plan out which sessions I was going to see and which authors I would profess my love and adoration to. This year’s festival was on Saturday, October 24, and was 100% free to the public—a fact that made the college student in me even more excited. Walking into Copley Square that morning, I felt like a child being set free in Disney World. Tents were spread around the entire square, each waiting for book nerds to thumb through books, admire artwork, and contemplate overly postponed MFA degrees. There were tables for children to make crowns and act out stories, writers to talk to magazines and presses, and readers to gape at the uncracked spines of new novels. It was beautiful.

Beyond walking around Copley Square and practically breathing in the freshly pressed books, there were various sessions throughout the day. Authors including Atul Gawande, Emily St. John Mandel, Emerson’s very own Jessica Treadway, as well as over 175 other presenters spoke throughout the day. There were nearly seventy sessions, beautifully color coded by genre, offering discussions on memoir, comics, Mary Shelley, war, digital culture, Sherlock, and even a literary sex talk. The only bummer, though, was that many of the sessions I wanted to attend took place at the same time. I felt like a mother having to decide which of her children was her favorite, and I ultimately had to give up Atul Gawande and Robert E. Lee for Mary Shelley. It was a rough decision.

One of my favorite events of the day was Writer Idol. Crammed into a reception area of a church were three literary agents, one reader, and many talented writers. The reader read aloud the first page of an anonymous audience member’s unpublished manuscript, and when one of the agents heard a phrase that would make them stop reading, they held up their hand. When two of the three agents had their hands raised, the agents discussed why the lines made them pause and offered suggestions to the author. I was baffled to see how quickly the agents, almost like the Greek Fates, looked at the beautiful lives of so many first pages, and then picked up their shears and sliced each one to its death. Writer Idol was certainly not for the thin-skinned, as the festival packet warned. Yet in examining the manuscripts’ fatal flaws, I learned quite a lot information about first pages, including rather important specifics: very few can eloquently open their book by talking about the weather, characters with twelve middle names don’t make good central characters, and your mother should not be the first person to read your completed masterpiece.

I attended one session specifically for writers, intrigued to see how a “writers” session was different than, say, a fiction or nonfiction session. The description explained that this was about the “nuts and bolts” of the writing process, and the authors were going to look at their own writing and explain how the words went from the deep wrinkles of their brains to the ink on the page. Concept grasped, execution not so much. Although the authors did talk about specific passages in their novels, they more so talked about which phrases lasted from the first draft to the final, and how proud they were of writing said passage in a certain amount of time. Even though this was interesting to a certain extent, it just wasn’t what I thought I was walking into. And while I do understand that a significant portion of a book festival should be dedicated to highlighting authors and their books, yet I was hoping for these authors to step outside of the eloquence of their sentences and discuss more of the larger meanings behind their words and the significance of their diction.

Waiting for the next session to start, I started looking at the bios for the authors who spoke at the writers session. I noticed all three authors were white. Then I realized the entire page of authors was white. Frantically looking through the pages, I started to count how many presenters weren’t Caucasian. It was about one in ten, at best. I was stunned. One of the most well-known facts about the publishing business is that more white males are published than anyone else. Not only was the festival proving this fact, but I felt that they were supporting and reinforcing it. Granted, race equality was not the focus of the festival, but I was rather surprised that such a progressive, intellectually engaging literary festival was not better representing the diverse identities of America’s authors.

Even though I was incredibly irked by my discovery, I tried to put it aside for the rest of the afternoon. My last session of the day was a discussion about Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley and Andrew McConnell Stott’s The Poet and the Vampyr: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters. Very long titles, but very interesting topics. The authors explained a little bit about their works and some important events for both Shelley and Byron, but the conversation eventually made its way to a feminist reading of Frankenstein. This was one of the most engaging sessions for me, perhaps because I was already familiar with the subjects of discussion, but also because it blended literature and history in a new way; I had never previously thought about how Shelley’s lack of a relationship with her mother could be represented in the monster of her novel. I turned away from many of the sessions because I didn’t know the authors and I didn’t know their characters, but entering the world of Shelley and Byron felt like coming home after a long day. Some of the authors with fictional characters spent more time talking about their characters and their worlds than the discussion topic. Yet Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Frankenstein’s monster don’t need that much of an introduction, which allowed for a more meaningful discussion.

Walking home that night, my head was swirling with monsters and poetry and stories and writing advice. I felt like I had too much information I just needed to share with the world. I wanted to tell everyone I knew—and even a few strangers on the street—about the authors I listened to, the books I added to my reading list, the ideas I had written down. Even though the festival had its few flaws, it was truly amazing to see the city come together to support the literary world and aspiring writers. I will definitely be at the festival next year.