Decatur Book Festival will have wide spectrum of authors
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The Decatur Book Festival is declaring its independence.
“America’s Largest Independent Book Festival” reads the tagline on the poster for the third annual book megaparty, which runs Friday through Aug. 31.
Other cities may have bigger turnouts, says Daren Wang, the DBF’s executive director, but they’re all owned by larger corporations. Decatur’s festival, which hopes to draw 75,000 attendees this year, is run by an independent board of volunteers that strives to weave the festival into the laid-back artsy vibe of downtown Decatur.
“Having been to a couple of dozen other book festivals in other cities,” says Atlanta novelist David Fulmer (“The Blue Door”), “these guys have just done a marvelous job. Bringing the music elements and the cooking elements have been huge home runs. They’ve even been pretty lucky with the weather.”
“They make Decatur a part of it,” says Atlanta’s Karen Abbott, author of “Sin in the Second City.” “It’s all self-contained and easily accessible, so you can leave one thing and go sample something else. You get to sample many things without trying to kill yourself.”
The DBF has another wide spectrum this year, from poetry readings to a dance version of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” steamy pop fiction to a children’s parade based on the “Madeline” books.
A few highlights:
• Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, gives the keynote address.
• Pop-up book king Robert Sabuda, creator of artistic books that adults ooh and aah over, will talk about his craft with co-author Matthew Reinhart.
• Speeches and signings by 250 authors, including novelists Eric Jerome Dickey, Kathy Reichs and Louis Bayard; former White House counsel John Dean; and popular young adult author Sara “Pretty Little Liars” Shepard.
• Local favorites, including Karin Slaughter, Kathy Hogan Trocheck, Pearl Cleage, Douglas Blackmon, Emily Giffin, Hollis Gillespie and Marvin Arrington.
• “The Harry Potter Quiz Show” has Potter editor Cheryl Klein quizzing kids only about wizardly trivia.
• And one highlight that won’t happen. Ty Pennington, star of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” had agreed to appear, then withdrew to tape an Oprah Winfrey segment the same weekend. The festival posters and programs, including an insert in today’s AJC, had already been printed before Pennington bailed.
The festival is very family-friendly; last year, the huge Target-sponsored tent for children’s events in the middle of Decatur Square was one of the most crowded venues at the festival.
But there are more adult offerings as well. Fulmer, author of several thrillers and a local fiction teacher, will teach a writers’ workshop Friday at Agnes Scott College with the head-turning title “David Fulmer’s Sex & Violence: Writing About Them Without Sounding Like a Virgin Pacifist.”
“When I teach writing classes, I see student writers have a lot of trouble handling sex and violence. Even great writers get in trouble with it.”
As part of the class, which is only for those 18 and older, local actors will read sex scenes from novels by famous authors.
Kristen Chase, a Douglasville blogger and mother of two, might feel at home there, since one of her blogs, Mominatrix, deals very frankly with sex after childbirth. She just signed a deal to turn Mominatrix into a book next year, but at Decatur she’ll be promoting the less explicit work she has reprinted in the new collection “Sleep Is for the Weak.”
“I’m going to be reading an essay about the neurotic moments that we all have as mothers that we don’t like to talk about,” says Chase. “And I’ll also talk about the power and community of blogging.”
The biggest change in the festival this year is that the food court will be pared down, from a full row of vendor tents lining the parking lot east of the old courthouse to only about three vendors.
“We understand there are certain goodies that you can’t have a festival without — beer, lemonade and corn dogs, for example,” says Wang. “But the heart and soul of Decatur is its
bars and restaurants. We want to encourage folks to sit down for a good meal while they are here. It’s like putting out the good china for guests, instead of ordering takeout.
“That should bode well for us,” says Ethan Wurtzel, co-owner of Twain’s, a Decatur bar and restaurant. “We’re going to have more staff available that weekend.”
Twain’s is one of several Decatur establishments, like Java Monkey and Eddie’s Attic, that are hosts for events for the weekend. Twain’s has a “Writer’s Conference Happy Hour” Saturday, which follows an informal writers’ support group with local authors Joshilyn Jackson, Anna Schachner and Abbott that’s free and open to the public.
Arguably, for a few authors, the entire weekend is Writers’ Happy Hour. Wurtzel says Twain’s sees an increase in business from festivalgoers, but a lot of their business comes from the authors themselves.
