Decatur Book Festival

When the folks from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution proposed last year to create a giant crossword puzzle to hang in the festival grounds during the book festival, I thought it was a fun idea. I had no idea, however, that it would be so intensely popular. Throughout the weekend, whenever I passed the Decatur Bandstand, there was always a line of people awaiting their turn to take a crack at solving the big beast of a crossword.

So this year, the folks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, along with several of us from the book festival, are going to create several different crosswords and hang them all over the Book Market Street Fair. Each one will be different.

This means we need a lot of crossword clues (and answers). Want to help?

If you have a crossword clue and answer (or several) to contribute to this year’s crosswords, add it in the comments. All literary topics are fair game. Sure, we’d like some of them to have something to do with authors in this year’s line-up, Georgia authors, and the literary history of the South. But we also want your Dr. Johnson, Herman Melville, and Stephen King clues. Or clues about bookstores. Printing and publishing history. The science of paper. You get the idea.

We’ll choose our favorites and include them in the crosswords.

And yes this does mean you can get the answers to some of the crossword clues by checking back to this post before you come to the festival.

We have to send these to the printer on July 28, so you have until July 27.

Ready? Go!

Last week I was eating breakfast with a friend, and we were lamenting the sad fact that there are no more new “Harry Potter” books to get excited about, no more midnight parties where we freak out for an hour, discuss fearfully who we think will die, and make sure no cruel soul yells out spoilers (seriously, I wore my iPod in one ear as soon as people got in line for “Deathly Hallows”).

Suddenly she said, “Well, you’ve read the Twilight series, right?”

I have been hearing more and more about these books (something to do with a hot vampire, right? I’ve seen the Facebook groups), but I shook my head no– I hadn’t read them.

She gasped and stared at me with wide eyes. When she got over her shock, she started jumping up and down. “OH MY GOSH. I am bringing all three of them over to your house this afternoon. You will LOVE them. And the fourth book’s coming out on August 2nd and we HAVE to go to a midnight party!”

Sure enough, five hours later she knocked on my door with three very thick novels piled high in her arms.

And I took the first one to the living room and I sat. And I read. And I read. And I read.
Finished. Hm.

The next day, I read. And read some more.

Finished. Well, I can’t stop now.

Late the next night, I came to the end of “Eclipse,” my mind reeling with humans and vampires and werewolves and a definitive side that I want Bella to pick (and even I know that I’m in the minority on this). And less than twelve hours later, during a meeting at Little Shop of Stories, co-owner Diane Capriola asked me, “Have you read the Twilight series?”

I laughed. “Well, now that you mention it…”

So now I have a midnight party to go to. Little Shop of Stories, Decatur Square, 11 PM, Friday, August 1. Trivia, food that even vampires won’t refuse, and of course my own midnight copy of “Breaking Dawn” by the impressive Stephenie Meyer.

Wanna come?

[Editor’s Note: Claire is the Decatur Book Festival’s Children’s Programming intern.]

Welcome to my Post #1 on the Decatur Book Festival blog. My name is Kerry and I’m a Decatur Book Festival Intern. Instead of fetching coffee and bagels for Daren and Tom, I get coffee for myself while I organize information about all the participating authors in the festival and enter it into the online database. I also organize in other ways, like making colorful schedules, occasional venturing to the post office and helping Tom and Daren discern between blue-green and green-blue (and by helping I just mean repeating that they are the same thing). I’m not exactly sure what my activities will be once all my computer-based tasks are complete, but I’m looking forward to finding out. Right now, you can check out my handiwork on the DBF website and in the picture below.

Take a gander at these schedule charts, one for each day of the festival with all the time slots and event locations:

I guess there’s no backing out of this now. This morning, we held the press launch for the 2008 AJC Decatur Book Festival, Presented by DeKalb Medical. I told the attending reporters about all the authors and events we have planned. Some of them had tape recorders. And cameras. Some of them have already blogged about it. (Such as Phil Kloer at the AJC and David Lee Simmons at Creative Loafing.) So I guess we’re on.

Here I am talking about the author line-up:

I’m not sure what that expression on my face was meant to convey. (Feel free to weigh in down in the comments.) But the poster looks great, doesn’t it? Kali Sanders of Lenz Marketing created it.

There she is standing next to Roy Blount, Jr., who was the guest of honor at the press launch. Blount was also the guest of honor Sunday evening for a Decatur Book Festival Literary Alliance party at the home of Mickey and Jim Baskett.

Here he is with DBF Executive Director Daren Wang:

It’s a heckuva festival we have planned for this Labor Day weekend. Go check out the details and keep checking back as we release more information in the coming weeks. Come on out and enjoy the party.

The Literary Center at the Margaret Mitchell House puts on a whole slew of writing programs for writers young and … what’s a good, diplomatic word for “not so young“? Check your thesauri! Several of the classes are taught by writers whom [note fancy pronoun] the Decatur Book Festival is proud to call our friends.

The next round of adult writing classes is starting in mid-April. They include: A “Fiction Shop” by award-winning literary mystery writer David Fulmer, a two-time festival author and supporter of the festival since before we began it. And a “Finding Your Voice” poetry workshop by award-winning poet Chelsea Rathburn, a one-time festival author and chair of the festival’s poetry committee.

Summer camps for young people start up in June, but register now so you don’t miss out. Check out the “Comedy Writing” camp by Jamie Allen, director of the festival’s Writers Conference the past two years.

Great opportunities here to learn from the best. Check ‘em out.

Next weekend will bring the premiere of “Reach for the Moon” at 7Stages. It’s a show created and headlined by Kodac Harrison, our very own Beatnik Balladeer. Kodac wears a lot of hats. He’s a gritty voiced singer-songwriter, a spoken word poet, director of the wildly popular weekly spoken word open mic “Java Monkey Speaks” (held weekly at Java Monkey), chairman of the board of Poetry Atlanta, co-editor of the anthologies “Java Monkey Speaks,” and director of the Decatur Book Festival’s Java Monkey Local Authors Stage. (I’m leaving out even more hats, but the rack is out of room.)

March 20-23, Kodac will premier “Reach for the Moon,” which combines his poetry and music with dance choreographed by Blake Dalton and Erin Weller of Crossover Movement Arts. Musicians Nick Longo and Kristin Markiton are also featured in the program. Del Hamilton directs.

It’s an appropriately eclectic show, and, knowing Kodac, will be a good time groovy kind of thing. I’m looking forward to it. Hope to see you there.

OK, my headline somewhat misrepresents Cory Doctorow’s point in “Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers,” writing in Locus Magazine. Doctorow offers the most original argument I’ve yet heard for why the perennial obituaries offered for books printed on paper remain premature.

I’m fascinated by the e-book phenomenon and by the remarkable endurance of paper books. The Web being so remarkably efficient at transmitting words, you’d think the paper book would have preceded the CD into oblivion. (I know CDs aren’t dead yet either, but surely they’re not long for this iPodded world, while books are still going strong.) Music and video require burly amounts of bandwith. A book could be transmitted over that 300 baud modem in “War Games,” without even breaking a sweat.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad that paper books are still around. I’m just surprised that the Web hasn’t killed them yet.

So here’s Doctorow’s take on it, in part:

Book reading is just not a mainstream activity in America. Every study conducted since the turn of the century shows book reading as flat or declining. Reports like the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts “Reading at Risk” is full of depressing nuggets about the ongoing decline in the importance of reading books to pretty much everyone: old people, young people, educated people and dropouts, the affluent and the poor.

But wait, that sounds like an argument for why paper books should die faster, not slower, right? Here’s where Doctorow’s analysis gets interesting. For e-book readers to supplant paper books, they’ll have to be dirt cheap. The factory cities in China can build them dirt cheap, but they can also build cell phones and laptops and Wii’s dirt cheap. And there’s far more demand for cheap (or expensive!) Wiis and cell phones and laptops than there is for cheap e-book readers. There just aren’t enough readers to buy them, thus not enough demand to push them to the head of the line at the most efficient factories, thus higher prices, thus further suppressed sales. The printing press survives to print another book.

Doctorow, an author himself, says this shouldn’t get us down.

But cheer up. It’s a big world. Even minority pass-times can be real business and real culture — does it really matter that only mumble-mumble percent of Americans read a book last year if the total number of book sales still topped mumble billions? If you’re a writer whose take-home slice of those sales was enough to cover the mortgage and food for the cat, there’s nothing at all wrong with living in the niche.

Cory also has some interesting things to say about freely downloadable books, but I’ll save that for some other time. We’re inviting him to this year’s Decatur Book Festival (August 29–31). I don’t know yet whether he’ll be able to come, but if he can, I’ll ask him to talk about all this (and also about his forthcoming young adult novel, “Little Brother“). If you know him, please encourage him to come. And Cory, if your Google Alert or Trackback has you reading this post, let’s talk.

Traditional writing groups give writers the opportunity to receive feedback on their writing from other writers. This is a good thing. But what might you learn about your writing from a dancer? Or a painter? Or an actor?

You can find out in Fieldwork. Louise Runyon writes of the program:

The Field is a 10-week workshop in which artists - dancers, actors, writers, musicians, visual artists and others - bring their works-in-progress and give and receive feedback according to Field guidelines, culminating in an informal performance at Emory’s Schwarz Center Dance Studio. Field has been happening nationally and in Atlanta for about 15 years, and is an incredibly supportive and helpful atmosphere in which to create new work.

They’ll be closing registration very soon, so get in touch right away if you’re interested. Send an email with “Fieldwork” as the subject to info [at] severaldancerscore [dot] org.

McSweeney’s is coming to town with a fire-eating sword swallower. I’m not kidding. Oh, and there’s a book. A novel about two young men who fall into the Southern drug trade. The book, “Arkansas,” is not by the sword swallower. It’s by John Brandon. Davy Rothbart, creator of “Found” magazine, will also speak, as will our very own Jamie Allen, of The Duck & Herring Co.

If you’re not familiar with McSweeney’s, you should immediately get yourself educated about them, before you embarrass yourself. They’re pretty much the hippest thing going in the publishing business these days, but hip in a fun, silly way rather than the type that would require you to invest in a beret and drink absynthe. Did I mention there would be a sword swallower who also eats fire? McSweeney’s editor Eli Horowitz will also appear at the event. He’s a good guy. (I’m not just saying that because he gave me a copy of “Arkansas” — beautifully designed book cover, by the way — when I saw him up in New York last week.) You should meet him.

The event, presented by Criminal Records, will be held at the Aurora Coffee in Little Five Points. Saturday, February 9, at 7 p.m. 466 Moreland Avenue, NE, Atlanta.

The latest Decatur Focus has a very kind story about the Decatur Book Festival, focused (ha!) on the Hometown Heroes award we recently received. Did we mention that? Oh, yeah, I guess we did. The article says:

In just two years this festival has garnered national publicity and become a showcase for Decatur.

And Decatur looks so good! We couldn’t have done this book festival anywhere else.

Download a PDF of the current edition of the Decatur Focus here.