Decatur Book Festival 2009, Second Day

On the second day of the Decatur Book Festival, I got a late start. My husband left home earlier in order to meet one of his favorite cartoonists, Keith Knight, at a noon venue. He bought two or three of Keith's books, too. Tom has purchased more books than I at this festival. With just a part-time job, I'm really aware of where every penny of that paycheck goes. I bought a volume of the journal Five Points, a publication of Georgia State University edited by David Bottoms, because the young woman at the booth looked so bored and because she was handing out free copies of older journal issues: a two for one. I purchased a couple of copies of the Wren's Nest latest publication because my daughter's artwork appears in this year's volume and because I like to support youthful writing endeavors. And on the second day of the book festival, I purchased a slim volume of poetry from a young woman standing on the sidewalk near the outside food court.

"Would you like to buy my book?" the poet asked.

"Not really," I replied, but then I softened my refusal by asking her a few questions before moving on. When I came back by a few minutes later and saw the woman still standing there, I thought, what the heck. What's five dollars? I'll buy one of her slim little books. I can always use the book for art projects later if I'm not moved by the poetry.

She said she was from California and that she had attended the book festival in previous years. Later I saw another middle-aged woman like me holding the poet's books while the poet bought some food from a vendor. What easy marks we are, I thought, for the young and hopeful.

Authors were everywhere hawking their books in many imaginative ways. I saw an alien right after I arrived, standing behind a board advertising Drake Highlander's book, What Not to Do When You Find a Spaceship. Drake Highlander himself was rather nondescript, a young man in his mid-thirties, I would guess, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved polo shirt. He handed me a brochure about the book and a bookmark with more information. The alien posed for me.

Although I didn't plan it, the venues I attended turned out to be focused mostly on Southern writers. I found Tom at the Decatur Conference Center where John Yow was promoting his book The Armchair Birder in his good-humored Southern drawl. Yow first read a passage from the book where he describes his inability to catch a glimpse of a wood thrush. It's a funny passage because everyone he asks has seen a wood thrush but himself even though his own yard, he claims, is good habitat for one. After the reading, Yow led a bird-calling contest, with help from two of his friends sitting at the conference table with I-pods and recordings of bird calls. He solicited members of the audience to perform bird calls and then to compare those calls with the recordings. This was a lot of fun, and the person who won the contest, hands down, was a young woman (teens? early twenties? it was hard to tell from the back of the room where I was sitting) who did a loud, convincing, and energetic call of a sandhill crane.

Tom and I then went to hear Sonny Brewer and Rick Bragg, both from Alabama, though Bragg is the most well-known of the two as a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing that he did for The New York Times and for the well-received books based on his experiences growing up in Possum Trot, Alabama. Although I haven't read any of Bragg's books, I have run across his writing elsewhere and remembered the trouble he got in at The New York Times for using a stringer's reporting to write a story in the first-person as if he had done all the interviewing himself. But the big guy (almost 6-foot, 3-inches and quite a bit over 200 pounds) is funny, thoughtful, self-deprecating, and profane--as many good Southern story tellers are. He blamed his weight on the M&Ms that hotels stock in their mini-bars. "I don't drink," he said, "but those fancy hotels that I stayed in on book tours always had three-pound bags of M&Ms in their mini-bars. Now these are hotels that wouldn't have me if I weren't a well-known author on a book tour. I'd have a pound of M&Ms in the evening while watching pay-for-view and another pre-breakfast pound the next morning. Now this is true. I gained thirty-five pounds eating M&Ms."

The final event I attended was in the Decatur Courthouse and was titled "Women & The New South," featuring Janis Owens, Masha Hamilton (the only non-Southerner of the three), and Cassandra King. On her blog, Janis Owens wrote that "The title of the panel should be: Running Our Mouths, because that’s what we do." And she certainly did a lot of the talking. Raised in the Florida panhandle in what she calls the "cracker culture," Owens told one funny story after another about her life, her culture, and her family, without skipping a beat between each story. For instance, she told the story of a grandmother who was so large that the mortician had to break her legs to fit her in the coffin. When the three women opened up the discussion to questions from the audience, however, the other two authors got a chance to talk. Some of the audience members were very familiar with King's and Hamilton's books and had very specific questions. One person asked what inspired Cassandra King to write The Sunday Wife. "I made it up completely," she said. Then she paused and told the real story, that she was once the unhappily circumscribed Sunday wife who eventually left the pastor. The novel wasn't published, she said, until after her mother died, for her mother always held her accountable for leaving the pastor. Now King is married to well-known author, Pat Conroy.

Masha Hamilton, who has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, is also a novelist. She went to Afghanistan in 2004 and returned in 2008, and has begun the Afghan Women's Writing Project as a way to give voice to Afghan women. The website for the project describes the efforts:

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media. Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project.

As Hamilton was preparing to leave New York and her three children to visit Afghanistan, she thought long and hard about how her traveling to such a dangerous country might impact her children. But she also wanted her children to know that some actions are worth the risk. Just before she left for Afghanistan, she said that her teenage daughter went out one night to Central Park with some friends. When her daughter returned home, Hamilton told her that she should never go to Central Park at night, that she was very worried about her. Her daughter looked at her and said, emphasizing every word with a pointing finger, "You are going to Afghanistan and you're worried about me being in Central Park at night with friends?"

I left this session very glad that I had attended it on the spur of the moment, for these are authors whose writings I will look for in the future. One of the great things about the Decatur Book Festival is that it brings in lots of well-known authors along with a little less well-known authors and even obscure authors. There is a venue for almost every interest. What a great event!