book festival musings

 

Tulane University hosted the New Orleans Book Festival last weekend and dozens of nationally-known writers were there. Is it unlikely that a city known for brass bands and Mardi Gras and 24-hour bars would also host a world class literary event? What I experienced was a definitive outbreak of literary joy: two-plus days of panels and readings, book signings and performances, food trucks and kid-friendly activities on the lush Tulane campus.

I attended one day and volunteered the next--it’s a free event but ushering offered me a free t-shirt, snacks and beverages, a badge and a great view (if I wanted it) of three hours of NYT best sellers talking shop.

Unfortunately, the best selling writers I ushered for were alternately a repulsive South African millionaire (all absurdly gigantic cowboy hat and 9-11 braggadocio) and an exploitative and tone deaf journalist-turned-novelist writing dead celebrities into fiction and patting himself on the back for his female character noticing another’s boots.

The bestseller panels I saw off the clock were miraculous though, thought-provoking and generous and funny. Charles M. Blow hosted professor and ethnographer Corey J. Miles, brilliant artist Brandan B.Mike Odums and avery r. young (Chicago’s poet laureate), in a discussion of art, culture and writing. Odums talked passionately about his art preceding him into places where he’s not yet welcome, in America, in 2024. 

And Eddie Glaude, Jr. interviewed Clint Smith, Imani Perry and Jesmyn Ward on writing about the South. Smith spoke of the dangers of myopic nostalgia for a South that never existed; Ward about depicting both trauma and joy in her writing. I read Perry’s South to America recently, her thoughtful analysis of the intricacies and identities of each state below the Mason-Dixon line. Glaude hilariously introduced Q&A by asking wryly, Let it be a question, please. (Spoiler: it wasn’t.)

Every festival is what you make of it, I’m learning, and I am glad to have heard these thinkers and talented writers share insights right now, at the height of their skills and power.