Boston Book Festival

The Boston Book Festival, held yesterday (10/16/2010) in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, was another mind-expanding day of ideas and high spirits. Though it was breezy and chilly, the weather was vastly better than last year's odd tropical stormy mix.

This year I volunteered. I helped usher and did book-signings in Trinity Church, with a little side-duty in the big tent of Google, a sponsor of the festival. While I worked all day and couldn't go off on my own to sessions I might have picked, it was a great experience to hear many panels in one location. It's a good thing to learn about topics you normally wouldn't seek out. All but one event in the downstairs "Trinity Forum" room was full to capacity of 200 people. By the end of the day I was completely jazzed by the new ideas, the amazing authors and their books, as well as the enthusiasm of readers, presenters, organizers, and volunteers.

The last event I attended was the keynote speech by author Joyce Carol Oates. She read one of her latest short stories to a full audience in the massive Trinity Church Sanctuary. By the time they got to the Q&A, I started to fade, and headed home on the subway with a hot  tea in my hand, an exhausted smile on my face.

How lucky we are in Boston to have the people who think up and make this incredible event a reality. And it's FREE.

Another Kind of Blooming - Boston Book Festival

There are so many times each year when I find myself thinking, "This is Boston at its best." I think this while strolling through the Public Garden in midsummer as the Swan Boats float by. The ever-changing plantings and sweeping landscape up the hill never fail to impress me. On a summer's day, I think it while eating a sandwich in the shade at Rowe's Wharf, gawking at visiting yachts and tall ships. At First Night, standing in the bundled up, down jacketed throngs lining the streets for the parade and fireworks, and admiring the ice sculptures, an old-fashioned winter-defying frivolity fills the air. Year round, strolls through the back streets of the North End yield all kinds of surprises. Observing early spring blooms in the miniature yards of Commonwealth Avenue townhouses keeps hope alive. In so many ways, the physical setting of Boston makes my heart skip, again and again.

This year's first-ever Boston Book Festival brought a different flowering to the streets, even as the weather played out around us with a strange kind of fusion, like a hastily thrown together band from Berklee. It was, all at once, blustery, rainy and tropical. Very odd for a Saturday in late October.

No matter, enthusiastic readers of all ages packed into venues around Copley Square like Old South Church. An impressive roster of our most admired authors, including Orhan Pamuk, Anita Diamant, and Anita Shreve, read to us and spoke about the world of books, reading and writing. Grub Street sponsored a jam-packed 'Writers' Idol' where first pages of books were read aloud and critiqued.

We completely filled the long pews of Old South's massive sanctuary, proving a point that Orhan Pamuk put forth in his Norton Lectures at Harvard this fall, (another unforgettable Boston experience). He said that modern man makes sense of life through fiction. That we need it to feel at home in the world. And that reading, we redefine our world outlook.

Seeing the crowds pack the halls that day made me so grateful to be a writer, here, now, in this fascinating city where ideas bloom too.