Literary Rainfall

Friday
It's raining. Boy, is it raining.

We get a late start heading up to Vermont for the Brattleboro Literary Festival. The rain makes it a slow trip, and several accidents make it even slower.

Saturday
We get to Hall Farm around 1:00am, and rise a little less than six hours later. It seems to be raining even harder it was during the drive up, if that's possible. There are a few of us staying at the Farm, and we have a perfectly pleasant breakfast before heading into Brattleboro.

latchis
Originally uploaded by dangunderman.

The Latchis is a great art deco building in the heart of downtown. The ornate theater inside has the astrological signs painted on the ceiling and crazy Victorian murals on the walls. It seats about 800, I think, and is packed with people hungry to see and hear John Irving. In his introduction, we learn that Mr. Irving was inducted into the national wrestling hall of fame in 1992. Maybe that explains his well-balanced, muscular prose. I've never read any John Irving, so I have no way of knowing if that's actually true.

Irving reads a chapter from his current novel-in-progress. About loggers. Without sounding like he's making a disclaimer, he tells us that this chapter will go through hundreds of revisions in the next four or five years, when the novel finally gets published. That he would share a work-in-progress shows off the size of his brass balls. He's got a good reading voice, fairly soothing, so he scares the bejesus out of the whole theater, when he screams a bit of dialogue in character.

The Q&A is even better. He gives interesting answers to even the dullest of questions. We learn that he's obsessive-compulsive, and that he does most of his writing long hand, often standing while he writes. He also hates Ernest Hemingway, about whom he complains, "If you want to write such short sentences, why not write ad copy?"

It takes us a while to clear out of the Latchis, especially with all the people waiting to have their books signed by Irving, and we're trying to get to the next event quickly. It's still raining like a motherfucker, and even in my super-raincoat, I manage to get pretty wet.

Dave Isay is founder of StoryCorps (among many other things) on NPR. What began as a booth in Grand Central Station in which two people interview one another has expanded into two additional traveling studios currently working their way across the country. Today, he's giving a talk at the Centre Congregational Church.

christrules

At breakfast, for reasons far too complicated to explain, I had sung a rendition of the hymn "Crown Him With Many Crowns." Centre Congregational is part of the United Church of Christ. It's a hippie church, all-inclusive. So in their hippie hymnal, "Crown Him With Many Crowns" has become "Crown With Your Richest Crowns." Same tune, though. The hymn on the facing page is called "Eternal Christ, You Rule," and dude, He totally does.

Isay's work is amazing. He's got the whole place weeping in a matter of minutes, as he plays some of the interviews they've collected over the past few years. Something unexplainable happens when two people are alone in a studio with microphones. The honesty is disarming. Isay had given a talk at Marlboro College the day before, and we find out later that he took it easy on us. He could've made us all cry a lot harder. We're all pretty much a wreck by the time he's done, and we recover slightly, but not completely, over lunch.

There are certainly authors worth seeing in the afternoon, but between the late-night arrival and getting our emotional asses kicked by Dave Isay, we're feeling pretty wiped out. After a little bit of shopping, we head to the car and take a nap. We do a little more shopping after (one of the big reasons for the Festival, after all, is the economic revitalization of downtown Brattleboro), and I get two pairs of pants. Except for a pair of jeans, I think these are the first clothes I buy in five years. My wedding outfit was a gift, as was the suit for my father's funeral, so those don't count.

We feel done for the day. The trip was worth making for Dave Isay alone, and the rain is getting to be somewhat prohibitive to enjoyment. We drive back to the Farm and venture out one more time for dinner at the Townshend Inn. The owner is a great chef and one of the hapless McNeill's Brewers in the Connecticut River Valley Baseball League. When we return to the Farm, we're pleased to find a fire raging, and we all sit around, drying out and warming up, while discussing fisher cats.

Sunday
Allowing ourselves a little lie-in, we get a late start, which is rewarded by Hall Farm director, Phil, who makes us pancakes. We make a half-hearted attempt to get to Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, but between getting our crap together to leave and stopping off for gas, we're a little too late.

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The rain has continued through the night. I don't think I've ever seen rain that hard last that long. It's pretty much done by morning, but when we get to our next event (after a little more shopping), we learn that poet Maxine Kumin was unable to get to Brattleboro from her home in New Hampshire, where the governor has declared a state of emergency. Not being familiar with Ms. Kumin's work at all, I'm of the opinion that this has turned out to be a blessing. She had been part of a double-bill with Dunya Mikhail, an exiled Iraqi poet, who instead gets the full hour to herself. And what an hour. She invites the audience to ask questions between poems if we're so inclined, which leads to a really low-key, unassuming event. Her feelings about Iraq are beyond complex. She went into exile because some of her most voracious readers were a part of the Saddam Hussein regime. Not the best audience for a political poet. She tells us of a friend who was angry with her for leaving her country, that as bad as Saddam was, she should stand with Iraq. Since the American invasion her friend has left Iraq. When someone asks what should be done in her country, she says simply, "I don't know." She feels her country is cursed. Things there have always been bad.

We get lunch, do a bit more shopping, and come back to New York. A whirlwind of a weekend, but quite a good one, even with the heavy rains.