Did you notice that little bounce the economy took this past weekend? That was me and my husband and a bunch of other readers, buying books at the North Carolina Literary Festival. Not to mention food and gas and hotel rooms. You're welcome, it was totally our pleasure.

 

Because stalking authors is fun for librarians and the kinds of people who marry them, Bill and I spent Saturday and Sunday in Chapel Hill, listening to a pile of writers talking with a pile of readers. There were hours of events in a dozen venues scattered all over the Carolina campus. Bill targeted graphic novels and science fiction, while my goal was to push beyond my old favorites and size up some authors I'm not already in love with. That means I missed Doris Betts, Lee Smith, Fred Chappell, Pamela Duncan, Allan Gurganus, Daniel Wallace, Kathryn Stripling Byer, John Hart, Elizabeth Spencer. Yes, they were all there and admission was free and life is full of hard choices.

 

So who was wonderful? In nonfiction, some horticulture professors from NC State who explained how we can all easily reduce water pollution by making rain gardens. A UNC poli sci professor who explained why the US has such a weird relationship with Cuba for at least the past century. The gooiest brownie I ever put in my mouth, prepared by a chef / cookbook author I didn't even get to hear and hope I've identified correctly. And a human behavior / business type professor from Duke whose research finds that a banker is twice as likely as a politician to lie to you or steal from you (Bill's all-festival favorite).

 

Fiction is chancier and we were very lucky to hear Elizabeth Strout, who just won the Pulitzer for her novel Olive Kitteridge, which some library book clubs will be discussing soon. Strout says fiction matters because it exercises our imaginations in an effort to understand other people, cultivates the capacity for compassion, and breaks down the isolation we were all born with. "Fiction is generous," Strout remarked, "It says we're all essentially in the same boat." 

 

Nobody who writes fiction in North Carolina makes me laugh as hard as Michael Malone, and I made an old favorite exception to hear him talk about his new novel, The Four Corners of the Sky. Besides, he stole some plot for it from The Wizard of Oz. "Comedy says 'Yes' to life," Malone says. "Life is messy, by comedy says 'Yes' to it anyway." 

 

I didn't actually hear any poets this weekend but I bought a book of poetry by Ruth Moose, who I first met as a short story writer a long long time ago, because she cleverly named it The Librarian and Other Poems. And I got a copy of Long Story Short, a collection of short short stories by 65 authors with ties to North Carolina compiled by Marianne Gingher. If you missed the Festival, this anthology is the one book you could read to meet almost everyone who was there and then some.

 

After hearing eight stimulating presentations crammed into two days and wishing I could have heard twenty more, and trying to catch up with a campus and town where I spent seven years almost three decades ago, my brain and senses were completely saturated. "Are you all right?" Bill asked. "You look a little glazed." He drove, and I slept all the way home. As I always do when I've been on a big trip, I feel like a little girl in a poem by Eleanor Farjeon that I know from a collection some cousins gave me when I was a very little girl,

 

I hope to see you at future NC Literary Festivals! In the meantime, to keep up with who's writing what in the Tar Heel State, visit Read North Carolina Novels or your library.