Ways with words: bound by books
Literary festivals, cherished by readers and writers alike, are more popular than ever, says Gaby Wood .
 Published: The Telegraph. 17 Jul 2010

I can still hear my American editor, inviting me to tell her the truth about how my US book tour had gone, years ago. But honesty would have been impossible. How to tell her – this person who had enough confidence to send me around the country – that I had sunk to levels of humiliation I suspected had never before been known to humankind?

How to describe the surreal bolts from alienating city to alienating city, from rural radio station to empty bookshop, the blankness when asked the perennial – and by now rhetorical – question, “Why did you write this book?”

She was asking, though, because she knew how gruelling it could be – even for real writers (and by that I mean people whose books are read by more than just their mothers). Those old-fashioned tours, in which you stand and repeat yourself endlessly, staggering around as if drugged – in bookshops, of all places, environments you’d once loved so much you thought of them as a second home – are famously terrible. They’re like rohipnol for the intellect.

In fact, when the Scottish poet Robin Robertson edited a collection of essays entitled Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame, there was a preponderance – from as wide a range of writers as Margaret Atwood, Louis de Bernières and Stephen King – not of classic childhood throwbacks like going to school without one’s knickers on, but of excruciating book-tour anecdotes. When asked about embarrassment, writers recall little else.

Which is why literary festivals are such a welcome corrective. Instead of all that, writers and readers can meet in pleasant surroundings over a weekend or a week or longer, and discuss things they really care about. Rather than simply doggedly promoting their book, and speaking to, say, the odd person who’s come in from the rain, writers become part of something else, something broader and more creative and more unpredictable: a festival of ideas. Or, as Bill Clinton memorably described the Hay-on-Wye festival when he attended it in 2001, a “Woodstock of the mind”.


Full story at The Telegraph.

Footnote:
The Press Christchurch Writers Festival. 9-12 September - has just released its programme.Chcek it out online.