It’s Literally Wednesday: Ask the Book Festival Folks
Dave | August 22, 2012Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the AJC Decatur Book Festival presented by DeKalb Medical But Didn’t Know Who or How to Ask
The seventh annual Decatur Book Festival starts in just nine days! Started as a relatively modest venture, it quickly grew to become not only the largest independent book festival in the nation, but one of the four or five most prestigious. More than 75,000 people will be coming into Decatur over Labor Day weekend, attending readings conducted by over 300 authors and other related activities. While the festival is spread out over sixteen different venues, nearly all are within a ten-minute walk from each other and contributes to the great vibe that the DBF creates.
Daren Wang, Executive Director of the Decatur Book Festival, and Terra Elan McVoy, Program Director, will answer all your questions about the festival and, perhaps, about life itself.
Ask your questions by submitting a comment in the “Leave a Reply” box. Daren and Terra will answer them. Terra has meetings for much of the day and won’t get to be able to get to questions until about 2 p.m.
This Week
Bruce DeSilva, author of Cliff Walk, Thursday, August 23rd, 6:30pm, Peerless Bookstore, free.
Okay, I’ll start. Who’s idea was this festival, how long did it take to put the first one together, and what was the biggest roadblock you all encountered?
My favorite Book Festival so far was the first one–not because the others haven’t been great but the first one was less crowded and had more of a personal touch. How can the DBF keep its quirky, homespun, family-friendly feel as it expands? The Keynote Address isn’t even in Decatur this time.
I recently looked at the first year’s program. We had 5 stages and about 75 authors.
We are very, very focused on the spirit and the feel of the festival, and balancing growth with the quality of the experience. There are many metro Atlanta festivals which I won’t even go to anymore because of the size of the crowd.
That said, the festival is growing, and will continue to do so. We’ll have about 320 authors and 16 stages this year. (If I stretched it, we could claim 20.) We continue to make adjustments (moving the kids stage this year is one such choice).
The short answer is that there’s no one thing we can do to keep the indie/local/homespun spirit, but it is something we work hard to keep alive in each decision we make.
Thanks for this deliberate effort to keep the DBF Decatur-ish. I’ve wondered if adding a day to the festival or doing the festival twice a year would help keep it manageable in size by spreading out the crowd over more time. Don’t know if it would work that way but I would enthusiastically attend twice a year and/or on the Labor Day Monday. I often miss an event because it overlaps another event or because I just can’t get from one part of the festival to another in time. Or because the venue is full. Is there any evidence that the festival is saturated and could use some extra time slots?
It’s feedback like this that *helps* us make the festival exactly what you want it to be. We can’t always accommodate everything (for various and sundry reasons), but please know that it’s really important to us, what our attendees think, and we’ll continually strive to make this the book festival YOU want to attend!
You don’t have to name names, but I’d love to hear your best eccentric author story.
My favorite story that is shareable is taking Kinky Friedman out for breakfast after a 5:45 am interview at Fox5. He was in his black cowboy outfit, sequins, hat, etc. and looked rather out of place. We went to Crescent Moon, sat down in an empty dining room.
He looked unhappy to be there and though not quite monosyllabic, he was close.
There was one person at the counter, drinking coffee, reading the paper. He lifted the arts section to read it, and a full page picture of Kinky in the exact same outfit unfolded on the front page. The guy at the counter did a sit-com style double take, and Kinky looked up to see the paper and smiled as broadly as you’ll ever see.
He was our best pal from that point forward.
Great story.
Mucous garcias. I wasn’t surprised that your story would be about the Kinkstah. At least his Peruvian Marching Powder days were behind him by then.
Great story Daren. Reminds me of the movie scene of the remake of The Fugitive when the guy riding the train is sitting across from Harrison Ford and sees his picture on the front page of the newspaper. Better outcome with Kinky.
I got one for you. Having a telephone conversation with Hal Needham who was at the Book Festival last year to promote his new book called Stuntman. Hal directed the Smokey and the Bandit movies and a lot of the action movies (featuring Burt Reynolds and others) at that time, but he was a stuntman before that and was the first person to break the sound barrier in a car. Chuck Yeager gave him props for that! Anyway, I’m just a volunteer who works for Daren and Terra and was trying to coordinate with Hal on what he needed for his presentation and he asked me to call him at home to talk about it. He’s a great character and even put his wife on to join our conversation where he was telling me about his book tour and background and other things he was up to. That’s the great thing about volunteering for these great Decatur events . . . you can stumble onto some memorable moments you’ll never forget.
No McSweeney’s booth this year?
I don’t think they’re on the list.
Make no mistake, we’d love, love, love to have them back.
They weren’t there last year, either. I heard a rumor earlier this year that the 826 Valencia people are looking for an Atlanta location. That would be great.
If you were a mere civilian this year, which author events would you put on your “can’t miss” list? Any hidden gems?
I really want to see Chuck Thompson discuss “Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession”
It has an appeal for me personally, but given Decatur’s prickly relationship with the state of Georgia, I think it would be interesting to folks from the 30030.
The New York Times had a timely review yesterday highlighting (for better or worse) the level of edginess of Thompson’s book. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/books/better-off-without-em-by-chuck-thompson.html?_r=1&ref=books
Ironically, perhaps to the author himself, is the fact that there will be about 1,000 more culturally stimulating events than listening to his take on “The South” happening right here in the area at the exact same time!
And just in case anyone gets the wrong idea, I’m a huge fan of the festival and feel lucky I get to attend year after year.
I agree with Daren that Chuck Thompson is going to be an incredibly interesting conversation, and I encourage folks in that direction! But it’s always hard for me, as Program Director of the festival, to narrow down any “must sees,” because the program committee has curated everything so carefully, and we think ALL the events are great. We have big names and debut names and unusual names, and I encourage everyone to pick one person they know for sure, and another one they’ve not heard of, because you are bound to discover something great! That said, I’m excited about representing graphic novels a bit more this year with Leela Corman and a conversation between Dame Darcy and Conor McCreery about adapting classic books into this contemporary format. I’m also excited about the “Importance of the Picture Book” conversation led by the esteemed children’s book critic, Leonard Marcus. And personally I also want to be sure and stop by Type Rider, who is a traveling audience-participation story-writer who is part of our street fair!
Who is the online “voice” of Bookzilla?
Why did you go and put 4 things I want to see all at the same time on Sunday afternoon ?
A good problem to have. Amazing to watch the growth of this event. Congratulations on a wonderful line up . Looking forward to the festival weekend. ( even if I can’t manage to see 4 things at once )
Good heavens, DBF lists “Sci-Fi” in their genre list! Seriously, anyone who reads in the genre will use either “Speculative Fiction” “Science Fiction” or just “SF”. “Sci-Fi” is used by those who class the genre as trash. I grant you that DBF is not big on genre fiction (for me, genres of interest are SF including Fantasy, Romance, and Mystery–only the latter has must of a presence), but this is really a sign of failing to talk to anyone involved with this area of publishing.
While I’m on a roll, I continue to wonder why a better synergy doesn’t develop between Dragon*Con and DBF–there are often authors at D*C I’d love to hear speak, but I’m not often willing to deal with the D*C zoo. Is it DBF, D*C, or resistance from authors or publishers? Or, given what I see with “Sci-Fi”, does no one at DBF have the knowledge to ask more major authors to run out to Decatur for a panel? I can only recall one panel a couple of years ago which was mentioned as a D*C/DBF joint effort…hopefully I just missed some others.