Byran Alexander provides this report from his Sunday at the DBF…

Loneliness was Sunday’s theme for me at the DBF. First up was the Glass Table Collective at the old courthouse venue. The Collective is a group of writers and artists who decided to pool their money to get their own stuff designed, printed, and marketed. Karen Kevorkian said they did this because writing is a damned lonely business, and you don’t need the publishing world to add to the misery. (By the way, the Collective is mostly based in Los Angeles, but Macon’s Kevin Cantwell is a member.)

Next on the loneliness stage were Edward Hirsch and Thomas Lux talking about how to read a poem. Hirsch’s book of that name takes the position that a lyric poem “speaks out of a solitude to a solitude. . . . and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship to each other.” Lux agreed that a good poem has the power to break an individual’s loneliness. Lux gets the Guerrilla Prize for this festival: Before the talk commenced, he went along the first two rows removing the “Reserved” tags because, he said, “There shouldn’t be reserved seats at a poetry reading.”

Over at the Decatur Presbyterian stage, Barbara Brown Taylor hit on the irony that we go to church to be with God and end up aggravated by the people we meet there. Some of us then conclude that it’s better to practice “spirituality,” and to do it alone. Taylor’s view is that, in pursuing the divine it is important not to become disconnected from the aspects of this human life that can seem so distracting—aspects such as other people! Was there any irony in her remark that solitude is so important for writing?

If irony was there, perhaps there’s a parallel irony in going to a book festival when you’re an introvert who loves the solitude of the book. But then surely solitude is of a different species from loneliness.