Saturday morning, just before 10am, we arrive–the Decatur Book Festival. It’s already 90, maybe hotter. The blacktop of Ponce de Leon Avenue, which supports the vendor tents, still radiates yesterday, and the old-orange sun has set up on its reamer to juice the day, so though we haven’t done anything yet, we’re already sticky and set on the scavenger hunt that moves us from one pool of cool to another.
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The activities officially begin with a “Skippyjon Jones Parade,” which is what is sounds like: someone inside a polyester fur suit and plush character head to cut a five-and-a-half-foot-tall Siamese cat figure, supported and guided by two skinny teenager, which suggests that whoever’s in the suit can’t see well (as I know, since I was a high-school mascot (mascot: black panther (I am not lying))), and is apt to trip over any of the several hundred children who have gathered around the abominable adorable to the beat of a single snare drum to march around the Decatur Courthouse to the Children’s Stage. We’ve perched for a moment well away from the center of the storm; parents claim every vantage for their children, and soon we’re on the move.
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If you were at home with the blinds closed and someone asked you if you’d pay $4 cash for 16 ounces of fresh-squeezed, deep-sugar lemonade, you’d ask if they were out their mind, but the sweat of the day lubricates the small bills, and they slip easily from your hands. A copy, finally, of Best American Poetry 2011. Chilled bottles of water. Matthew H. Bernstein’s Michael Moore: Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon. Paper fans. Kevin Young’s Ardency. A glass of beer beneath the arctic blast of air in the Brick Store Pub. $3 a pop for “hand-made” frozen treats from King of Pops, with flavors like Watermelon Mojito and Sea Salt Chocolate and Orange Cream. Allen Tullos’s Alabama Getaway.
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It’s about fifteen minutes to 10, and I’ve got my eye on a reading by Jennifer Grotz and Linda Pastan at the old Decatur Courthouse. But almost immediately I begin to run into people I know. I’ve meant to stop into the University of Georgia Press booth, because I’ve been looking to obtain a copy of Emilye Crosby’s Civil Rights History From The Ground Up, which frames approaches to local histories of the Civil Rights Movement and Charles Reagan Wilson’s Flashes of a Southern Spirit. I’m on a panel with Charles this afternoon, so I imagine I might get the book a little later in the day, maybe during a lunch break or just before our talk, but I see Reagan Huff, a publicity agent at UGA Press, who waves me in.
I meet one of her colleagues, then step out. I still have time to make the Grotz/Pastan event, but almost immediately I get caught in a pincer-movement of Emory colleagues, including Julie Delliquanti, a program organizer and exhibit designer for Emory’s Manuscripts and Rare Books Library (MARBL). She shows off the Emory tent, which is showcasing all the festival authors with Emory ties, and while I’m there, I meet Matthew Bernstein, a film historian who, as it turns out, works with someone my wife knew from high school. We talk for a few minutes, and then it’s after 10.
I think I’ll catch Jennifer Grotz at the author’s reception later on.
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Now that I’ve started to acquire books, I may as well swing back by the UGA booth to pick up the titles on my list. There I run into Allen Tullos and Charles Reagan Wilson, and we start to talk about our panel, which is set to begin at 1:45. Two cultural historians and a poet talking about the meaning and future of “the South” in the 20th Century. After the parade of children for Skippyjon Jones, it’s hard to think of our panel, just after the lunch hour, as much more than an air-conditioned room.
We’ll be competing with Tony DiTerlizzi’s “The Search for WondLa” and The Story Pirates’ “Theodore Boone & The Thrill of Rights” at the Children’s Stage, Ann VanderMeer’s presentation of “The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities” at the Old Courthouse; H. T. Narea’s “The Fund,” Chris Adrian’s “The Great Night,” and Holly Tucker’s “Bloodwork,” each on his/her own stage, which suggests they each have serious agents and/or people are drawn to mystery titles (even though I don’t know if these are mystery books, they sound like them); Ned Stuckey-French’s “The American Essay in The American Century,” which I would actually like to see and hear; Lauren Miracle’s “Shine,” presented at the Decatur Library, which seems typed for young-adult titles; Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux reading from their work, which I’m also sorry to miss (but I’ll see them later at the author reception, perhaps?); Howard Wasdin’s offering of “SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper”; Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!”; and Debby Maugan’s “Small Batch Baking for Chocolate Lovers.”
Now I’m hungry, so I’m going to get out of the sun and get some food.
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Charles, Allen, and I, my wife, and a few others gather at Leon’s Full Service. I have barely enough time for a beer before we have to leave, but we think we panelists can hoof it over to our venue and leave the others to come just as we’re scheduled to begin. Surely there will be plenty of seats.
When we get to Eddie’s Attic, however, the place is packed and moving, and I imagine this is the end of lunch or the remnant of the crowd that must have been here earlier to hear Elizabeth Nunez present “Boundaries.” But as we get situated, I slowly realize no one is leaving. The room is full. As the start time comes, one of the volunteers closes the door to the room, which doesn’t open again.
They’re putting late-comers in a back room or on the outdoor patio, where they can watch the event on closed circuit television. Mindblowing.
If this many people (225, I later learn) are here, in this room, in this building, how many more are in the other rooms? How many are outside looking for a Skippyjon Jones parade, the pops and lemonade, fried chicken baskets and lobster rolls, for this phantasmagoria between and toward and for books?
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We are signing books and Hurricane Jericho Brown whirls into the room. He’s got the attic just after us. I glimpse Collin Kelley, but miss him. We are signing books. I have an interesting aside with someone from the audience who was slightly offended by another audience member’s question. We authors sign each other’s books. We get up to move to another table, on the other side of the festival, to sign books, or to absorb the sun.
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The day goes on like this, and I’m sure I’ll see the people I missed at the author reception, though I don’t. I see Tom Lux and Katie Chaple and briefly Travis Denton, whom I’ve seen earlier in the day, Kevin Young, and maybe I get a glimpse of Colin Meloy (yes, that Colin Meloy) but otherwise am sharing with everyone else the difficulty of moving through a space choked with furniture and a few dozen writers trying to get as much of the good beer as possible before all we have is Bud Light. It is still crazy hot–so many people, like me, have had to change clothes at least once, which means if you were looking for someone’s get-up, you’d be let down most of the time. Jericho Brown breezes in in something bright and tangerine, almost neon, and then is gone almost as quickly. We are all looking for this kind of wind, which eventually comes, however weak, and blows us all out into Decatur in search of cooler tables and better food.
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The next morning it’s much more temperate. The latest tropical storm remnant is moving in from the west. By the night we’ll have rain. But the cloud cover mostly serves to keep everything much cooler, which is a blessing to everyone.
I spend the morning interviewing Sandra Beasley for Emory’s Southern Spaces, which goes well, despite my being sleepy and also constantly in awe of Sandra’s cheer and energy.
After this, I grab a quick bite, then run into Brett Gadsden outside the Courthouse where he’s creeling a lobster roll. We’re both heading to the same place, the panel “Struggles for Freedom,” with Doug Blackmon, Kevin Young, David Eltis, and Michael Thurmond. Again, a panel of historians, journalists, and a poet, discussing slavery and labor history–and this room, which will seat around 400, is three-quarters full. Here Thurmond steals the show; a former Georgia congressman, he opens by saying how many people are surprised that a Georgia congressman can read, let alone write.
We follow this with the Best American Poetry 2011 Showcase, which involves Kevin Young, Natasha Trethewey, and David Lehman reading round-robin from the anthology–an approach that produces a strange collection of bright moments, from the devastating reading Trethewey gives of her own poem, “Elegy,” to the hilarity of Lehman’s rendering of Michael Cirelli’s “Dead Ass,” a poem that involves Lehman having to read the following stanza:
The song on the radio said that the po-po was:
“tryna to catch me ridin’ dirty.” I imagined
Chamillionaire wearing a 20-lb. gold chain
with mud dripping off Jesus’s shiny toes,
Krazie Bone in four-hundred dollar jeans,
with grass stains on the knees.
This is the limit, isn’t it?
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The rain has come. There is just one more panel, which I’m going to miss. Somewhere a table awaits.
And the song stuck in my head is not Chamillionaire’s “Ridin,” but Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Freaks for the Festival,” which, in the version on the album Compliments of the Mysterious Phantom ends with Kirk shouting “Let’s go home and lay down!” and “Get me out of here!”
Until next year, anyway.