BRATTLEBORO-The 25th Brattleboro Literary Festival (BLF) is ready to roll Friday, Oct. 16, and Saturday, Oct. 17, throughout downtown Brattleboro.
This free event, a press release states, proudly draws on the area’s “rich history of writing and publishing” and “has grown into one of the region’s most significant annual gatherings, attracting more tourists, sponsors, and participants each year.”
Since its start, the Literary Festival has presented over 900 authors, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Women’s Prize, the Newbery Medal, and the Caldecott Medal, among others.
This year’s schedule — shortened by a day, owing to an illness — is nonetheless packed with a host of top-shelf authors speaking in pairs. A hallmark of the festival, those pairings yield interactions that BLF board president Robert Parks says can be ”really spicy” and “really exciting for the audience.”
For instance, as described on the BLF website:
• Lily King and Stephanie Wambugu will talk about “young love, loss, and the friendships that shape us.”
King, in Heart the Lover, explores “desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love.” Wambugu, in Lonely Crowds, “follows two girls bonded in childhood by difficult upbringings, whose friendship is tested decades later as they navigate New York City’s competitive 1990s art world, where only one of them can make it.”
The pair will “dive into unforgettable coming-of-age stories and discuss the people who stay with us long after we’ve grown.”
• Jamaica Kincaid and Anne Fadiman, “masters of the personal essay” will discuss recent works and “a conversation on a lifetime spent perfecting the art of the personal essay.”
In Putting Myself Together, Kincaid “offers a brilliant, trenchant, and hilarious self-portrait, a testament to the inimitable mind and spirit, wit, and fearlessness that has made her one of our greatest, most original writers.”
In Frog and Other Essays, Fadiman writes about subjects ranging from a deceased pet frog to obsolete printer technology to a magazine published by early Antarctic explorers.
• Poets Kevin McLellan and Iain Haley Pollock “share two singular visions of what a poem can hold” and will offer “a reading and conversation exploring the boundaries of form itself.”
Pollock’s All the Possible Bodies “grounds itself in the physical world with evocative imagery and deft narratives, posing larger questions about violence, America, racial justice, and personal and national identity through the myths we spin about self, family, and nation.”
“McLellan’s Sky. Pond. Mouth. “takes little for granted — boundaries, solidity, the line between plant and human, faith, the enduring self — offering poetry of permeable, mutually dependent existence, where every noun is potentially both self and other.”
• Novelists Gish Jen and Stefan Merrill Block will “explore the families that make us and the odds we overcome to become ourselves.” Together they’ll dig into “how family impacts us, and the odds we overcome to become ourselves.”
In Bad Bad Girl, Jen “spans continents, generations, and cultures in a genre-bending autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.”
Block’s Homeschooled is “a heartbreaking, empowering, often hilarious debut memoir about a mother’s all-consuming love, a son’s perilous quest to discover the world beyond the front door, and the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions.”
• Master photographers Beowulf Sheehan, of Brattleboro, and Vaune Trachtman will discuss “the unique challenges of translating their work and story into book form.” Together, they will “delve into the challenges of storytelling across form and time.”
Sheehan’s second book, The Father of the Man: The Last Author Portrait Sitting with Cormac McCarthy, “recounts in pictures and words his day spent photographing the iconic writer — an homage to McCarthy’s art and a reflection on how the experience helped Sheehan better see and love his own father.”
Trachtman’s Now Is Always, with a foreword by Major Jackson, “melds archival negatives, handwriting, and contemporary photography into 45 photogravures reproduced for the first time in book form, and includes an essay by the artist about her background, influences, and process.”
At various venues — Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts, Stone Church, 118 Elliot, Brooks Memorial Library, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center — one can hear these and other authors in the lineup: James Dodson, Hannah Lillith Assadi, Karan Mahajan, Wyn Cooper, Lisa Graves, John Seabrook, Shara McCallum, Rebecca Hart Olander, Tilar J. Mazzeo, Amity Gaige, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Jessica Francis Kane, Ann Braden, Erin Somers, Kevin McLellan, Andrew Martin, Bianca Stone, Monica Ferrell, and Tim Mayo.
All around the town
Mayo, of Brattleboro, helped shape the first BLF in 2002. While in the past he’d done “nuts and bolts and everything else,” his focus for recent festivals has been on choosing poets — some of whom apply, while others the BLF seeks out.
Regardless, the criterion for selection of poets and all other BLF authors is that they must have published a book within the last two years.
Mayo himself falls therein. He’ll be sharing work from his latest publication, Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster, over five years in the making, published in 2026 by Bainbridge Island Press. He’ll be speaking with Halifax poet Wyn Cooper, whose sixth collection of poems, The Unraveling, was published this year.
Jerry Carbone, retired longtime Brooks Memorial librarian, was also involved in the BLF’s beginnings. Over 25 years ago, he said, founder Sandy Rouse “approached me at the library with an idea for a one-book community read” that soon launched and endures today. (Rouse remains on the BLF board of directors and is the festival director.)
Soon, he said, Dick Burns, who then ran the Green Mountain Bookstore on High Street, came up with the idea of doing a book festival, inspired by the Nantucket Book Festival.
The idea took off.
“We said, ‘We’ll name it the Vermont Literary Festival,’” Carbone recalls. “He said, ‘No, let’s name it for Brattleboro — one and only Brattleboro.’ And it became the Brattleboro Literary Festival.”
They started inviting authors. That first year’s offering included Howard Frank Mosher, Eleanor Lipman, Karen Hesse, and Jesse Haas — a “whole host,” Carbone says — as well as part-time Brattleboro resident Saul Bellow. “So that was quite a coup to get a Nobel Prize laureate in our first.”
A human scale
While authors receive no honoraria for their participation, they’re assured their expenses will be covered for an appealing fall-foliage weekend. And for a big, popular, plenary dinner party.
BLF Vice President Elizabeth Catlin adds, “I think authors love our festival because of its extremely human scale. We have our beautiful town, of course, but some of the bigger literary festivals [...] just have a slightly more corporate feel. Ours is different: Everything’s free; there’s no commercial presence, and the authors get to spend a lot of time with each other, which they really seem to love.”
“I gather that it’s quite a popular festival among authors,” says Carbone. “They can meet and interact with their peers and colleagues, and that’s unusual.”
Carbone describes his role as “the gopher guy: What needs to be done, I participate. And I’ve actually invited some authors.”
But since 2020, he’s been the BLF “tech guru,” first facilitating the Festival’s pandemic-driven year-round Literary Cocktail Hours on Zoom. He then coordinated the technology for the 2020 all-remote Festival and continues to cover tech needs and to collaborate with Brattleboro Community Television (BCTV), which records all the sessions.
Having lived and worked in Brattleboro for over 50 years, Carbone was succeeded at Brooks Memorial Library by Starr Latronica, who retired last year.
LaTronica, hired in 2015, has volunteered for the BLF since she moved to the area, but “this is the first year I’ve had the chance to really help out — anything that needs to be done, let me know and I’ll see if I can lend a hand.”
Serving on the BLF Author Selection Committee, Latronica says that with a “background in youth literature, I know a lot of children’s authors.” She has helped get Avi, Jarrett Krosoczka, Katherine Hannigan, and “some other really good authors” to participate over the years.
This year, she adds, Brattleboro author Ann Braden will do a young readers’ presentation while launching her latest work, “which is a fantastic middle-grade book called Hijacked by Goats.”
Before moving here, LaTronica had “stumbled upon” the second BLF event in 2003 on a family visit, and it “was one of the things that made me really want to move here and be a librarian” in Brattleboro, where she sees a “dynamic literary bent.”
“My observation is that people in this town still love to read real books,” LaTronica says. “I think I’m seeing more and more people of all ages embrace that deeper reading. We’ve been so fractured and fragmented by all these quick messages and texts and emails that you just fire off and send out there that don’t have much thoughtfulness.”
She says that hunger for meaning prompts people to come to the BLF, to “really revel in the richness of the written word.”
Of the festival, she adds, “We get world-class novelists, world-class authors, the highest you can get. And the ones that people are lining up and paying to go see at the Boston Book Festival or the Brooklyn Book Festival: We have them here — for free.”
LaTronica says the scale “is wonderful. You can actually talk to those folks.”
“You might see them at Mocha Joe’s having a cup of coffee,” she says. “And that’s amazing.”
She also likes that “in this small cluster of really fine authors, you get tremendous variety and the serendipity of [potentially] discovering an author you didn’t know about.”
At the BLF, she adds, “you can dip in and listen to a conversation between two wonderful authors.”
“You might not know anything about either one of them, and you come away wanting to read everything that they’ve ever written,” LaTronica says. “That’s the magic of this festival, and we have Sandy Rouse to thank for that.”
Catlin recalls that she was “just an avid participant for many years. I loved to read.”
Eventually Rouse was “clocking how much I read and asked me if I wanted to be on the author committee, which is a wonderful opportunity to have input into who comes to the festival.”
Catlin notes that she’s been able to meet “some of the most remarkable writers and thinkers of our time,” and that “almost every conversation, every reading becomes about some aspect of our shared humanity.”
Of the BLF, she says “it’s just that feeling of being in community — in the room with people who are also reflecting on deep, timeless topics of being alive, being in love, grief, belonging, all the big questions, I guess.”
Parks adds, “we have so many opportunities daily to watch famous authors on YouTube and, like — big whoop — but [at the BLF] we get to stand 20 yards away from them, and for some reason that propinquity, you know, gives us the goosebumps, gives us the little excitement, because we can ask questions. It’s live.”
Parks has been with BLF for about eight years. A writer for Condé Nast for 25 years, he was also senior editor at Wired magazine and a contributing writer to that magazine and others for about 15 years before transitioning to writing curricula for large school systems.
“There are people in Brattleboro who are so passionate about books, and I want to say that if you’re passionate about books and you’re coming to the Literary Festival, bring somebody who may be kind of intimidated,” he says.
“And if you’re not a literary person, come anyway,” Parks adds. “Just pick two events you’d never normally go to.”
With the exception of two staffers, the BLF’s engine is all volunteer. The project relies on generous private donors and support, in part, from the Vermont Arts Council, which receives support from the state of Vermont, the National Endowment for the Arts, and local sponsors.
Noting that weather is never an impediment to the festival’s success, Catlin says, “honestly, the weather’s always good inside those rooms.”
“It just is a wonderful chance to sit with a community of readers,” she says. “And the writers create the climate.”
For the Brattleboro Literary Festival schedule, locations, writers’ biographies, and other information about the event, on Friday, Oct. 16 and Saturday, Oct. 17, visit brattleborolitfest.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.