The Festival of Faith & Writing 2008

Movable Feast
by Kent d Curry

I never miss Calvin College's biennial Festival of Faith & Writing, but it's hard to encapsulate. Yes, it features award-winning authors, but it also focuses on fresh talent. Yes, the keynote lectures host most of the nearly 2,000 participants, but there are also 12-person workshops and one-on-one meetings with editors and agents. Yes, there are dozens of sessions sprayed across the Grand Rapids, MI, campus, but some participants just camp out in the exhibit area to talk writing with publishers and editors. It can get overwhelming. Then again, this isn't a conference, it's a festival, a near-nirvana of everything writing and reading.

This year the event was held April 17-19, and the featured speakers included Mann Booker Prize winner Yann Martel, Pulitzer prize winners Michael Chabon and Edward P. Jones, Newberry Medalist Katherine Paterson, and Christy Award winner Francine Rivers.

"We often choose beauty over goodness. This is not admirable."
~Mary Gordon (Opening Session, April 17, 2008)

Overwhelming Choices

The typical Festival format consists of five blocks of sessions each day, with each block offering between 7 to 10 one-hour sessions. Nearly every type of writing is covered, from novels, short stories, creative non-fiction, and memoirs to hymn writing, screenwriting, poetry, and illustrated books. We started at 8:30 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, with all three days ending at 8:30 p.m., unless you elected to attend the additional late night concerts, lectures, or films, which often ended around midnight.

Sessions included:

• readings (Scott Cairns, Elizabeth Strout, Patricia Johnson)
   
• topical presentations ("Writing Toward Social Justice," "The Writer Versus Hollywood," "C.S. Lewis and the Moral Imagination")
   
• interviewing the featured speakers and special guests (Rob Bell, Derek Webb)
   
• practical subjects ("Telling a Good Story," "The Writer-Editor Relationship," "Writing Comics," "Shaping an Essay")

There was also a documentary (The Reckoning) and a play (The Women of Lockerbie) being offered at multiple times throughout the festival, with the creators speaking at separate sessions.

There's no such thing as free time. True, you can eat your box lunch outside by yourself, or you can attend one of the "lunch forums," which explore topics such as "Writing About Musical Sounds," "Listening for God in Contemporary Fiction," "Writing Creative Non-Fiction," and "How to Keep Your Book Club Vital and Fun." Or you can participate in one of the 19 Festival Circles, which focused on memoir, graphic novels, pastors, teachers, poetry, and much more, while meeting twice (during a lunch and dinner). Or you could attend an overlapping two hour writing workshop one day.

"Every story is hard—it's all created out of nothing."
~Edward P. Jones (An Interview with Edward P. Jones, April 17, 2008)

Full Immersion

I ricocheted through this schedule, furiously scribbling notes in most sessions, bailing out of the few that weren't what I expected.

I immersed myself in the separate public interviews of Jones and Chabon, who are near-opposites. While both command outstanding talent, Jones personifies the isolated nonconformist with opinions chiseled from a difficult life; Chabon epitomizes literary cool, whether it be in his offhand pop references, chic outfits, or prodigious literary output in a number of forms, including the weekly New York Times Magazine. It will be fascinating to see how they continue to develop over time.

Poet Scott Cairns and bestselling memoirist Kathleen Norris's discussion about the power of the Christian monastic traditions to shape lives today made me rethink my own walk with God. Norris said she got involved not through blind luck, but "blind grace." Both discussed how the repetitive traditions of daily Psalms and prayers added strength to their faith and shaped their writings. As Cairn's said about the monk's habitual prayers, "Not only have those prayers been said for centuries, but those prayers have been said for centuries in that place. These people are praying for us. If you think the world is on shaky ground, just think what it would be..." I've been thinking about those prayers, and my own, ever since.

I also attended sessions on "Telling our Master Stories," "Writing Across Borders," "Faith, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy," "A Conversation with Francine Rivers," the writing workshop hosted by the Pulitzer-nominated Lawrence Dorr, and the short fiction Festival Circle.

One of the wonderfully frustrating aspects of the festival is the author unknown to me is always someone else's favorite. Should I admit my ignorance of Haven Kimmel (A Girl Named Zippy), Elizabeth Berg (Open House), and Krista Tippett (NPR’s Speaking of Faith), even as other attendees gushed over their sessions? What would I have missed to enjoy their insights? I still don't know.

“The artist who can’t play, can’t create and nothing sickens the soul like stifled creativity. Go play.”
~Katherine Paterson (The Wiersma Memorial Lecture, April 19, 2008)

Exhausted, But Exhilarated

Between the sessions and the signings, there is the book buying. Publishers and literary quarterlies and Web zines and specialty stores offer an astounding array of reading material in the exhibit area. After snatching up the freebies on the first day, I agonize over my buying choices, plucking the choicest morsels from the stacks over the next two days, always buying in the afternoon or evening to prevent my back from breaking beneath the load.

By Saturday night, my brain was bursting with ideas, my heart overflowing with writing fever, and my soul remolded by faith. Then again, this wasn't a conference, it was a festival, a near-nirvana of everything writing and reading.

Visit the Festival of Faith and Writing website to order tapes from this year's festival. The next Festival of Faith and Writing is slated for April 15-17, 2010.