blog entry

Festival Notes

It’s exciting when you can see a friend’s idea take off.  Two years ago, I went to the SC Book Festival with Caroline Lord.  She was working out her plans for a literary journal, and I watched her chase down writer George Singleton to tell him about it.

This year, Caroline is moderating two sessions at the festival and has a booth in the exhibit hall, where you can check out her first three issues of Short Story.  

Short Story includes a short story by George Singleton.  Singleton was reading and moderating panels Saturday, much to the delight of his number one fan—Susan Murphy.  Susan led me to a Singleton session, where volunteer Meredith Galentine was working as a room monitor.

Galentine’s job (aside from keeping over-zealous Singleton fans in line) is to make sure everything goes as planned.  An employee of Colonial Life, she had given up her entire Saturday to the festival, where she’d worked two poetry “shifts”, science fiction, and short fiction.

Galentine reports that there were very few violations of the No Cell Phone policy and that she was surprised by how much she enjoyed the science fiction panel.  “I liked the way that they saw the novel,” she told Susan and me.  “They said that good fiction gives you a sense of wonder.”

For me, a good book festival introduces me to some new writers.  This weekend, I learned about two I’m curious to read:  Will Allison, whose novel What You Have Left is set in Columbia, and Lauren Groff, who has a new novel out this month called The Monsters of Templeton.