Monday, May 19, 2008

festival remembered

All right. So Festival was an age ago, and I’ve been terrible about getting to it. But now I’ve blown the dust off my notes. As I think back, I had two major highlights in the midst of the wonderful events.

David Athey.
I had never heard of David Athey before, but I went with Mom to his reading after the opening chapel service. We got there right after he started, but the room was already packed. We found places near the door to stand, but people kept coming after us, sitting around our feet, so I couldn’t move for a full forty-five minutes. Standing there in, we’ll say, not very sensible shoes, I should have been terribly uncomfortable.

But here’s the thing about David Athey:

From the moment I propped myself against the wall until the moment he stopped reading, I was spellbound. Absolutely entranced.

People toss around words like “compelling” and “luminous” on so many book-flap endorsements, but I promise you that he captivated that audience. And not with any silly reading tricks or gestures, but the straight reading of his lyrical prose. He was reading from the first chapter of his novel, Danny Gospel Run pick it up and just try to read the first chapter without losing yourself in the voice and life of the protagonist.

Rob Bell.
I almost didn’t go to hear Rob Bell. He spoke at nine on Friday night, and I was mentally and physically exhausted. Besides, Yann Martel had just blown us away—what more could be said?

Enough to astonish me some more.

I knew Rob Bell through the Nooma DVDs and I’d seen Velvet Elvis at Zondervan and at the bookstore where I worked. I hadn’t really thought of him as a writer and a reader, but that’s how he met us Friday night.

He had a chair and a small table on the auditorium stage, and he began talking to the audience of hundreds as if we were drinking coffee in his living room. He started by talking about who he was as a reader—things at least half of us identified with. Do you hate to finish a book because then… you’ve finished it, it’s done? Have you ever saved a book for a trip, and it just killed you to wait?

And then we’d groan or raise our hands in agreement, and he’d throw himself happily back in his chair, laughing, or say I’ve found my tribe! This sounds like a session of Readers Anonymous… “Hi, Rob!”

He read some of his favorite passages from books he read lately, and then began to talk about writing, and who writers are, and what they risk. He talked about the tension of creating something new, the fear that must be countered, and… I felt more energized at the end of his talk than I’d felt tired at the beginning.

Although I still fell asleep five minutes after hitting my bed at the hotel…—jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 05/19 at 02:46 PM
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