Concord Festival of Authors Unfurls Flag of Great Literary Tradition

This year's Concord Festival of Authors will mark the 11th time that hundreds of booklovers have convened in the town that inspired Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. The festival, held from October 23 to November 8, in the Massachusetts towns of Concord and Lowell, brings together some of the most prominent names in fiction and nonfiction. Events, including author panels and individual presentations, an award presentation, and kids' party, are held at a variety of venues including bookstores, public libraries, houses of worship, historic sites, museums, and Walden Woods. From its humble beginnings as a long weekend festival in 1993, the festival now runs for two weeks, includes around 35 authors, and has become a major regional event. Gail Collins, Gregory Maguire, Alice Hoffman, Robert Morgan, and Alan Lightman are among this year's featured speakers.

BTW spoke with the festival founder and director, Rob Mitchell. A former bookseller, with years of experience at his own bookstores in the Boston suburbs of Sudbury and Acton, and then director of an author series at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mitchell also reviews books in print and hosts a weekly radio program featuring author interviews. He produces the festival under the auspices of the Angela Arkell Mitchell Foundation for Literature.

"The original goal," Mitchell said of the festival, "was to build upon, and continue, the great literary heritage and history of Concord. The Concord Bookshop was involved from year one and has been an indispensable part of the festival in many different ways, including being one of the many local businesses that provide financial support to the festival. They also provide personnel to help with the various events, in-store promotion, books for every event, ticket sales, as well as much intangible support."

The Concord Bookshop provides the official festival schedule on its Web site, www.concordbookshop.com, and inserts the festival tabloid-sized brochure into the hundreds of local newspapers it sells. According to store manager Dale Szczeblowski, the Concord Bookshop also does in-store merchandising and has a festival display case. The schedule on the store's Web site includes links to all attending authors' featured titles -- a job that Szczeblowski said was "very time consuming, but made easier since we began using BookSense.com."

Building on last year's success, the festival will again partner with the Lowell and Concord public libraries to host some of the programs. Popular young adult author Christopher Paul Curtis (Bud, Not Buddy, Yearling) will speak at the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell on Wednesday, October 29, and will spend a day making presentations at the Wang Middle School in Lowell. For children of all ages, the festival will include a Pirate Party on Saturday afternoon, October 25, in Monument Hall in Concord, which will include an appearance by Barry Clifford, author of Return to Treasure Island and the Search for Captain Kidd (Morrow). Decorations for the children's party, which has been held for the past two years with different themes, have become increasingly fantastic since the involvement of the Emerson Umbrella Artists' Group, according to Szczeblowski.

Panel discussions at this year's festival will feature the themes "Finding a Voice and the Courage to Use It" and "Finding a Story and the Wisdom to Tell It." Appearing as one of the new authors "finding a voice" will be Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club (Random House), and one of the "voices of wisdom and experience" will be Anne LaBastille, author of Woodswoman IV (West of the Wind).

Closing the festival, on Saturday, November 8, the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library will present the Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, author of The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (Random House).