On the surface, a literary festival at Yale sounds like a high-brow, hyper-intellectual event. And indeed, as I entered the Beinecke on the evening of Thursday, September 19, the crowd assembled to hear the Windham Campbell Prizes Art of Fiction panel aligned with this image. I snagged one of the few remaining seats, technically five minutes early but unspokenly late compared to the elderly couples sporting alumni merch and middle-aged academics in horn-rimmed glasses.
The Windham Campbell Literature Prizes, founded at Yale in 2013, annually honor notable drama, nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Like the many other students with tote bags and Moleskine notebooks in attendance, I was drawn to the event because of my love of literary fiction and enthusiasm about the panelists: 2018 National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez and 2007 Booker Prize winner Anne Enright. As expected, they both spoke beautifully about their writing processes. But what I loved most—and value the most about literary festivals in general—was the candidness of these remarkable writers—how casually they provided the audience with a glimpse into their minds.
Growing up in the literary haven of Brooklyn, I was exposed to book festivals and literary culture at a young age. As an elementary schooler, I proudly got my copy of Elephant and Piggie signed by Mo Willems at the Brooklyn Book Festival. In middle school, I became a pretentious reader of The New Yorker. As soon as I turned 13, I got my New York Public Library card. In high school, I would sit at the dining table, a book surreptitiously propped in front of my laptop and homework. I buried myself in the worlds of Min Jin Lee and Emma Straub, Brit Bennett and Ann Patchett.
I began to identify with characters, develop my literary obsessions, recognize narratives—about friendship, love, family—in the real world. It is so easy to get lost in a book and inhabit a fictional landscape. But the real beauty of books is that they exist within the ecosystem of our lives. Reading can be a solitary experience, but I find it much more fulfilling to be part of a community of word-lovers, weaving the stories we read into our conversations and lives. Book clubs, book swaps, and of course, book festivals—these are the real joys of literature. “Words rise to meet what you see, like water rising in a footprint,” said Enright at the festival. Words aren’t special unless you have a community to share them with.
Last year, my mother and I attended the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. I was surprised at how at home I felt; waiting in the long snaking lines, scribbling notes during panels, and approaching the microphone to ask questions to my favorite up-and-coming writers. It was cozy to be swaddled in this blanket of bookish-ness, to see parents leading their young children to workshops and elderly women chatting with friends as they stood in line.
Yes, a book festival is about hearing notable authors speak, but it’s also about the experience of being in the room with everyone—being part of the conversation. At the Art of Fiction panel, Enright and Nunez both expressed their appreciation of “horizontal” writers: people who don’t place themselves on a pedestal or talk down to you. For Enright, it is important to “get company on the page, the feeling of give and take.”
I stumbled upon Nunez and Enright around two years ago, drawn to the colorful covers of their books on the bookstore shelves. Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend, about a woman who adopts her late friend’s Great Dane, became one of my favorites of that summer. The protagonist’s silent relationship with the dog, Apollo, and her reflections on friendship, invited me to think about my own relationships, both with my cat and my dear friends. While Anne Enright, a native Dubliner, sees her relationship to the Irish literary tradition as somewhat “antagonistic,” I was drawn to her work because of my love of other Irish writers, like Paul Murray and Claire Keegan. Her novel The Wren, The Wren, an intergenerational story about a family grappling with their famous but absent patriarch, is stylistically unique and thoughtful.
Hearing writers speak about their work helps us appreciate art as a living entity. “Characters seem to move, but they are inert on the page. You can’t change them by talking to them,” Enright said at the panel. While this is true, it is possible to change your relationship to books by rereading them, talking to others, and attending a book festival. I am fond of Nunez and Enright because of the role that their books have played in my real life. I bought The Wren, The Wren with my friends on an impromptu trip to a local bookstore after dinner one night. After reading The Friend, I lent it to a friend who has a dog that looks eerily similar to Apollo. Literary festivals can seem intimidating, but I find them to have a unique sense of community. Sitting in the Beinecke, I saw many people clacking on their keyboards or jotting their thoughts on a notepad just like me. “Writing is unraveling the mystery of yourself, writing about obsesses you,” Nunez said. I was part of an engaged audience, eager to unravel that mystery as well.
Of course, I wanted to have a good view of the celebrity speakers. Before the presentation began, I dragged my chair closer to the action. I was greeted cheerfully by the woman next to me, a middle-aged woman in scrubs. A young woman, who had given up her seat at the front for a little old lady with a cane, came to stand by us. “You can sit right here,” the woman in scrubs said, patting the handle of the chair. The young woman smiled. In the art of fiction, there is room for everyone.
