I'm a Writer. Here's Why I Hate Literary Festivals.

“Jove Decadent” by Ramon Casas, a painting that captures how I prefer to interact with literature.

People have been asking me if I’m going to the upcoming Santa Fe International Literary Festival. They assume I’d like that kind of thing. I don’t, by the way. I don’t like that sort of thing. Not even a little. Yes, I’m a writer. But it’s more of a calling and a curse, writing, and never something I’d have chosen as my vocation, had I not been condemned to writing at birth. And though it suprises people to hear it, I don’t like literary festivals. In fact, I hate them. Let me tell you why.

I came to writing from reading. From walking to the small local library in my neighborhood as a kid. It was an old house, converted. There’s nothing as magical as the quiet patience of that library, with its scent of soft wooden floorboards and freshly cut grass, in the days before smartphone and reality television. Reading, as I came to love it, was a private, solitary, slow, and delicious thing, something I had all to myself. Reading is among the most interior experiences a person can have, like meditation. And the best books are those whose authors disappear in service to the story, as a gift to the reader. Which is precisely why the literary festival makes no sense to me, and probably never will. Because at a literary festival, it’s all about the writer, just like the worst sorts of books.

Music festivals work. You can hear a whole song there. Film festivals work, too. You can experience the film there in its entirety. You can sit in a crowd (though I’d still rather not, thank you) and receive the thing itself, complete, in real time. A book festival offers no equivalent. You cannot read a book with care in a convention hall over an afternoon. What you get instead is the author — on a stage, performing, opining, quipping, explaining, competing, preening, basking, being important — which is almost always a lesser, louder version of what they do on the page.

The writers best suited to festivals are often the ones I trust least as writers. The performers. The egotists. The extroverts. The people who’ve confused saying something with having something to say. The book that needs its author present to complete it isn’t much of a book.

The only thing more intolerable than a literary festival, I have found, is a writers’ conference. The big ones, especially. Nothing but the extroverted writers, with their signature hats and pipes and turbans and egos the size of a small moon they drag around on a chain. All those moons, wrecking into each other in the elevators, their owners chuckling to make these interactions seem like camaraderie when in truth they are insecure brawls for the scraps of the reading universe that still remains.

To me, good writing only happens when writers get out of the way, when the words go direct to the reader’s heart and mind, so much so that the reader is able to forget the writer exists at all and sees in the story only a validating version of themselves. Literary festivals are counter to all of that. They trot the writer out as the interesting thing. But few of us are interesting, as people. This I promise you. The best writers have always been the solitary observers, outside looking in, with no call to occupty any spotlight.

No writer worth a damn has ever wished to be a celebrity author.

So, no. I’m not going to the literary festival.

I am ardently avoiding it, for the same reasons I avoid monster truck rallies.

Instead, I’ll be in the garden, with a book whose writer’s name escapes me because it’s just that good.