You might wonder what a reader gets out of a literary festival. Writers get tips on how to market their work, the chance to share with other writers, critiques of their writing, if they attend such a workshop. What do readers get: what do they want? First off, they get to see authors, people they admire or are curious about. By listening to writers speak, a reader gets to expand that sense of belonging to the world created in the writing. The stories about how ideas evolve into books are fascinating, and become a prolongation of the enjoyment of the book. Listening to authors speak about their processes also allows readers to hone their sense of what makes writing good, why they particularly like something, or even why they don’t. There’s a sort of expansion of awareness as we see what methods and techniques the author uses to make a point or convey a mood. Readers learn about the transmission of ideas from these discussions, what works, what doesn’t. And that’s not including the content of the writing. I know an elderly man who never was much of a reader. His wife is, though, and she remarked to me once that he has very little understanding of other people, and she thought it was because he never read anything, only watches golf on TV. We don’t want to draw too many conclusions here, but there is another result of reading, and that is learning, be it factual or experiential. And it is fascinating to see and talk with those who arrange those lessons, the writers, especially since that is often not their expressed intent at all. So, we readers may not be gathering publishing tips for ourselves, but we are very interested in hearing from those who do, seeing them in the flesh, and learning more about what makes the magic in the writing they do.
Scarlett K
