Being at the Brooklyn Book Festival—which I also attended in its year of inception, and which has clearly multiplied its prowess since then—was rejuvenating. Really, it’s not a bad place to be at on a Sunday when you’ve been feeling brain-dead for months. I only wish I’d gotten there soon enough to catch more panels than I did.
The annual Brooklyn Book Festival returns to Borough Hall this Sunday (forecast is sunny), featuring a multitude of vendors, panels and workshops, and covering a wide range of interests: fiction, poetry, biography, comics, politics. Admission is free, but a ticket must be picked up for select events, such as the Poetry, Pop, and Hip-Hop panel, where Thurston Moore and Lupe Fiasco, amongst others, discuss “how poets, songwriters and rappers push language in new and essential ways”. See full schedule
Since you can pick up a ticket only an hour prior to each event, and the turnout was great last year, making it into ticketed panels one after the next will probably be impossible. Here are the ones I’ll be trying to get into.
Francine Prose was at Strand to read and discuss her newest, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Loves Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them. The book demonstrates how careful reading of great writers is an effective way of learning to write, but it also appears to be her long-due tribute to these masters. Though Prose is a prolific author with 14 novels, 4 non-fiction titles, and several children’s books published to date, she does not hold an MFA; “Can Creative Writing Be Taught?” is the question with which she opens her book. She explains that though great line-editing skills can be picked up from a fiction workshop, as can the feeling of a community, a writing class was not where she learned to write; it was from reading books that she polished her craft, and it is this way of learning for which the book provides encouragement and guidance.
More after the jump
