This past weekend was the first annual Woodstock Writers Festival, an event I bought a pass to way back when I was feeling totally healthy and not slinking around with this disgusting whatever it is I have and can’t get rid of. The little condo Husband and I have upstate is less than ten miles from Woodstock, and since the festival fell on Valentine’s weekend it seemed custom-made for a lovely getaway of cozy togetherness and meaningful separateness. As it turned out, it was neither.
Husband was recuperating from his own health crappiness and didn’t feel like the three-hour drive. I didn’t either but I would have had to be scheduled for an amputation to miss hanging out with a couple of hundred other writers and hearing several famous authors speak. The festival ran Friday to Monday, which meant Sunday morning found me in the empty library parking lot in my pajamas and winter coat trying to glom onto their free wireless so I could send Husband a witty Valentine message. I could have been an upright citizen and gone to Panera’s which is also free, but that would have required clothing and lip gloss.
The festival was terrific despite the glitches inherent in the maiden voyage of any endeavor, in this case over enrolled workshops and one famous author who should have been reeled in and told there are more nouns, verbs and adjectives than fuck, fuck and fuck. I don’t know whether her appearance at our festival demonstrated the real persona of Julie/Julia author Julie Powell, but after listening to her for far longer than was humanly necessary I will forever think of her as Boring/Boringer.
The best part was hearing everyone’s story and the way they chose to tell it. The theme of the festival was Memoir, a writing form the reading public has embraced since the advent of reality television and the human devastation of 9/11. For whatever reason, people are interested, even fascinated, by the lives of others, and those others don’t even have to be celebrities or circus performers. Although now that I’ve said that, one of my favorite readings was by a young woman with a Sarah Silverman thing going on who wrote a vibrant lust scene between a carnival worker and a society girl trying to find herself on the carny circuit. It almost made me want to go out and hug someone sweaty.
Over the course of the weekend, I met a woman from Chicago who is writing a memoir/cookbook as a tribute to her mother; a Michigan mom who plans to blog about leaving the corporate rat race to run the family farm; and a woman who looked very familiar to me who is writing the story of her dramatic weight loss. When I told her I felt like I’d met her somewhere before she said, “Did I look like this or was I 300 pounds?” Not a question you expect to hear. It turns out she lives on the same street as my brother and sister-in-law so I probably really have seen her. And I think she was thin.
The real revelation for me was that I have something in common with golfers, fantasy football leaguers, quilters, and Trekkies. I like being with people who are passionate about my passion. Hard to believe I didn’t already know that.
Today’s Fotos show us Signs of Woodstock
retro festival logo
bearsville theatre staircase
but remember to put them back on
love the one you’re with