Round up of Festival of Faith and Writing, Calvin University

Soooo back from Grand Rapids and the Festival of Faith and Writing. It has been 6 years since we met in-person. I was last there in 2018.

Boy, has a lot changed. Of course, I’m/we’re older. I missed seeing some of the Calvin University faculty (Gary Schmidt, Karen Saupe) that used to introduce the speakers. Some of the intros were more informative than the actual speaker. This year, as the festival continues to regroup after the pandemic-induced hiatus, there were some measurable differences from past years.

As I mentioned I missed seeing some faculty—and, especially on Thursday, I noticed venues were half full (I’m being generous in that observation). In past years I saw way more of the student body taking advantage of the festival. Maybe there are just less English majors. The humanities have certainly taken a hit. There is a “new” financial/business department supported by the DeVoss/Amway family fortunes that I walked through to access the Prince Conference Center. I doubt the students hanging out there knew why all of us old ladies were traipsing through. The typical festival attendee skews older, white female. Me. They carry book bags with slogans against book banning, etc and wear chunky boutique necklaces, not me.

So, yeah, less attendees, less student interaction, and, at times, more Christian-ese than I remember in the past. I mean there’s always been excellent speakers and programming with a balance of invited speakers from diverse spiritual traditions—except this year it seemed to be a bit heavier on the Evangelical side. Friday and Saturday attendance ticked up and by Saturday I was having trouble deciding between sessions. I tend to be attracted to the writers who have won awards and are celebrated for their literary output rather than where they go to church, if they do at all. Two major discoveries were John Wray, from Wikipedia:

His second novel Canaan's Tongue (2005) is based on the legend of the preacher John Murrell, described by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi.[3] In connection with his second novel, he did a 600-mile tour by raft on the Mississippi River in 2005. In 2007 Wray was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the "Best of Young American Novelists".

His fifth novel, Godsend (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2018), was inspired by the story of John Walker Lindh. It follows 18-year-old Aden Sawyer, who runs away and disguises herself as a man to study Islam in Pakistan.

And, Curtis Sittenfeld, who writes these weird alternative world, what-if novels such as Rodham about Hillary Rodham Clinton only if she hadn’t married Bill and ends up teaching at Northwestern’s School of Law. She also wrote American Wife, a novel about Laura Bush—I know, go figure.

Some of the speakers were holdovers, originally invited upon the strength of a work put out in the last decade, but, because of the pandemic, were just now getting around to actually being at the Festival. Not that their work still wasn’t fresh, but there was an incongruity to the lineup that needed, in my opinion, more of a thru-line.

The last night featured Anthony Doerr, author of --, well, actually everyone there knew who he was and there was a huge community as well as festival turn-out. The arena where plenary speakers spoke was packed out. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve read almost everything he’s written, even the collection of short stories. I appreciate his work, but the hype was overdone. First, there was a lengthy introduction, leaving the main speaker about 40 minutes to talk about his work, maybe his process. I’m sure many of us there—at a Festival for writers and readers—were interested in his headspace, where he was when writing All the Light We Cannot See and his most recent, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Instead he took us on a chock-a-block image-filled PowerPoint that, though entertaining, had NOTHING to do with anything. Which is saying a lot as his works encompass so many themes and points in time and made up time. I mean, I got his point—everything connects. All he had to say was in my work I explore the interconnectedness of human life and the natural world. There, that’s it. Not by spending time clicking though slides taken from the internet.

Nevertheless, it was all great, even the overblown parts. I met up with folks, got reaffirmed in my writerly journey, and ended the festival by attending the student production of Little Women put on by the Calvin Theater Group. This particular production was an adaptation of Little Women by Kate Hamill, which allowed for interpretation and cast nuances that centered on Jo’s identity and particularly her affinity for boy’s clothing and men’s more active roles in society at the time. There might have been the teensiest bit of referencing that if given an option she might have wanted to transition—except if she lived in a red state where it was outlawed and, of course, not the 1880s where many of today’s state supreme courts seem to think we still live in.

More next post about the festival—and how I got there. Ahem, it involves a bike.