On a mid-October evening in 2014, two preeminent authors — literary journalist Gail Sheehy and acclaimed historian
David Maraniss — discussed the significance of Monica Lewinsky in front of a packed audience at the Central Library’s Community Room.
“Those are the moments when, if you’re not in the room and you hear about it later, you feel like you missed something,” says Conor Moran, director of the Wisconsin Book Festival, who was there that night. “We always want events where a lot of people get together and create some energy.”
The festival, a free four-day celebration of reading and writing organized by the Madison Public Library and held at venues in downtown Madison, generates plenty of energy.
This year’s event happens Oct. 22-25 and offers something for everyone — not just academics and bibliophiles. Among the many highlights will be presentations by Pulitzer Prize winners (Maraniss and fiction writer Adam Johnson), a National Book Award recipient (Timothy Egan), a Newbury Medal winner for children’s literature (Madison-based Kevin Henkes) and a former U.S. secretary of labor (Robert Reich).
But things almost didn’t turn out this way.
When the Wisconsin Humanities Council opted in 2012 to no longer oversee the event it began in 2002, the library emerged as the most likely successor — even though it was in the midst of a $29 million renovation of the Central Library at 201 W. Mifflin St.
“We were talking about taking on a large project that had this iconic attachment to our community, right after we would be opening our new doors to the public,” says Greg Mickells, director of the Madison Public Library. “There were a lot of ‘should we’ and ‘should we not’ discussions. Eventually, we realized the significance of what this event meant not only to the Madison community but also as a symbol of literacy in the city.”
The 2013 Wisconsin Book Festival took place mere weeks after the Central Library’s grand opening and made fast use of the facility’s expanded public spaces, technology features and second entrance.
The festival is funded in large part by the Madison Public Library Foundation, which contributed approximately $300,000 over the first three years of the library’s oversight, as well as an increasing number of sponsors and partners. The foundation recently committed to funding the festival for another three years, through 2018.
Fewer days (four instead of five), venues (eight to 10 instead of 35 to 40) and events (70-plus instead of 130-plus) also have made the festival more manageable and practical.
“One of the biggest challenges was that we didn’t have the capacity to host the festival the way the Wisconsin Humanities Council did,” says Tana Elias, digital services and marketing manager for the Madison Public Library. She says earlier festivals included many academic authors, which might have given the impression — right or wrong — that it was not an event for the masses.
One way to change that impression? Last year’s festival featured a one-of-a-kind event, titled “Science of the Supper Club,” which could only happen in Wisconsin. Complete with appetizers and demonstrations, the celebration spotlighted the food, culture and history of the state’s storied supper club tradition with three Wisconsin-based food-and-beverage authors.
“I’ve noticed at book festivals everywhere — and perhaps a bit more at the Wisconsin Book Festival — that audiences are diversifying, and people seem passionate about soaking it all in,” says Maraniss, a part-time Madison resident who has a long history with the festival. He will make an appearance Oct. 24 at 1:30 p.m. in Community Room 301 and 302 at Central Library to discuss his new bestseller, Once In a Great City: A Detroit Story. “The original idea of spreading the Wisconsin Book Festival all over the city at different venues made it a little too diffuse. The best festivals I attend have a single location as a common gathering place.”
The Central Library has become the hub for many festival events, and other venues tend to be within walking distance, including Overture Center for the Arts, Monona Terrace, the Wisconsin Historical Museum and the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Festival attendance has remained steady the past three years, Moran says, hovering between 10,000 and 12,000, slightly lower than the number of people who attended the 2012 festival. That may be because the festival is hosting fewer events.
But working in the festival’s favor are recent reports that print books are alive and well and not succumbing to the e-book craze that had analysts writing off print for good. In fact, the American Booksellers Association reports that more independent bookstores are open today — 1,712 companies in 2,227 locations — than at any other time since at least 2009.
Moran and his staff are branding the “Wisconsin Book Festival” as a year-round program rather than an annual event by increasing the number of author appearances in Madison during other times of the year. The festival is partnering with UW’s Go Big Read to welcome Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, to Varsity Hall in Union South on Oct. 26. Moran says if the idea of the festival were limited to just four days, he wouldn’t have landed New York Times bestselling author Sarah Vowell on Oct. 30 at Central Library to discuss her new book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, an account of French aristocrat the Marquis de Lafayette.
Another highlight of this year’s festival is a reading by Nickolas Butler. The Eau Claire-based author appeared at the festival last year in support of his bestselling novel, Shotgun Lovesongs. On Oct. 24, he will read from a new short story collection, Beneath the Bonfire, and also preview his new novel, The Faithlessness of Men — about three generations of families traveling to a Boy Scout camp in northern Wisconsin.
Like Maraniss, Butler has a long history with the Wisconsin Book Festival. He lived in Madison for 10 years, while the event was evolving, and volunteered as an author escort.
Butler says one of his favorite book festival memories was hosting Harvey Pekar, the famous comic book writer. “He and I spent the afternoon together at Lake Monona eating pizza and talking about his family and his fame,” says Butler. “He passed away five years ago, and I feel really fortunate to have had that opportunity.”
Other cities around Wisconsin have their own book festivals, including Appleton, Edgerton, Mineral Point and Waukesha. But the event in Madison is the most comprehensive, and the only festival in the state that will be on TV. After filming just a bit of the festival last year, C-SPAN will provide 12 straight hours of coverage from the festival this year, broadcasting live from Central Library on Oct. 24.
“C-SPAN is going to feature what we’re presenting and broadcast it to the nation,” Moran says, sounding a little stunned. “That’s a testament to the role of the Wisconsin Book Festival in our city and our state.”
