Also lurking in that Facebook stack of books photo I put up a few days ago are a few connections to the Brattleboro Literary Festival, which for 2025 is coming up on October 17-19. I’ve been involved with the Lit Fest since I don’t know when and sometimes my reading arises out of some Fest endeavor.
The Festival has been gloriously going on annually since 2002. During the online Covid era we started up more or less monthly Literary Cocktail Hours via Zoom and those have continued to this day. Hence the appearance in the stack of Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico by Ted Genoways. I served as an interlocutor for Ted’s LCH back on May 9, and we had a grand time boozing, er, schmoozing it up.
Ted Genoways, left
That session can be found here, along with a ton of Literary Cocktail Hours and sessions from the Festival itself at our YouTube channel,
This year’s Festival looks like it’s going be terrific, but then they pretty much all are. We should have a full house on Saturday afternoon when Ocean Vuong appears to talk about The Emperor of Gladness. That one actually appears in the stack because it was my book group’s most recent read. It was also a pick of that other little book group, Oprah’s.
We should also have a big crowd Sunday afternoon when Paul Lisicky and Henry Alford bring down the curtain on the Festival talking about their books—both about the one and only Joni Mitchell. I’m looking forward to introducing the authors, and I expect we’ll pipe them in with some appropriate tunes.
Lisicky’s book is in the stack photo, but I forgot Alford’s—I’m still reading it, so it was upstairs on my bedstead at the time. Here are the pair:
The books both swirl around Mitchell’s music and life, but they couldn’t be more different. Lisicky’s Song So Wild and Blue: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell is more interior, about the direct effect Joni’s music had on his own youth and adulthood, his creative life, his teaching, his love life (he and Alford are both gay).
Alford took a page out of one of Craig Brown’s books, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, to come up with his I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots. His two score and 13 lively chapters are more reportorial in nature—Alford dug deep in the vast catalog of secondary sources about Mitchell, but he did some of his own interviewing as well—if not with Joni herself. Neither author has, as far as I can tell, ever met Mitchell.
Alford’s chronology is haphazard, not unlike leafing through a pile of random snapshots, with much of the same incidental delight along the way.
I haven’t yet been able to find out if the pair have appeared together live since their books came out, so we may have something of a coup here. In any case, it should be a lively hour and fifteen minutes. If you get the urge for going, hope to see you there.
I first put this up on my Substack page, Tom’s Bedellicatessan
