For the second year in a row I attended the Bay Area Book Festival. A collection of authors, publishers, readers, and other bookish sorts also show up for the weekend in Berkeley. This year, like last year, I discovered some great sessions that led me to think about things from a new perspective and that I might not otherwise have learned about.

One great thing about the book festival is that, true to its slogan, it connects readers and writers. Much like the podcast Song Exploder, the sessions caused me to think far more about the process behind creating the things I love than I might have otherwise.

Something that struck me and my friend, however, is how few of the attendees were young. There are a lot of attendees (of sessions, especially) that seem to be retired, quite a few middle-aged people, and in the YA-fiction sessions I attended, a good number of children and their parents. In fact, much of the festival seemed designed to be family friendly.

However, in a reflection of publishing at large (perhaps) the festival neglects the population that is most clearly present in Berkeley and the Bay Area to me—the ~ * millennials *~ that attend the university and work in tech and other industries all around the bay. I saw a few other people in their mid-twenties and mid-thirties, but not nearly as many as I’d hope to see. No one that I talked to in that age range (save my friend) knew about the festival that weekend, and I saw almost no marketing for it aside from the emails from the organizers (thanks to signing up for the email list last year) in the social media sites and feeds that I follow. Hopefully in future years this will change.

I also struggled to determine who the actual target audience of the festival was based on the sessions I attended and the booths I witnessed wandering around (I’m not much of an actual booth-visitor). The fest again, advertises itself as connecting readers with writers, but it seemed to be connecting writers with other writers just as often. Whether on panel discussions or through writer-oriented booths in the park, that was a very present and understandable theme. I’m not sure it matters that the target of the festival is so broad, and perhaps it might flourish even more if it were more explicitly targeted to this wider audience. But again, perhaps not.

I attended two sessions each day of the festival, and here are my impressions of each of them.

Saturday

The first session I attended on Saturday was called Worlds We Create: Young Adult Fantasy Writers on Creating Alternate Realities and Memorable Characters. It’s only in the last year or so that I started realizing that I do read fantasy and sci-fi novels, and while I didn’t seek them out when I was younger (sorry, Tamora Pierce and Phillip Pullman), I always enjoyed historical fiction and fairy tale retellings. This session was explicitly about how fantasy writers go about creating the worlds in their novels. The moderator had some great questions, they asked about how authors develop characters to reflect the world they inhabit, whether the story or the characters or the world come first, and more.

They discussed using “sensitivity readers,” a concept I hadn’t heard of before this panel, who you can hire to provide feedback and criticism about the way that you’ve told the story of a character with experiences that you haven’t had directly. One of the authors, who set her latest book in turn of the century New York City, spoke of the balance of being sensitive to certain life experiences and having to confront discrimination with the focus of blowing it up in the book.

Needless to say, I’ll be thinking a lot more about the quality of worldbuilding after this panel. I was in the midst of reading a series that was set in a world that took awhile for me to understand, and seemed to use a glossary to attempt to offload some of the worldbuilding heavy lifting, yet the story and the characters were fairly well-developed enough for me to appreciate it and continue following through. The balance of world-building time and story-telling time was also covered in the panel, with one of the authors mentioning that she’ll use worldbuilding as a way to get started writing a new book if she’s struggling with how to start.

The second session I attended on Saturday was rather different from the YA fiction panel. This session featured Masha Gessen in conversation with Orville Schell on Truth, Lies and Totalitarianism in Russia and the U.S.. This session featured quite a few great moments. My friend pointed out that she hadn’t before heard someone speak with such attention to the precision of their language, yet that is exactly how Gessen spoke. They were very precise when agreeing or disagreeing with Schell, and didn’t mince words. Some paraphrases of what they said in the session, along with my own characterizations about what they said, follow.

Totalitarianism succeeds through destruction… not durability of the presence of totalitarianism or genetic makeup or expectations but of the absence of shared understanding and society and other things that help you move forward in the face of it.

They took care to distinguish her perspective from that of Schell’s. He asked a question about whether totalitarianism or autocracy persisted in some countries due to the genetic makeup of people or due to a durability of the people, and they disagreed, though recognized that they agreed on the state but not the cause of the state. The absence of certain things, rather than the presence of something, is what is helping totalitarianism succeed and persist in these nations.

We’ve constructed a story about what happened in post-soviet states but not what happened in the west… democracy isn’t a state achieved by a country but a spectrum (becoming more or less democratic)

I really appreciated that they mentioned this. As someone who studied post-Soviet states in college, I am quite familiar with the stories constructed there, but I hadn’t considered this perspective until they mentioned it. In my recent travels and events in the United States, it’s become clear that the Western states didn’t pay much attention to developing an identity that didn’t position other states as enemies and actively maintaining democracy.

Gessen also mentioned, perhaps in response to an audience question, why Trump admired Putin so much. In response to that, they referenced Tim Snyder in the NYRB, who wrote “Putin is the person that Trump plays on TV.” Expanding on that point, they continued that “Trump talks of power, off the charts popularity, and control… but doesn’t really understand where that comes from.” And where that comes from is autocracy. They also discussed their own article in the NYRB about autocracy. Also discussed was the differing perspectives of politicians, businessmen, and others in an autocratic state compared with a democratic state.

There’s this belief from Russian politicians, journalists, businessmen that everything can be bought or is for sale or is transactional… a few years ago that didn’t fly here but that’s changing here… apparent struggle to understand non-transactional motives in authoritarian societies and possible explanation for a lack of understanding of civil society… If public service and nonprofit motives are questioned or not understood then democracy is challenged

Schell also brought up countries that don’t deal with history in an honest way (like many totalitarian states, Russia or China especially have quite censored and limited views of their own past), Gessen spoke of WWII as being a touchstone in Soviet history in rewriting the past, but also continued to discuss whether a society can move forward with a distorted view of the past.

All societies have distorted views of the past…that’s trauma that societies have to deal with. Estonia for example has done a good job with this: “we trust one another, we were under occupation, and we’re going to rebuild based on that trust.” Germany had the advantage of short period of time and everyone could remember pre-totalitarianism and talk about perpetrators, bystanders, and victims…. but it’s totally muddled in the Soviet Union; people were both perpetrators and victims and no one was a bystander. How do you take responsibility for your own past if you messed it up? Whitewash the history…

One of the things that they mentioned as being most challenging for rebuilding in (or after) a totalitarian or autocratic state was imagination.

How do you rebuild when you can’t imagine a future or a past…and sometimes you can’t imagine the present because it’s so awful that you can’t fathom it…you reach for the past and confuse lack of imagination with understanding

When asked about her hopes for Russia in the future, they were blunt. “Russia is hopeless, scorched earth.” They did expand in response to a follow-up question to discuss the small-scale successes of some friends of theirs in starting focused community organizations, but acknowledged that people seeking to make change on a small scale, while inspiring, is a way of admitting defeat. After you start focusing almost exclusively on small-scale change, you’re no longer trying or dreaming of making those changes on a large scale.

Sunday

Sunday I slept in, so I skipped an earlier morning session I considered attending so again attended two sessions.

First I attended another YA fiction session, Reality Bites: Fiction About Teens’ Real Lives, which was really great. Another panel discussion, the authors discussed what they do when they write most of a book and realize it isn’t working, sometimes all you can do is “upcycle” some of the scenes into other books. The moderator also asked about recurring themes and iconography, and while one author mentioned trees (she writes largely thrillers that tend to involve the woods), another author mentioned that she often writes about the sky, likely because it represents us against the vastness.

Most relevant of all, I thought, was the discussion on how writing novels teaches you to be compassionate about multiple points of view. Kim Culbertson especially made some great points about this. Sometimes a character has to do something differently than the way you would. She mentioned that “Lots of people are uncomfortable when they hold themselves up to another person and the edges don’t match.” But she likes to challenge that in a way, to help people get to the understanding and consideration that other people are different from you and that may seem strange but it’s actually awesome, and we need to recognize that!

The second panel I attended was about immigration and identity, Living in Two Worlds: Crossing Borders and Identities to Create Home. The moderator asked each author in turn to speak about their book which led to a great focused discussion on the themes in each one.

First, Laleh Khadivi discussed her book and the challenge about writing about two worlds, especially that “one world is never going to believe the other world.” Next, Lesley Nneka Arimah discussed her book of short stories. She mentioned that she included Facebook in one of her stories because she was tired of reading stories set in contemporary Africa that didn’t mention social media. She underscored that while traditional infrastructure in Nigeria and other countries may be lacking, everyone has a cell phone and electronic communication is crucial to how they live their lives. It seemed out of touch not to acknowledge that reality of life in her fiction.

Carolina de Robertis spoke next about her novel, but my favorite quote by her came from the Q&A after the moderated panel concluded, which was that “Culture is not static; we can shift culture and push it open with the narratives that we live and write.” Pajtim Statovci spoke last about his novel, and addressing the fact that living through the trauma of immigration, especially as a refugee, doesn’t automatically make you stronger.

Sometimes our negative experiences don’t make us stronger. Sometimes they make us weaker and sad and pathetic.

That resonated with me, because it’s easy to look at those who have survived something traumatic and assign strength to them merely because they survived. But that isn’t always the case. This thread resonated with the other books on the panel as well, because the main character in Khadivi’s book is an immigrant who radicalizes after immigration. Lesley Nneka Arimah mentioned about wanting to write about flawed characters as well, in the vein that we often think of ourselves as better than we are, so she wanted to write about characters that do the wrong thing in service of finding their own truth.

Overall impressions

The festival was worth my time to attend, and spend time thinking and talking about books with and around other book-minded people. I look forward to the next year’s book festival and the sessions! It’s always easy to attend when it’s convenient to get to and the weather is beautiful. Now I’m inspired to tackle even more of the books on my shelves…