Dispatches from the Texas Book Festival
Deep Dives
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Since I started writing on Substack in October of 2023, this newsletter has unintentionally become a chronicle of the Texas Book Festival, a whole weekend of writers talking about books that I attend every November. (You can read my previous TBF posts here and here.)
This year, most of the panels I attended were in the Texas Capitol or the poetry tent, which was right across the street from the governor’s mansion. On Sunday, at a panel featuring Texas poet Cecily Parks and California poet Rachel Richardson, we had to strain to hear over the howling of a brown dog behind Governor Abbott’s fence. “I’d like to ask him about his home life,” said Richardson.
The TBF is where you sometimes get to meet and ask questions of your favorite authors. I met Miriam Toews at a memoir panel and walked through the Capitol with her to the signing tent. In the Capitol—where I have been a child on a field trip, a mom, a tourist, a state employee, and a protestor—I walked with Miriam into the center of the rotunda and told her, Look up! and pointed to the star at the top with the letters T-E-X-A-S around it. That was sort of a dream come true.
And now that I have taken the super special employee tour all the way to the top of the rotunda, I got to tell her about how dirty it is up there.
The TBF is also where middle-aged women eat trail mix out of tote bags so that they don’t have to stop going to panels. On Saturday night, eating my first hot meal of the day, I didn’t want to answer when my husband asked if I had any takeaways. It wasn’t a “takeaway” kind of event, I thought, as I ate fried chicken with my fingers. The next morning, however, I woke up thinking about his question, and an interesting theme presented itself.
I don’t remember what the question Donika Kelly was answering when she talked about how she decides whether to publish a poem. It was Saturday morning and she was sitting at a dais in the basement of the Capitol, beside fellow poets Tiana Clark and Amanda Johnston. (Johnson, the moderator, is also the founder of
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