On history, manifestation, and the Gaithersburg Book Festival.
This past Saturday featured a highlight of my year, every year: the Gaithersburg Book Festival. It’s a big literary event for the DMV (that’s DC, Maryland, and Virginia for non-locals) and it measures on a national scale, attracting bestselling authors from around the country to speak on their work. The setting is a particularly beautiful rec center in Gaithersburg with rolling green hills and a pond. Like a music festival, multiple stages run simultaneous programming, allowing attendees to flit between panels, interviews, workshops, and poetry readings all day long. By some luck the last couple of years have seen warm Spring weather, inviting good crowds of local readerships and families looking to enjoy the outdoor event. In addition to book-centric programming (with literally dozens of recognizable authors) there are loads of kid activities, food trucks, and local vendors selling crafts, food, and yes, more books.
The festival runs a strong historical fiction panel most years featuring different authors and diverse topics. This year was no exception with such well-known novelists as Jeff Shaara and Louis Bayard discussing their new works, The Old Lion and Jackie and Me, respectively. Most of the author interviews and panels also include solid Q&A sessions, and the audience in this one was particularly energized, asking plenty of insightful questions. One attendee asked how the authors choose when to borrow from the historical record in their work and when to use fictional creation. Both Shaara and Bayard provided thoughtful responses about how history as we study it is inextricably mixed with perspective, bias, and motive. Bayard, almost off-handedly, said, “History is a fiction,” and boom, now I have a new maxim to use.
It reminds me of the great John Waters quote, “And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, ‘I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth.’ Fiction is the truth, fool!” There is a contingent of readers who look down on historical fiction. Why read a fictional account of a historical period when you could spend your time reading about the real thing? Of course, people like what they like, and they should read whatever they want just as much as they like… I just want readers to make informed choices. That is what I would wish for people at large. If your interest in reading history is spurred by your interest in spending your reading time to learn new things, I can assure you that fiction can give you just as much new knowledge as non-fiction. From re-contextualizing historical events to imagining very real human character, fiction (and historical fiction, in my personal preference) can broaden your worldview, and even teach you tangible, proven facts, if that’s your thing. And non-fiction should not be read as the arbitration of truth, for that matter. Non-fiction should be read with as critical an eye as when reading fiction, examining the context and authorship and style to understand and appreciate all its facets. And that’s what Bayard was getting at, except in a very pithy and sharp way.
The best part of GBF is the author signings. All authors featured in talks and panels have signing lines after their events, and GBF is special for gifting attendees with the experience of getting to meet and talk to the authors one-on-one. They are all eager to meet readers, share knowledge, answer questions, customize signings, etc. Other book festivals are so big that you don’t get this opportunity, but GBF feels especially intimate and welcoming in this aspect. I always look forward to getting to meet new-to-me authors, thank them for their work, and even ask a burning question or two.
This brings me to something I’ve been thinking about for years now. Every year I attend GBF, I spend a couple minutes picturing myself on one of these panels. I think, “Next year, I’ll be here as a soon-to-be published author.” And I have been published! Before and since attending, I’ve been published in print and online. But… not as a novelist. And that’s the next step for me. I don’t want to go to GBF in 2024 without a novel under my belt. This is as good a place as any to lay down what I really want: I want to be an author with a book deal in 2024. Understanding the timeline of professional publishing informs me that, even if I were to sell a book to a publishing house tomorrow I would not have a book in hand by next year, so the signing is what I’m after. But that’s what is in my sights, that is what I am working toward every day, and that is what I am making myself accountable to in this blog. Someday I will attend GBF as a featured author. As Octavia Butler articulated in her own personal motivation work, “So be it! See to it!”