First Edition of Haystack Book Festival in Norfolk

Norfolk, longtime home of The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill and James Laughlin’s New Directions, has never stopped being a literary town, and this fall it will host the inaugural edition of the Haystack Book Talks festival.  Over the weekend of Oct. 13 and 14, writers with variously shared interests will come together in a series of open-ended and unmoderated conversations on topics ranging from the social and ecological impacts of global warming to the life and work of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.  The conversational format loosely follows the example of the United Kingdom’s Hay Festival of Literature and Arts that has run for more than 30 years in the village of Hay-on-Wye—a town that, like Norfolk, sits in the midst of a region of great natural beauty.  The festival’s organizers, Norfolk Foundation, hope to make the festival an annual event, with other one-off Haystack Book Talks scattered throughout the year.

This year’s program features four panels on the Saturday and a fifth panel on Sunday (along with an opportunity to tour Great Mountain Forest’s unusual Tobey Bog).  Between panels, there will be book sales and signings at the Norfolk Library, and the Norfolk Historical Society is mounting a special exhibition about one of Norfolk’s less-known bits of publishing history—Dick Child’s Modern Age Books, founded in 1936 as one of the country’s first producers of mass-market paperbacks.

Saturday’s panels include:

Novelists Rumaan Alam “That Kind of Mother” and  Angelica Baker “Our Little Racket” discussing the shifting pressures on and tensions within the contemporary family.

Mark Eisner, author of “Neruda: The Poet’s Calling,” the first full-scale biography of the Nobel Prize–winning poet and activist, in conversation with Jessica Powell, translator of one of Neruda’s most important and strangely neglected early works, “venture of the infinite man.”

John Keene, author of “Counternarratives” and translator of numerous works, and Rosa Alcalá, translator of the contemporary Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña and author of “MyOTHER Tongue,” talking about the complexities of voice in their work as writers and translators.

Inveterate travelers and trespassers Ken Ilgunas “This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back” and Kate Harris “Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road” explore the prospect of  a renewed imagination of the commons in a world of private property and national sovereignty.

On Sunday, writer and activist Julian Brave NoiseCat will talk with Jeff Goodell, author of the widely acclaimed “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World,” about the social and ecological inevitabilities of climate transformation.