Haystack Festival brings literary minds to Norfolk

The Great Room at Norfolk Library filled to capacity for the Haystack Festival.

Jennifer Almquist

Haystack Festival brings literary minds to Norfolk

Just after noon on Sunday, Oct. 6, attendees of Norfolk Foundation’s Haystack Festival spilled out of the red Shingle Style Norfolk Library into brilliant October sunshine, emerging from the final book talk of the weekend (excepting an event for young readers later in the day). The talk, which was a conversation between horse experts journalist Sarah Maslin Nir and author David Chaffetz, was rife with equine puns and startling facts. The tongue-in-cheek use of the word “cavalier” brought laughs from the engaged audience, while Nir disclosed that horses eat for a full 16 hours a day.

The talk brought levity and humor to the festival’s conclusion, while also diving into the serious history of the relationship between society and horses. Chaffetz explained horses were fundamental in the formation of large empires: “We don’t see empires until horses became fundamental to the political state.” Nir elaborated that the “wild” horses in North America are not native, but feral horses descended from animals brought by Spanish imperialists. “No tea grows in England,” she explained, “it is the result of empire – and so are horses.”

Other talks included a conversation about the history of ballet between writers and dance critics Marina Harss and Mindy Aloff, a discussion between bestselling authors Michael Korda and Simon Winchester on wisdom and memory, and a heady chat about the intersection between academic ideas and the public sphere between public academics William Egginton and Samuel Moyn.

Festival Director Michael Selleck said that while he doesn’t curate for theme when selecting the speakers, a certain atmosphere tends to manifest. While last year the tone skewed political, he said, “this year things were more philosophical.”

Exemplifying the philosophical streak in the festival was a conversation between naturalist and writer Noah Charney and Great Mountain Forest executive director Mike Zarfos. Charney advocated for a philosophy of nature that “shouldn’t take species as good or bad.” He encouraged the audience to get out into their own yards and “learn the plants and critters” while remaining open to imaginative and novel understandings of ecology. He urged the crowd to follow a naturalist principle of “being out there, getting muddy and wet, and eating plants.”

Selleck was very pleased with the turnout this year, with few seats left empty and an audience that he said was “very engaged”. And why throw a festival like this one in Norfolk? “Norfolk is a cultural center,” he said, and he wants to “bring a literary element back to the cultural heart of Norfolk.”

Brooklyn and New York based writer Gillian Bagley gave the Brendan Gill Lecture on Friday night. The lecture is an annual talk given in memorial of Brendan Gill, a celebrated New Yorker writer who lived in Bronxville, N.Y. and Norfolk.

Appropriately, it was a family affair. Bagley is Gill’s granddaughter, and she was introduced by her cousin Anne Gill, another granddaughter of the writer. As she took the podium, Bagley fondly recalled spending summers with her grandfather in Norfork as a child – during one such stay, the two co-authored a book called “The Monster of Haystack Mountain.”

Beyond recalling memories, Bagley also presented and read from her new novel Negative Space, and reflected on how Gill influenced her own writing. She read a passage in which Gill said he sought to instill within his paragraphs “a weight and a shape no greater than a cloud of blue butterflies.” She said she strives to imbue her own fiction with this sense of “precise contours and the weight of something real,” informing her practice of “constant whittling” that defines the pared-down style of her prose.

This writing process doesn’t produce long novels, and she offered several jokes about her predilection for brevity that drew hearty laughter from the crowd. Several readers had told her they had finished the book in one sitting, she said, adding that, “I suspect it wasn’t that they couldn’t put it down, but that they didn’t have to.”

Latest News

Hotchkiss lacrosse ices Kingswood Oxford 19-0

LAKEVILLE — The Hotchkiss School opened the girls varsity lacrosse season with a big win in the snow against Kingswood Oxford School.

The Bearcats won 19-0 in a decisive performance March 26. Twelve different players scored for Hotchkiss, led by Coco Sheronas with four goals.

Keep ReadingShow less
HVRHS releases second quarter honor roll

FALLS VILLAGE — Principal Ian Strever announces the second quarter marking period Honor Roll at Housatonic Valley Regional High School for the 2024-2025 school year.

Highest Honor Roll

Grade 9: Parker Beach (Cornwall), Mia Belter (Salisbury), Lucas Bryant (Cornwall), Addison Green (Kent), Eliana Lang (Salisbury), Alison McCarron (Kent), Katherine Money (Kent), Mira Norbet (Sharon), Abigail Perotti (North Canaan), Karmela Quinion (North Canaan), Owen Schnepf (Wassaic), Federico Vargas Tobon (Salisbury), Emery Wisell (Kent).

Keep ReadingShow less
Thomas Ditto

ANCRAMDALE — Thomas Ditto of Ancramdale, born Thomas David DeWitt Aug. 11, 1944 in New York City changing his surname to Ditto at marriage, passed peacefully on Pi Day, March 14, 2025. He was a husband, father, artist, scientist, Shakespeare scholar, visionary, inventor, actor, mime, filmmaker, clown, teacher, lecturer, colleague, and friend. Recipient of numerous grants, awards and honors in both the arts and sciences, a Guggenheim and NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts fellow, he was a creative genius beyond his time. In addition to authoring scores of papers, he held several patents and invented the first motion capture system and the Ditto-scope, a radically new kind of telescope. He was a pioneer in computer generated video, film, and performance.

When not hard at work, he was always there to help when needed and he knew how to bring smiles to faces. He loved his family and pets and was supportive of his wife’s cat rescue work.

Keep ReadingShow less
Winifred Anne Carriere

SHARON — Winifred Anne Carriere passed away on March 6, 2025, at the age of 87. A resident of Sharon for many years, she later retired to Ancramdale, New York.

Born in New Haven to writers Albert Carriere and Winifred Osborn, Anne grew up in New York City. Raised in a Quaker family, she attended Friends Seminary, and The University of Wisconsin. Anne studied American Architectural History through Bard College’s University Without Walls. For her degree, she wrote a comprehensive history of the architecture of Sharon during its first hundred years.

Keep ReadingShow less