I spent last weekend as a volunteer at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books where I was given a mint green t-shirt to wear and advised to carry a fanny pack for my water bottle, keys and sunscreen. I arrived at my first shift without an agenda, ready to take my place where I was needed. With so many choices (wardrobe, schedule) out of the way, it was easier for me to turn off the part of my brain that worries. Attending the festival can be great fun, but it’s an experience that, for me, can also bring up a series of prickly questions and concerns about my identity as a writer. Where should I go? Who should I see? Shouldn’t I be further along? Doing more?
My job as an Author Escort muted those questions. The handout described exactly what I should be doing, and inside those boundaries, I felt more like myself.
My fellow volunteers were enthusiastic, kind, responsible, curious, and filled with a love of books. I met a journalist, a notary, a retiree, several students, a social worker, numerous USC employees and a handful of teachers. In between panels, our conversations covered everything from movies, parenting, reading, and writing, to climate change, menopause, and the state of our world.
As an author escort, I had a front row seat for Stories from Inside the Healthcare System, where Ruha Benjamin, author of “Viral Justice,” encouraged us to look at the way health is affected by social stressors and offered a path toward mutual aid and collective healing. Anthony Chin-Quee, (“I Can’t Save You,”) spoke of the value of writing toward self-discovery: “If I’m asking the reader to do internal work, I have to meet them half way.” Ricardo Nuila, (“The People’s Hospital”) pointed to money as the primary reason some people benefit from health care in America while others are excluded, and Nicole Chung (“A Living Remedy,”) spoke movingly about the recent death of her parents and the way she felt betrayed by the impersonal, disconnected and difficult to navigate medical system. “We are made to feel that we should be experts,” she said. “We are encouraged to blame ourselves and each other.”
On the Inner Journeys panel, Carla Hall of the LA Times editorial board engaged Pico Iyer, (“The Half-Known Life,”) Jaime Greene (“The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos,”) and Dacher Keltner (“Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and how it can Transform Your Life,)” in a wide ranging chat about awe, extraterrestrials, death and beauty. “Everything that is essential,” said Iyer, “is unknown or half known.”
Sunday morning found me in the Broccoli Theater for a memoir and poetry panel moderated by Alex Espinosa (“Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime.”) Matthew Zapruder, (“Story of a Poem,”) summed up his process as a way for him to “understand myself so I cannot go forth and harm people.” Saeed Jones (“Alive at the End of the World”) described writing memoir as “spending a lot of time in the woods of yourself.”
It was good for me to be out of the woods for a while.
My final job as volunteer was to accompany Patt Morrison and Joan Baez to their discussion and subsequent signing. “It is presumed,” Morrison said at the beginning of the conversation, “that Ms. Baez is the soundtrack of your life.”
Because this was true for me, I did not tell my story then, and I won’t bother you with it here. (You probably have your own.)
Both women were wise and kind and funny and powerful and it is always good to meet your heroes and find they are just as heroic as you imagined.
I have no images of my time at The LA Times Festival of Books.
Some years ago, a photographer told me about the time he went on a whale watch. He’d been out in a Zodiac all day with camera in hand, alert and ready to capture earth’s largest mammal. Over and over, he clicked his shutter on flukes and spouts, and on dark bodies emerging like ephemeral islands in the water. It was the shot he didn’t get that remained most vivid in his memory. A whale swam right alongside the little orange boat and the photographer looked down just as the whale tipped slightly. The water, all inky thick ripple, seemed to move with the briny breath of the creature, and the photographer was simultaneously aware of the stillness of the moment and the speedy world spinning. The whale’s eye was huge, he told me. And so close he might have reached out and touched a finger to the lens. The photographer’s camera was a cold weight in his hands. Eye to eye, he held that whale’s gaze for as long as he could.
Eye to eye!
Gorgeous, lilting prose that makes the hair on my arms rise.