Haystack Book Festival explores far-ranging topics

By Joe Kelly

From a small conversation six years ago with a biographer of the poet John Ashberry, Norfolk’s Haystack Book Festival has evolved into a multi-day exploration that remains true to its roots in literature but now ranges into criticism, religion, history, foreign affairs, journalism, domestic politics and usually quite a bit more.

This year’s festival hit its stride with more events and larger audiences, setting a model that, according to one of its chief organizers, Michael Selleck, will serve it for years to come.

The festival got underway under incredibly stormy skies so perhaps it was appropriate that the opening session featured that perennial rainmaker of the publishing industry, the memoir. In this case, two books by daughters of prominent critics were featured: Priscilla Gilman’s on her father, Richard Gilman, a long-time drama critic and Yale professor, and Ada Calhoun’s on her father, Peter Schjeldahl, a poet and, for more than 20 years, the art critic at the New Yorker. Both men were Olympian in their influence and both daughters cut their fathers down to size in loving and, to varying degrees, affectionate portraits in which they also interrogate themselves and their choices. Both books were set among amusing, if not occasionally frightening, accounts of growing up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.

The theme of memoir and interrogation continued in the annual Brendan Gill lecture, presented this year by Susanna Moore about her latest novel, “The Lost Wife.” It is loosely based on an account by a 19th century Minnesota woman, Sarah Wakefield, who was abducted and ultimately saved from death through her relationship with a Sioux native. Moore noted that whenever Wakefield wrote positively about her experience she was vilified. Moore spoke of her own suspicion, not of what happened, but of how Wakefield had smoothly adopted different identities to survive. She wrote “The Lost Wife” to try to find the sustaining character behind it all.

By Saturday, the skies had cleared, and the festival left memoir and fiction behind, turning to religion, war and politics.

Elizabeth Bucar and Bob Smietana wrestled with the question of what happens if churches disappear but people still want to benefit from all the ways they contribute to community life.

Atlantic staff writer George Packer and war correspondent and author Elizabeth Becker remembered their friend and colleague, the late Anne Garrels, and discussed Baghdad, Viet Nam, Ukraine and the many political wars on the home front.

In the heaviest back and forth of the festival, historians Robert Schneider and Samuel Moyn debated why liberals today are so ineffectual. For Schneider, it’s rooted in the failure to grapple with the very real roots of resentment, the emotion he sees as dominating politics. Moyn took a narrower approach, indicting Cold War-era thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling for abandoning the New Deal-like commitment to the power of the state and, as a result, leaving liberals with little left to say.

Throughout Saturday’s discussions, there were numerous references to “flyover country,” America’s vast expanse between major cities. The session on Sunday morning offered a chance to visit that terrain first-hand thanks to Neil King Jr., whose book details his 330-mile trek from Washington, D.C. to New York, and Rinker Buck, who recounted his 2,000-mile journey from Pittsburgh to New Orleans aboard a wooden flatboat.

Haystack Book Festivals follow no particular pattern, but by Sunday it’s not unusual for nature to get the last word. Ecologist Carl Safina capped the program with the account of the relationship he and his wife developed with a wild screech owl, Alfie, that left the audience by turns mesmerized, skeptical and ultimately gobsmacked, especially by a video of Alfie nuzzling against his bent finger. Safina’s matter-of-fact account of interspecies relationship building brought Norfolk’s 2023 Haystack Book Festival to a perfectly dramatic close.

More details about this year’s authors and their books, as well as previous Haystack Book Festivals, can be found on the website of its sponsor, the Norfolk Foundation, at norfolkfoundation.net/