wooden shoes and windmills

AAAHHHH..... a long satisfied exhale after a weekend spent celebrating one of my all-time favourite entities - books! Writers - published and unpublished alike - along with readers from all walks of life, filled the UCLA campus Saturday and Sunday for the LA Times Festival of Books. Nothing but books and writers and readers for two days!

Saturday my mother and I drove up to UCLA early. We snagged tickets (all free, mind you) to speakers like James Patterson and Sue Grafton - both were great (Grafton was cheeky and so funny in person). We browsed booths of book sellers - bought some books (just a few, surprisingly) - and enjoyed our book-loving selves thoroughly. I even hit up a few panels of authors discussing topics like Creative Non-fiction (Anne Patchett and others) and children's picture books (Rosemary Wells, Marie Louise Gay and others).

A surprise: my mom discovered Michael Hague, an illustrator with stunning work that I grew up loving, was signing books at one of the booths. I returned Sunday with an armful of my own copies. Gracious Mr. Hague signed all four of my books even though the limit was supposed to be three and he was 15 minutes past the end of his scheduled signing time. Hague has done illustrated copies of many classics. His version of Bilbo Baggins was the first I ever met, he brought the world of Pod, Homily and Arrietty Clock alive for me and his Mole will always be the protagonist I see when I read Kenneth Grahame's classic.




Sunday I headed back to LA on my own for a second day of book fun and the icing on my book festival cake: a reading by Anne Lamott from her newest book with a signing to follow! But, Anne (yes, of course, we're on a first name basis now :) was the last "act" of the day so I spent the rest of my time in a panel discussion titled How a Children's book Gets Published, with Authors Bebe Moore Campbell and Quincy Troupe and Illustrators Robin Preiss Glasser and Kadir Nelson and then a conversation with Mary and Carol Higgins Clark mediated by Connie Martinson.

About an hour before the much anticipated Anne Lamott reading I headed to the Barnes and Noble tent to purchase Anne's latest. When she finally came on stage to cheers from an overstuffed tent full of eager fans, she was exactly as I had imagined (with help from the info on the fly leaves of her books :). Bohemian. Funny. Purposeful. She read the first piece from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith and then fielded questions - only one of which attacked the committed Jesus follower's anti-war, anti-Bush, liberal, leftist leanings. She closed with the last chapter in her phenomenal book on writing: Bird by Bird. It was so exciting to hear from a writer that has so impacted me.

All of this paired with the fact that the late Bill Peet - a genius author and illustrator and another favorite that I was introduced to as a child - designed the festival logo, made for a superb celebration of literature.