After months of preparation, planning, and a venue upgrade, on Tuesday Butler’s first annual Writer’s Harvest came and went without a hitch. It was, in the words of one of our attendees, “One of the coolest, most amazing things I’ve ever gotten to see.” Hopefully you managed to hear about it from a friend, read about it in the paper (or on this very blog), or maybe you saw one of its beautiful posters– and hopefully you attended.
If you did, you saw eight (8!) tall boxes of donated rice and dried pasta filled to the brim, and you saw 761 spectators of all ages fill Clowes Hall. Considering the capacity of our original venue – Atherton Hall’s Reilly Room – is 400, and those eight boxes of donations added up to over 900 pounds of food (1.2 pounds of food per attendee), I’d say this harvest was a resounding success. Not bad for our first, eh?
Both Butler and Second Helpings want to extend our gratitude to everyone who came and gave so generously.
And of course, we also want to thank our readers for absolutely hitting it out of the park (as expected, of course). They were fantastic. Added to the line-up late, our opener (and MFA student) Allyson Horton walked on stage without introduction and tore it up. Under the bright hot lights she delivered three poems with the kind of verve and confidence I doubt I could replicate in front of 761 people. A mother and daughter pair in front of me nodded and jotted notes in the short silence after every rhyme.
Exuberant as always, Ben Winters, on top of reading a pivotal moment from The Last Policeman, delivered his enlightening take on the mystery novel– rather that all novels should be called “mystery novels,” or that work in his niche genre should just be called “novels,” because the core purpose of art, stories especially, is to create mystery. I watched the same mother from before scrawl something onto a note card which she passed to her daughter. I’m only a little ashamed to say I looked. It read, “Do you think he’s always this energetic– or is it the John Green effect?”
Susan Neville shared a spellbinding (just as I promised) essay on the nature of fabrication. Brimming with insight into the process of writing, Susan’s essay likened writing to the mechanical processes she observed during various factory tours, yet simultaneously packed paragraph after paragraph with exuberant language, with risk and play. Somehow fabricating writing is and is not exactly like assembling the motor of a car.
John Green was a ripe peach, charming as always. You could feel those under 14 (half the room) surge and swoon as he spoke. And after he read this passage from The Fault in Our Stars: “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once,” I swooned. After that, Green, in keeping with the tradition of a writer’s harvest, where work from the past year is shared, read us three chapters of his in-progress novel The Data Plot. Chapters he had written the day before, and the morning of, that hadn’t yet been subjected to his editor. And they were equally as fantastic, raucous, hilarious, and weighty.
All said, it was a good night with good writers serving a good purpose. Here’s hoping next year’s, second annual harvest is even gooder better.