Saratoga Book Festival weekend: Alvarez, Bohjalian, Lunden

The Saratoga Book Festival is in its final two days in downtown Saratoga Springs, with about two dozen author talks, panels and workshops set for Saturday, October 3, and Sunday, October 4. Nearly every session is free, and the weekend runs across five stages within walking distance of Broadway, plus a Sunday morning headline event at Skidmore College.

This is the sixth year of the festival, according to Saratoga TODAY. The event opened Thursday, October 1, with a ticketed keynote by Eric Idle, the Monty Python cofounder, who talked about his new memoir about buying an old property in Provence. Friday night brought the Literary Night Market, an evening of local authors and booksellers at Universal Preservation Hall. The weekend is where most of the programming sits.

The festival is organized by the Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library, the volunteer group that raises money for library programs. The group says on the festival page that more than 30 sessions are scheduled across the four days, and that sponsors and individual donors are what keep general sessions and youth programs free.

Where the sessions are

The weekend uses a handful of downtown rooms that most locals already know. Sessions move between them every 90 minutes or so, so it helps to know the map before you go.

• Universal Preservation Hall on Washington Street hosts the headline talks on Saturday and several Sunday sessions.
• Caffe Lena on Phila Street has the smaller book chats on Saturday afternoon.
• Saratoga Arts on Broadway runs panels both days and the Saturday evening music program.
• The Saratoga Springs Public Library on Henry Street holds the workshops and the horror and speculative fiction panels.
• The Children’s Museum at Saratoga hosts the KidZone on Sunday afternoon.

The one session away from downtown is Joan Lunden’s Sunday talk at the Arthur Zankel Music Center on the Skidmore College campus off North Broadway.

Saturday, October 3

Saturday is the heaviest day on the schedule, and the two headline talks are back to back in the morning at Universal Preservation Hall. Times below come from the festival’s published session schedule.

1. At 9:30 a.m., Saratoga Poet Laureate Jay Rogoff and poet Marilyn McCabe lead a poetry revision workshop at the library.
2. At 10 a.m., novelist Chris Bohjalian talks about his newest book, The Amateur, with Joe Donahue, host of The Book Show on WAMC.
3. At 11:30 a.m., Julia Alvarez talks with Rachel Person of Northshire Bookstore about Visitations, her first poetry collection in more than 20 years, and a graphic novel version of In the Time of the Butterflies.
4. At 1 p.m., Francine Prose discusses Five Weeks in the Country, a historical novel about Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, at Caffe Lena.
5. At 4 p.m., Ashley Winstead and Nicolas DiDomizio host a Crime Fiction Happy Hour at Universal Preservation Hall, where the bar opens at 3:30 p.m.

There is a lot more running at the same time. A Romantasy Tea with fantasy authors Mai Corland and Lauren Blackwood is on the Caffe Lena schedule, with tea and biscuits. The 1 p.m. hour also has a horror panel at the library with Paul Tremblay, Clay McLeod Chapman, Christoph Paul and Saratoga Schaefer, and a panel at Saratoga Arts with Kate Fagan, Kim van Alkemade and Kayla Rae Whitaker.

At 2:30 p.m., Yaddo alumni John Searles and Jonathan Santlofer share the Caffe Lena stage, while Christine Kuehn talks about Family of Spies, her account of her own family’s role as spies during World War II, at Saratoga Arts. National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez reads with Mark Mayer at Caffe Lena at 4 p.m. The night closes at Saratoga Arts at 7 p.m. with New York Times journalist Jim Windolf, whose new book traces how Bob Dylan and the Beatles shaped each other. A listening session follows the talk.

Sunday, October 4

Sunday starts early and ends with poetry. The biggest draw is Joan Lunden, the longtime Good Morning America host, who talks about her new book with Emmy-winning journalist Julie Chapman at 10 a.m. at Zankel. The session is free, but the festival suggests reserving a seat on its site.

Downtown, the rest of the day looks like this, per the published schedule:

• At 10 a.m., the festival’s first Coffee and Crosswords session brings puzzle makers Chandi Deitmer, Kate Hawkins and Erica Wojcik to Universal Preservation Hall, with doors at 9:30 a.m. and free coffee and pastry.
• At 11:30 a.m., romance authors Jennifer Iacopelli and Elizabeth Everett talk at Universal Preservation Hall, and a murder mystery panel runs at Saratoga Arts.
• At 1 p.m., culinary historian Nancy Siegel and Saratoga County Historian Lauren Roberts talk about food and politics in the Revolution, with samples of Election Cake.
• At 2:30 p.m., Jennifer Keishin Armstrong talks about the sitcom Parks and Recreation at Saratoga Arts, and the I Could Write a Book workshop on getting a manuscript into print runs at the library.
• At 4 p.m., poets Carol Graser, Elaine Handley and Lucyna Prostko read from new collections with Jay Rogoff at Saratoga Arts.

KidZone for families

The family piece of the weekend is the KidZone, set for Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. at The Children’s Museum at Saratoga. The festival lists more than 30 children’s and young adult authors, most of them local, along with face painting, a preview performance by Saratoga Children’s Theatre and a visit from Clifford the Big Red Dog.

Entry is free. The festival’s KidZone page asks families to register ahead, and says registration will also be available at the door. According to the festival, The Dark Horse Mercantile is bringing a miniature horse named Upset, which may be the most Saratoga detail of the whole weekend.

Tips for the weekend

The sessions are short and the venues are close together downtown, and the festival’s own notes point to a few things worth knowing before you head out:

• Reserve a free seat for the Joan Lunden talk at Zankel, since the festival lists reservations as suggested for that session.
• Register ahead for the KidZone if you can, though the festival says sign-up will also be open on site.
• Come early for Coffee and Crosswords on Sunday, when doors open at 9:30 a.m. and the panel has a puzzle ready for early arrivals.
• Plan on a drink before the Saturday crime fiction session, since the Universal Preservation Hall bar opens at 3:30 p.m.

One note on the festival site: the Friends group warns that look-alike websites and emails have copied the festival name, and that official messages come only from the group’s own domain. The real schedule lives on the Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library website.

Why the festival matters here

Our read: the festival has grown into one of the busier weekends of the downtown fall calendar, landing between the end of the racing season and the run-up to the holidays. It puts national names on small stages, which means a question from the third row actually gets answered. It also gives a full evening and a full Sunday afternoon to local authors and children’s writers, who rarely get that kind of foot traffic.

For more on what else is happening downtown this fall, see our downtown fall events calendar, which covers the Fall Festival later this month. For more about the city, see our Saratoga Springs town page.

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