Wordstock Was Rainy and Crowded, But I'm Still Glad I Didn't Have to Go to a Convention Center

Pat Moran
Patrick deWitt

I heard a lot of griping about Wordstock this year, and I get it: From at-capacity events to long wait times in the rain, attendees had plenty of valid reasons to complain. It’s a bummer to pay to attend a festival and miss out on some of the reasons you showed up in the first place. But the beauty of a this year’s festival was its well-curated lineup of national big-name writers and wonderful local authors and alternatives to the mainstage events (pop-up readings throughout the museum, Lit Crawl, the book fair). There were flaws in execution, sure, but there was no shortage of great authors to see.

I’ve been to probably too many giant literary events than is strictly reasonable. Here’s the weird, bad news: They’re almost never uniformly great. The annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, for example, was a disastrous experience the first time I went. The big-deal authors I came to see were disappointments, I found myself attending panels that were insufferably boring, I had to wait in huge, snaking lines for everything, and an air of quiet desperation that can only be conjured by 12,000 writers in one place descended upon the downtown Chicago Hilton and didn’t let up all weekend long.

I had more fun once I realized that I could walk out of boring panels, and that offsite readings—the weirder and lower-profile the better—could be hidden gems. One of the greatest readings I ever went to (DISCLOSURE: and also read at) was inside a hotel room at the Boston Sheraton during AWP 2013. It was a spur-of-the-moment brunch reading hosted by two shoestring presses. Readers stood next to a flatscreen TV, and the audience sat on fluffy beds. I skipped the keynote that year. I walked out of a reading by Anne Carson, a poet I adore. I didn’t regret either decision.

Yes, a festival can be mismanaged. It can be annoyingly crowded. But you can have a great time in even the most frustrating circumstances if you game it right. All too often, the big names don’t deliver in the way you thought they would. Sometimes, the best readings are the ones you never planned to attend. This year, I was unimpressed by a panel featuring two nationally known writers I genuinely think are some of the best, and I was blown away watching Nick Jaina read from a book that’s been out since January to a modest crowd inside a cold piano shop garage.

It was well worth the time I spent standing in the rain.

After the jump: Tons more photos of Wordstock highlights.