Bristol BookFest returns April 5-6 for its fourth year of enriching the East Bay community with classic literature. This year, the festival celebrates the great American novel “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville.
“Moby Dick,” like any of the classics, has become synonymous with “required reading;” most people know it to be long, difficult, all about a whale, and only read in school. This book, like the other classics the BookFest committee members have chosen in the past (including “The Odyssey” and “Frankenstein”), represents “books you just need to have read to understand the world and make sense of your life,” insists Charles Calhoun, one of the co-founders of the festival.
That line of rationale is most likely one that many unwilling students heard when they complained about reading a book for school, but the BookFest’s mission is to go beyond literary appreciation. Not just for English majors, the Bristol BookFest works with town-wide community institutions – especially Rogers Free Library – to create a rich program of multidisciplinary events related to the chosen novel “that reaches all ages, all interest levels, and all reading levels.”
This year, the auxiliary programming started in January and included a crafts night to make sailor’s valentines, a class to learn sailor’s knots, a scrimshaw show, and even a 65 foot inflatable whale at Colt Andrews Elementary School that children could climb inside. Upcoming programming includes a concert of sea shanties with The Whale Guitar Project on March 25, and a retelling of epic voyages of Herman Melville’s seagoing uncle, Captain John D’Wolf on March 28. Whatever angle a reader approaches “Moby Dick” – from literature, science, history, or art – the Bristol BookFest gives people “an incentive” to read the whale tale, says Calhoun. Participants “have discovered it’s a fantastic book.”
“This book festival is about making connections,” Calhoun asserts, referencing not just the wide range of programming that connects to the book, but also to the community as a whole. The festival is a way to meet your neighbors, and “Moby Dick” is, in a roundabout way, a very old resident of the town of Bristol. “Bristol, in the 19th century, did have a very small whaling industry – nothing to compare to New Bedford, Nantucket, or Newport – and when Melville was a very young man, maybe nine or ten years old, he came here to Bristol to visit his maternal uncle who was a local sea captain,” explains Calhoun. “[Captain D’Wolf] had been in a ship in the North Pacific off the Alaskan coast, and he had been rammed by a whale. Maybe the germ had been planted in young Herman’s mind that a whale could be quite the force.”
While the festival’s main events in April are all about the book, Calhoun encourages readers and non-readers alike to visit. The April 5 programming on Friday evening is free to the public, featuring keynote speaker Declan Kiely from the New York Public Library. The April 6 program is very academic, showcasing a series of speakers to discuss the book and related topics. Speakers and their topics include: Richard H. Brodhead from Yale will talk about Hawthorne’s influence on Melville; Mary K. Bercaw Edwards of the University of Connecticut will describe the life of a 19th century sailor; Cyrus R.K. Patell from New York University (NYU) and NYU Abu Dhabi will discuss Shakespearian influence on Melville; and Robert Rocha from the New Bedford Whaling Museum will speak on whales, past, present, and future. Calhoun hopes the lectures will be inspiring for non-readers, encouraging them to pick up “Moby Dick,” and the talks will be interesting on their own, he insists.
The two-day surge of academia isn’t made to scare people away from the festival or from reading the book. Quite the opposite. Calhoun is making it his mission through the book festival to break down the ivory tower of high academics and fill the gap between universities and the general public: “people in the academic world and people in the regular reading world need to come together, and there aren’t that many opportunities.” The Bristol BookFest is meant to make knowledge and traditional academia accessible.
Calhoun had run a similar program in Maine for about 25 years with the Maine Humanities Council. When he moved to Bristol five years ago, he wanted to start up a similar program for his new community. Now, in its fourth year, the Bristol BookFest has been recognized by The Boston Globe as one of the 30 must-see cultural events this spring, a testament to Calhoun’s ambition and the festival’s success.
