Write Direction: Bookmarks Festival has matured into collection of events

It took four years to plan the first day dedicated to books in Winston-Salem.

When Bookmarks, version 1.0, was held Sept. 11, 2004, at Old Salem, it was a temporary village of tents filled with books, book-lovers and writers. The groundwork had begun in 2000.

Fast forward to 2010; Bookmarks is all grown up. The volunteer festival, once an effort of the Junior League, is an independent nonprofit organization with a paid, part-time executive director, Ginger Hendricks, and a sprawling collection of events.

Its growth is due in part to the persistence of such volunteers as Debbie Harllee, a member of the Junior League who wanted Winston-Salem to have a book festival where writers and readers could meet authors. Harllee visited a book festival in Baltimore in 2000 and imagined the same kind of event in Winston-Salem.

"We are an area of so many colleges," Harllee said. "We are a very literary city."

"It was her enthusiasm which definitely started the conversation and led us to the point where we are now," Hendricks said.

This year is Bookmarks' sixth (there was no festival in 2006), and its second time downtown. Last year, the festival moved from Bethabara, where it relocated after its first year in Old Salem.

The move downtown has been good for some Trade Street shops. At Earthbound Arts, co-owner Gordon Jones says Bookmarks helped bring people into his shop, which is packed with homemade soaps, bath salts, pottery and other gifts.

At Body and Soul, a gift-and-book shop that specializes in African-American products, owner Dana Suggs says she's considering opening her shop an hour earlier than normal so she can take advantage of the crowd. Last year's festival brought lots of foot traffic in to check out her soaps, purses, earrings, artwork -- and a back room filled with books by authors ranging from academic and poet Nikki Giovanni to erotic-fiction writer Zane.

"They were pleasantly surprised that we sell books," Suggs said. "People coming in are readers. The people who come to this are progressive and open-minded."

As publishing and book buying and selling come into the age of Kindles, iPhones, e-books and all words digital, Bookmarks is still a popular draw for readers and writers of all ages.

About 7,500 people attended last year, and organizers are hoping for a similar turnout this year, despite competition from another big arts event happening the same weekend -- the opening of the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts, and a slew of workshops, performances and talks associated with it. Bookmarks will have a presence there, too: Storyteller Tim Tingle will perform at the Rhodes Center at 4 p.m. Saturday.

Bookmarks has gotten leaner over the years. There were more than 100 authors in 2004, and the budget was about twice the $83,500 the festival plans to run on this year. This is one of the reasons for the move to Trade Street: It's more economical to hold readings in existing buildings than to rent tents and build a festival infrastructure from the ground up as they did in Bethabara. Financial support from local corporations such as Krispy Kreme has waned but has been offset in part with money from foundations.

Bookmarks has been a boon to N.C. authors: 40 percent of this year's writers are from North Carolina, from academics in Winston-Salem's backyard such as David Coates and Peter Siavelis, professors at Wake Forest University and editors of Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know (Potomac Books, 2009) to barbecue guru Fred Thompson to such first-time novelists as Erica Eisdorfer, a career bookseller who had her first novel, The Wet Nurse's Tale, published at age 52.

"That's important, to have representation from Winston-Salem and from all over North Carolina," Hendricks said. "We like to support our local authors. There's definitely a strong tradition of North Carolina writers."

Hendricks would like to see Bookmarks grow to multiple days, perhaps having author events the preceding Thursday and Friday in addition to the all-day festival on Saturday. "The stage is that we're hopeful, and very much interested in expanding," she said.

There will be big names, too -- MUTTS comic strip author Patrick McDonnell, Diana Gabaldon, author of the fantastical Outlander series and Billy Collins, a New York professor who was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and author of such titillatingly-titled collections as Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes (Picador, 2000).

Aside from the usual cache of novelists, poets and children's book authors, Bookmarks draws many non-fiction authors, too. This year, journalist Christopher McDougall will talk about the world's greatest distance runners, Southerner Anna Fields will dish on being a rebel debutante, and local writer Emily Herring Wilson will talk about the letters of Emily Lawrence, the first woman to graduate from N.C. State University's landscape-design program.

Want to go?

Admission to the 2010 Bookmarks Festival is free. It will be from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday in the following locations:

• The Sixth Street Main Stage: Young Readers Central at the City Market Stands/Downtown School, 601 N. Cherry St.

• Artworks Gallery: 654 N. Trade St.

• 5ive and 40rty art gallery: 541 N. Trade St.

• Urban Artware: 207 W. Sixth St.

• Signature: 534 N. Trade St.

• The Millennium Center: The Red Room, the Speak Easy and the Blue Room, the Millennium Center Basement, 101 W. Fifth St. -- entrance is off of Trade Street; Food for Thought, Millennium Center Dock -- entrance is at the back of the building.

For a complete list of festival activities, visit tinyurl.com/bookmarks10. For more information, visit bookmarksfestival.org or call 460-4722.

Putting faces to the words

Decisions, decisions. It was hard to do, but Bookmarks Executive Director Ginger Hendricks has picked some of the authors she's looking forward to seeing at this year's festival:

• Billy Collins: The former U.S. poet laureate will kick off Bookmarks at 10 a.m. on Saturday, reading from the Sixth Street Stage. Collins is a professor at the Lehman College of the City of New York. His poetry collections include Sailing Alone Around the Room and Ballistics. "He's the most popular poet in the United States, so that's awesome for him to open that day," Hendricks said.

• Emerging Voices Panel: The four-member panel of first-time novelists includes Kathleen Grissom (The Kitchen House), John Kerr (Cardigan Bay), Kim Wright (who lives in Charlotte, and wrote Love in Mid Air) and Erica Eisdorfer, who has managed the Bull's Head Bookshop at UNC Chapel Hill for more than 20 years and published her first novel, the delicious upstairs-downstairs story of a Victorian wet nurse, The Wet Nurse's Tale, in 2009. At 11 a.m. in the Millennium Center's Red Room.

• Trudier Harris: A North Carolina author and retired academic, Harris also wrote a memoir about growing up in Orange County. Her latest book is The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African-American Authors and the South. Harris will appear at 10:30 a.m. at Artworks Gallery, 564 N. Trade St.

• Jack Riggs: A Georgia novelist, author of When the Finch Rises and The Fireman's Wife, will hold forth at 11:30 a.m. at 5ive and 40rty, 541-A N. Trade St.

Others not to miss

• Frank Deford: NPR addicts will recognize Deford as a public radio sports commentator. He's also a senior contributing writer for Sports Illustrated, a correspondent for HBO's Real Sports with Byrant Gumbel and author of 16 books, including his newest novel, Bliss, Remembered, a love story set during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and World War II America. Noon at the Millennium Center's Speakeasy.

• Zee Edgell: An award-winning Belizean novelist and author of Beka Lamb, In Times Like These, The Festival of San Joaquin, and Time and the River, Edgell brings Caribbean fiction to an American audience. 2:30 p.m. in the Artworks Gallery.

• Patrick McDonnell: Creator of the MUTTS comic strip, McDonnell is an animal advocate who pushes for social issues such as responsible pet ownership within the frames of his drawings. MUTTS appears in about 700 newspapers in more than 20 countries. 2:30 p.m. on the Sixth Street Stage.

• Anjail Rashida Ahmad: Ahmad is the director of the creative-writing program at N.C. A&T State University and a poet who is also blind. She will hold a workshop at Bookmarks on "The Essence of Poetry Writing: A Workshop for Beginners." 12:30 p.m. at Signature, 534 N. Trade St.

• Diana Gabaldon: Gabaldon was an ecologist in a past life, but today she's better known as the creator of the New York Times-bestselling Outlander books, a seven-novel, mind-bending series that center around a time-traveling 20th-century British nurse and her 18th-century Scottish husband. 1 p.m. on the Sixth Street Stage.

A complete list of Bookmarks Festival programs is at tinyurl.com/bookmarks10.

Same Page

In conjunction with Bookmarks, the Forsyth County Public Library will kick off its annual On the Same Page community-read project at the Millenium Center on Saturday. The book for this year is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

• 11 a.m., mystery writers John Hart and Erica Spindler, and young-adult author Bonnie Doerr, will present "The Art of Mystery."

• 1 p.m. Spindler will have a reading and book signing.

• 2 p.m. Hart will have a reading and signing.

Community-wide programs, including film sreenings, are planned through Oct. 2. For information about other On the Same Page events, visit forsythonthesamepage.wordpress.com.