Some thoughts on the Festival of Faith & Writing

In the hubbub outside an auditorium, among well-caffeinated conferencegoers, a friend asked about my experience at the Festival of Faith & Writing. Like holding a cup beneath a waterfall, I said. I’d been to eight or nine sessions, any one of which could have keep me intellectually and artistically stimulated for a week. It was too much to absorb. It was overwhelming. It was wonderful.

The Festival at Calvin University has been an important event in my life, and I’d like to explain why, because, whether you ever attend an event like it or not, I think there’s a power in gathering around a shared passion that is especially important these days.

As a student attendee years ago, I could tell right away there was something special about the event, which is held over three days every other April and organized by the Calvin English department (now through the Center for Faith & Writing). It hosts Christian writers as well as acclaimed secular writers like Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, Jewish writers like Chaim Potok, impossible-to-classify writers like Annie Dillard and David James Duncan, as well as children’s authors, graphic novelists, songwriters, screenwriters, and on. It’s just not an academic conference, a networking event for writers and publishers, or a place for book fans to meet their heroes, but all of that and more. Even after moving to the West Coast, my wife and I have returned as often as we can, sometimes with infants and diaper bags in tow. Pandemic disruptions and family needs kept me away from several, so this year it was especially good to be back.

There was no single brain-shattering moment that made it special, but rather an accumulation. It was Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer teaching us how it’s in her tradition to begin such gatherings with gratitude. It was poet and gardener Ross Gay reminding us that our hands are for sowing, reaping, making — they are more than appendages for holding a phone. It was the poet Todd Davis speaking of the microbes living in all of us and complicating the notion of the isolated self. It was bumping into Todd between sessions and talking about the similarities between his talk and Kimmerer’s. 

It was poet Kiki Petrosino describing grief as a ring missing its gemstone — you write around the absence. It was journalists like Kathryn Post and Astead Herndon talking about reporting on the ground with MAHA tradwives and Haitian Creoles and alien conspiracists and finding that every community is more complex when you get up close. It was young adult novelist Laurie Halse Anderson explaining why her recent book featured a teenage hero enduring both a smallpox epidemic and a war.

“Thirteen-year-olds have been dealing with hard things for a long time,” she told us. “It’s not all bunnies and rainbows. But people do fall in love, even in the middle of revolutions.”

It was all of that and more. But — crucially — it was being in the room to hear it with other people.

There were bright-eyed student volunteers, retirees, hip grad students, agents and editors dressed to cut deals, and field-trip groups of fidgety middle-schoolers. We may have had different reasons for being there, but I suspect we all hungered for some of the same things.

I’m often struck by the incredible amount of advice-for-living we have at our fingertips at nearly every moment. The wisest voices of our age, whoever you consider them to be, are available to you right now through their commencement speeches or TED talks or sermons or lectures or livestreams or podcasts or Substacks or what-have-you. We have all the content, even wisdom content, that we could ever need.

It’s not content but context that matters. Screens can open up worlds to us, and digital cultures can be fascinating in their own right, but the experience of being alone with a screen takes from us more than it gives. Our nature as embodied creatures was a recurring theme across the speakers I heard, maybe to the point of cliche, but it gets at a shared need to remember that we are mammals living in a physical world. We need to touch dirt and yap about the weather and be in spaces with other people.

That’s why I think the Festival is relevant to more than just book nerds. I’m fortunate to live nearby and have the flexibility to attend. But whatever you’re into, whatever news has you dismayed, consider getting yourself to a concert or dance-off or fishing tournament or Memorial Day parade or anywhere that people gather around a shared passion. We all need it.

Header photo by Richard Dorran on Unsplash