Readers, authors revel in first Westchester Book Festival

Authors Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Emma Straub at Katonah Village Library. GABE PALACIO PHOTOS

Author Ali Flynn at Katonah Reading Room.

Author Ann Leary in the Author’s Corner at the Reading Room.

By AMY SOWDER

It was almost too obvious.

Yet, for the first time, downtown Katonah unlocked the area’s trove of acclaimed authors at its inaugural Westchester Book Festival, showcasing the talent tucked in nearby neighborhoods and farther flung locales.

More than 30 authors took to tables, podiums and stages Nov. 8 at select locations throughout the hamlet — plus more published authors who arrived among the hundreds of attendees to soak in the literary camaraderie.

“I’m like a kid in a candy store,” said Maureen Morrissey, a Mount Kisco-based novelist and children’s book author (“Country Dog, City Dog”). 

She loved meeting other local authors.

“I travel for these things,” she said. “The fact that we now have one in Westchester is amazing.”

Organizers estimated that more than 1,000 people participated in the festival’s library sessions, gallery talks, book signings and partner tie-ins and events happening throughout the day.  

“We’re over the moon with all of the positive feedback we’ve gotten from everyone, from attendees to authors to volunteers and partners — and so many people asking for an assurance that we plan to do this again next year,” said Midge Iorio, one of the festival planners.

Upstairs at The Reading Room, waves of three and four authors simultaneously sat, poised with pens, for book signings in five sessions.

Many of these authors have not only earned critical acclaim, won literary awards, or sold tens of thousands of books but also had their tomes adapted into films starring household-name actors. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks (“March”) and prolific New York Times best-selling author Veronica Chambers shared experiences of writing about love, loss, and navigating struggles.

New York Times best-selling memoirist and novelist Ann Leary of Katonah, whose latest work is a book of essays (“I’ve Tried Being Nice”), saw her novel, “The Good House,” adapted into a movie starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline.

She sat signing her books that attendees bought and chatting with whoever arrived in her corner. “I’ve gotten such great feedback from people at this table about this event. They’re so excited,” Leary said. 

Next to Leary sat Heather Clark of Mount Kisco, a Pulitzer Prize-finalist biographer whose latest critically acclaimed book is a novel (“The Scrapbook”). They chatted about the blurred lines of historical fiction and the ethics of inventing the thoughts and daily dramas of real people. 

“It’s wonderful to connect with local readers and the local literary community,” Clark said. “I never met Ann before. And booksellers like Gretchen are rarer at a time when there are fewer and fewer venues.”

Dani Alpert of Katonah, an attendee and two-time author (“Hello? Who Is This? Margaret?”) connected with Leary over their love of dogs.

“I’m coming to support local authors because it can be hard to get people to come out. We’re all hawking our wares,” Alpert said. “But face-to-face, not Facebook, connections fill me up more than digital or social media. I’m an in-person person.”

A PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, Carolyn Ferrell of Yonkers (“Dear Miss Metropolitan”) signed books and reconnected with a former Sarah Lawrence College student she taught, Gabrielle Aversa of Sleepy Hollow. After her signing session, Ferrell took her seat at the Katonah Village Library’s Authors in Conversation session featuring critically acclaimed authors Emma Straub of Brooklyn and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah of the Bronx.

“Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah — I teach his stuff all the time,” Ferrell said about her fiction writing college classes. “I’m a groupie. I’m going to be fan-girling.”

Instead of offering straight author readings, festival organizers paired authors whose books had a common thread, adding a moderator who was also an author, to probe their minds with questions.

“The format seems very conducive to a really relaxed sharing of ideas,” said festival director John Glusman. He noted busy book sales, sold-out main events with overflow rooms and full parking lots downtown. “It’s fun to see so much community support and turnout, and the authors are having a great time.”

Straub’s time-traveling, almost autobiographical novel and Adjei-Brenyah’s novel set in a dystopian future provided a trove of topics to chat about.

In writing his novel that became one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year, Adjei-Brenyah discovered he had a harder time writing about sex than physical violence — an internalized American norm he didn’t realize he possessed.

Getting vulnerable is a must for compelling writing, the authors agreed.

“The more layers of self-protective film you can peel off, the better,” Straub said.

Adjei-Brenyah described his creative process of cherry-picking some aspect of America to come up with a premise and a character, mulling over what it feels like to be that person, what they sound like, and look like — sometimes a five or six-year process.

“Once I get that voice, the rest of the world emerges, the obstacles,” Adjei-Brenyah said. “I like different spaces where the rules are dramatically different once you cross the threshold, like libraries or strip clubs.”

The crowd laughed.

At the Chroma Fine Art Gallery, avid reader Lori Bergherr of Goldens Bridge was fascinated by the details and live demonstration at Robert Kessler’s session, “The Ins and Outs Making an Audiobook.”

“It was really amazing because you got the sense of how important audiobooks are now,” Bergherr said. “The market has grown so tremendously, and they’re even using AI to narrate some of them. He talked about what it’s like for an author to hear a narrator interpret their book.”

At the “Children’s Publishing, from Concept to Creation” session at Oak & Oil, Dan Potash warned the audience of 35 people about the “danger of Noodle-land,” the intangible place where you do only slight variations of book cover ideas (thereby noodling around) when asked to submit three distinct art ideas. And for placing the text, Potash said, “Read it out loud many times, because you’ll discover when a word should be on the next page.”

Gretchen Menzies, owner of The Reading Room and a festival advisory board member, loved seeing crowds filling the downtown sidewalks and local businesses.

“Katonah was one big bookish smile Saturday at the book festival,” Menzies said. “People were wandering town just so happy to be a part of an event so uplifting and community-centered. The storybook town of Katonah came to life with this magical event.”

For the final Authors in Conversation panel, journalists David Grann (“The Wager”) and Patrick Radden Keefe (“Empire of Pain”) discussed how they get their story ideas and handle narrative nonfiction book projects when their primary sources won’t talk to them.

“I think access is entirely overrated,” Keefe said, noting that he gets more details from the ex-wives of bigwigs than the lip-service doled out from industry titans themselves. 

Both authors had their books adapted for TV and movies: Keefe’s “Say Nothing” became a miniseries on Hulu, and Grann’s had five nonfiction books adapted into feature films, most notably Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” More are in the works.

Grann talked of how history shows that it always backfires when leaders hammer their people into submission. 

“I get uncomfortable in making overly-glib analogies, but I do think there are themes and echoes,” he said. “I still have enough hope because of events like this, with a live and engaged crowd interested in books and culture. Let’s keep hoping each in our own small way, however we have agency.”

Festival director Glusman shook his head in admiration of Grann and Keefe as he filed out of that last author chat in the library.

“It’s been a great inaugural event,” he said. “We’re just getting started.”