Reading Local Seattle

Local is fresh.

Clark Humphrey pretty much sums up the event at Misc Media. It was good for all the reasons he mentions.

Revised Post (10-31): After the Paul Constant churlish posts and some griping by Diane Mapes via Twitter, I was unsure what to make of the Seattle Book Fest. Organizer Paul Doyle in early September was flummoxed during a planning meeting when I suggested that the event would probably end up resulting in attracting mostly local writers instead of the type of large, general audience of the Northwest Bookfest. At that point, he only had a rough schedule and a handful of people such as Jerome Gold, Paul Nelson, and Pam Binder who had stated to help with the line up. Doyle said something to the effect that writers were going to be “on display” and that “readers” would be the ones coming to the event. I was skeptical and concerned that such an ad hoc event would work. I but it still made me uneasy although I didn’t know what that might mean. Paul Constant at The Stranger’s Slog seemed eager to fill in the blanks about what could go wrong before the event event started, and then after the event he continued to elaborate.

King Rat has a list of things that need to improved, based on his circuit of the vendors and leaving. Like many people King Rat focused on the lack of signage and the attempt to fix this problem with hand-made signs. I found these signs of charming, but if you were used to a corporate sponsored event in a conference center, I can understand why they would seem, well, cheesy. There were other features of the conference that were rough, too. The “food court” was a bit dismal and like a labor camp offering Starbucks and Phad Thai . It was raining, and the building had that chilly, barn-like feeling that pervades older buildings in the Seattle area (unless they are super-heated.)

Read the rest of this entry »