![]() The room was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance. ![]() Philip leaned over the rail, staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. The book festival was doing what many of us do: shaping a gathering according to various unstated motivations, and making half-hearted gestures toward loftier goals. It bothered them to make an author wait two minutes for citizens to bond. Their purpose, whether or not they admitted it, was the promotion of books and reading and the honoring of authors. The group wasn’t ready to make the purpose of the book festival the stitching of community if it meant changing the structure of the sessions, or taking time away from something else. ![]() But at the first sign of needing to compromise on another thing in order to honor this new something, alarm bells rang. Everyone liked the idea of “book festival as community glue” in theory. There it was-the real, if unspoken, purpose rousing from its slumber and insisting on its continued primacy. “But I wouldn’t want to take away time from the authors,” the person said. And it would activate a group identity-the city’s book lovers-that, in the absence of such questions, tends to stay dormant.Īs soon as this idea was mentioned, someone in the group sounded a worry. It would also break the norm of not speaking to a stranger, and perhaps encourage this kind of behavior to continue as people left the session. What is a book that really affected you as a child? What do you think would make us a better city? Starting a session with these questions would help the audience become aware of one another. What brought you to this city-whether birth or circumstance? I proposed an idea: Instead of starting each session with the books and authors themselves, why not kick things off with a two-minute exercise in which audience members can meaningfully, if briefly, connect with one another? The host could ask three city- or book-related questions, and then ask each member of the audience to turn to a stranger to discuss one of them. But couldn’t an ambitious festival set itself the challenge of making the city more connected? Couldn’t it help turn strong readers into good citizens? That seemed to me a promising direction-a specific, unique, disputable lodestar for a book festival that could guide its construction.We began to brainstorm. What kind of purpose could be their next great animating force? Someone had the idea that the festival’s purpose could be about stitching together the community. The festival’s leadership reached out to me for advice on these questions. What was it for? What could it do? How could it make itself count? The festival’s continuing existence felt assured. Now they felt like they needed a new purpose. This book ew to attract thousands of visitors every year.
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