An important part about being a writer is not letting the hermit side win all the time. I need to do the work, get the words on the page, move them around, cut them, add to them, all of the fun and frustrating parts of being a writer day in and day out. That needs to happen, but interacting with other writers and readers in various ways is also important.
A great option is attending literary and creative events.
In the past three weeks, I’ve attended the NH Book Festival, a day at the NH Film Festival, and the Boston Book Festival. The last two were both happening this past weekend (October 15-18th for the Film Festival, 16-17th for BFF) so I had to scramble to make both work, but am so glad I did!
I won’t go into everything, but these types of events provide the opportunity to be inspired by other artists and creators in the world. To see how they’ve struggled, overcome, persevered, and still find the joy in creating their art. I am so glad I attended these and hope to pass on a little of that inspiration to you as well as inspire you to sign up for the next literary/ creative event in your area. You never know who you might see and what the event can spark in you!
NH Book Festival
First I went to and greatly enjoyed the NH Book Festival on October 3rd. I attended Beyond the Last Page: the Power of YA featuring Rajani LaRocca (Such Great Heights), Mindy McGinnis (How Girls Are Made), Cait Levin (Imposter: Code Like a Girl), and Alexandra Villasante (Fireblooms) with Julie Dao (“Rise of the Empress” series) moderating.
There, I was excited to see the authors talking about their books which delved into far deeper topics than the typical romantasy. I and others have become frustrated with the YA category pushed by the Big Five and traditional publishing lately which seems to mainly serve middle-aged women as opposed to teenagers. Teens and tweens are looking for more than simply romance and I was excited to see how these authors delve into hard topics in their work and support their main characters with family and friends in addition to possible romantic partners.
I also attended Creative Nonfiction Excavating Identities featuring Hester Kaplan (Twice Born), Michael Lowenthal (Place Envy), and Lynette D’Amico (men i hate) with Jocelyn Winn (freelance writer and small business founder) moderating. I was excited to see nonfiction represented as well as the diversity/ inclusivity of this panel which focused on “min[ing] sexuality, family, race, class, and ancestry in search of identity.”
I always strive to read and engage in material different than what I create as it can be both a break and a chance to learn something in a new way, making me a better writer. In particular, I was interested in seeing how they incorporated their personal journeys into their various works as I often try to delve into various societal and identity topics within my fiction work and beyond.
My spouse and I ended the day by going to both the pop-up bookstore with the presenters’ books and Gibson’s Bookstore’s official location to pick up tons of books and finish the day on the couch reading. We were so glad we were able to support these super local authors, Concord’s local indie bookstore, and all the authors we bought from.
NH Film Festival
The NH Film Festival has been an annual event for my spouse and I for the past 4 years and we’ve always loved it! As an arts and culture journalist, the Film Festival has been vital for helping my spouse keep up with the current film scene, especially locally! While the New Hampshire Film Festival often brings in national and international works sometimes featuring huge names, it also makes sure to focus on local NH and New England films. The form is constantly being pushed both on the big stage and in the self-funded films put on by up-and-coming filmmakers.
While not the same as books, films are stories. Making a film means writing a script and finding the best way to tell that story visually. There are so many other unique factors that go into a film versus a book, but so much of it comes back to the story at the heart of all the acting, special effects, lighting, and more.
I only got to join my spouse on Friday this year, but was excited to see a few films including The Last Critic about Robert Christgau, the famous music critic. Being married to a critic myself, it was a fascinating, funny, and inspiring film. In addition, there was Bucks Harbor, a fantastic film highlighting the hard lives of Maine fishermen and their families. It was an eye-opening experience for me and had some really insightful messages about work, life, and harmful gender expectations.
Boston Book Festival
Despite my efforts to keep a beat on the pulse, I somehow completely missed that Boston Book Festival was happening until it was brought up by a member of my critique group. I reworked my plans a so I could attend BBF on Saturday. It’s a truly amazing event for readers and writers of all ages, going strong for almost two decades!
The Boston Book Festival offers a FREE full day of panels from amazing authors across the full spectrum of writing (children’s to adult, nonfiction to speculative to romance to poetry and everything in between) as well as over 60 participating organizations hosting tents on the Boston Public Library Plaza in Copley Square. This event was massive, spanning nine spaces in BPL, as well as six other locations (mostly churches) for over 70 panels, all within a couple blocks.
It was truly difficult to narrow down which panels to attend, as is often the case with these amazing festivals, but I finally created a schedule hitting the variety of ranges within which I work and enjoy. I wanted to share a little bit about some of my day.
After navigating the bus and T to Copley Square, I perused some of the stalls and then took a few wrong turns on my way to Rabb Hall for my first panel: the Kids Keynote with Meg Medina and Claribel A. Ortega.
As I’m querying my Middle Grade near-future, grounded speculative novel set on a space station, I was so excited to hear from these powerhouse authors of on their recent books: Medina’s Graciela in the Abyss and Ortega’s most recent and final installment in The Witchlings series.
The panel was moderated by Cathryn (Cathie) Mercier who serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Literature and Writing, Graduate Program Director of Children’s Literature and Children’s Literature Alumni Endowed Chair of Simmons University, which sponsored this panel.
It was inspiring and fun hearing about their writing process and stories for these specific books and other installments in their writing journeys. They shared thoughtful advice, humorous stories, and joy throughout.
Next I shifted to “Soilpunk: Growing Radical Futures” to learn about this new(ish) subgenre in the speculative realm and hear how the science and art collide. The panel included Annie Chen and Zoe Lee of BEAM, Yemi Amu of Oku Farms, and Lana Z Porter and Claire Gustavson of Tractor Beam. As someone with an interdisciplinary and informal education background myself (by way of science museums), this was a fascinating panel and I highly recommend checking out all of their endeavors. I will not be able to detail all of their amazing insights and work, but I’ll try to highlight a few points.
As they explained, “soilpunk” follows its siblings in looking to the future with various focuses. While cyberpunk looks at computers being integrated into humanity in various ways, steampunk rethinks how steam and the industrial revolution combines with humanity, and solarpunk looks at how utilizing power from the sun can launch us into the future, soilpunk focuses on soil, the Earth, and how humanity fits into this larger ecosystem. Like solarpunk, it’s often hopeful and focuses how humanity can be part of the solution for the future as opposed to simply an antagonistic force.
The panel focused on how all of them work together (sometimes with other organizations and experts) and independently to bring these dreams of tomorrow to the present and to reality. Fish ended up being a common topic, and a more integral part of the ecosystem than many of us might expect. Amu, Chen, and Lee discussed in detail about Oku Farms (a Brooklyn-based aquaponics farm, educational center, and community hub) and BEAM’s cookbook/ field guide Eating the Whole Fish based on Rhode Island’s fishing industry which exports over 90% around the world and then imports over 90% to feed its population. To poorly sum up many of their points, fish and underwater plants are vital to our oxygen, to our food supply, and to life as a whole.
Porter and Gustavson talked about how they work with writers, artists, and experts like their panel-mates to create Tractor Beam, the first publication ever devoted to soilpunk which creates an interesting fusion of fiction and nonfiction to discuss these present and future concerns. I was excited to pick up some free zines from 2025 to look into them more.
Next, I journeyed to the BPL’s impressive Children’s Library, and in specific their Rey Room for the panel “Friendships and Finding Your Way” for Middle Grade audiences/ book lovers. Norm Feuti, Janae Marks, and Sofia Warren (moderated by Lori Lobenstine) discussed their new books (Feuti’s graphic novel A Kid Like Me, Marks’ Starting Now, and Warren’s graphic novel debut, Film Nerds) as well as writing and publishing in children’s literature, prose vs. graphic novels, and more.
Pros at the school visit game, they all naturally engaged with the audience which was fairly split between adults and kids. It was truly fascinating to hear from all of these amazing writers about their work and how they go about it. For Q&A, they really focused on kid audience members, which was really wonderful to hear the children engage with them and ask questions only a kid could come up with (like about spin-offs of well-known brands and the process of visualizing a character in words and illustrations including the cover).
The next panel I’ll feature was such fun and honestly a very fittingly named one. I was running a tad late because the previous panel ran right up to this one’s start time. I entered the First Church of Boston, looking around, trying to orient myself. The amazing volunteers sent me upstairs to be directed into the right room since both the Sanctuary and the Auditorium were being used. I opened the door to find myself on a balcony with a few levels of auditorium or atrium styled levels sporadically filled with chairs looking down at the panelists below.
The sparse chairs were already filling up, but I snagged a chair on its lonesome since I had come to the event alone. I was in for a treat.
I had primarily been interested in John Chu’s The Subtle Art of Folding Space when planning my day, but was impressed by the interplay between him and Lin. She and her book Samantha Spük: Paranormal Wedding Planner surprised me, proving to be more intriguing than the trope-filled rom-com (just not my style) I expected it to be based on the title and description.
I loved hearing them talk about their individual world-building and how to immerse readers in worlds and stories without overwhelming them. In particular, Chu’s journey of expanding a short story for this debut book was intriguing. The moderator, Kathleen Carr Foster, also seemed to jump dimensions, explaining that her forthcoming debut, The Jewel of Corlivo, though not technically released yet, was “magically” available for purchase downstairs.
For my final block of the conference, I had originally planned to attend the Fiction Keynote. However, considering the fact the Fiction Keynote was back down near the plaza (as opposed to the “Churches District” (dubbed by me) I was currently in), and the fact it was starting right as the Dimensions panel was ending, I looked closer at the panel that would be starting right next door in the Sanctuary of the same building. A further perusal of the panel description intrigued me in addition to the travel logistics.
Despite being a speculative fiction fan and writer, magical realism often isn’t my jam. As someone who struggled with One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, I had originally been daunted by this panel full of magical realism and narratives spanning generations, but now….
As I grew up in South Korea for a few years with the Korean Cinderella storybook, I was intrigued by a retelling of the Chinese Fishbone Cinderella. As they all explained their books to introduce the panel, I grew more hooked with every word.
A Chinese family moves to South Dakota and the U.S. government builds a military silo on their land, sparking an East of Eden meets Stranger Things (“Season One while it was still good” as I’ll paraphrase the author) adventure?
A family who can entice pencils to tell the stories they have written before, prompting data privacy concerns?
An intergenerational curse of invisibility in which the granddaughter is the only one noticing her grandmother disappearing forever?
Yes, yes, yes!
The panelists (Tom Lin (Babylon, South Dakota), Allison King (The Phoenix Pencil Company), and Elizabeth Lim (Fishbone Cinderella) were all engaging, insightful, and funny. Kerri Maher (bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller) did a wonderful job moderating the discussion as well. All in all, I’m so glad I decided to attend this panel, dive into their books, and recommend them to you as well.
In general, I highly recommend checking out all the authors featured at this year’s NH Book Festival and Boston Book Festival as well as the films accepted to the NH Film Festival (even though many of these will be on the festival circuit for a bit) to see if any will inspire you.
So, in short, don’t discount creative and literary events happening in your area. Both the NH and Boston Book Festivals were mostly free to the public (with featured opening/ keynote events being ticketed). Many book festivals are. And even if they do charge, if you can swing it, the chance for inspiration is often worth it.
What literary/ creative events have you attended recently? How have you been inspired?
Leave a Reply