According to Tribtix.com:
The Printers Row Lit Fest was founded in 1985 by the Near South Planning Board to attract visitors to the Printers Row neighborhood (once the city’s bookmaking hub). By 2002, it had grown to five city blocks (on Dearborn, from Congress to Polk), attracting more than 200 booksellers from across the country displaying new, used and antiquarian books and featuring more than 200 authors participating in panels, discussions and a variety of other programs.
As part of its ongoing commitment to the written word and its support of literacy and literary endeavor, the Chicago Tribune purchased the Printers Row Book Fair in 2002 from the Near South Planning Board. Recently renamed to be the Printer’s Row Lit Fest, it is considered the largest free outdoor literary event in the Midwest-drawing more than 150,000 book lovers to the two-day showcase.
I went for this first time this year.[tweetthis] Could this really be free? Would the crowds be crazy?[/tweetthis] I wanted someone to go along with me and Loved-One declined. CoCo loves the city, and she loves me, so she agree to go along. She turned out to be a delightful companion. And yes, it really was free, And the not too very crowded. On top of that, we went on Sunday. The weather had cooled to a pleasant 75 degrees, from the previous day’s sweltering 90 and humid.
We met Patricia L. Arnold, Chief Communications Strategist at the AARP booth. She liked some of my ideas for articles, and asked me to keep in touch.
We met Martha Boyne from Belt Publishing. She’s the editor of a small publishing company that focuses on non-fiction about the rust-belt. We agreed to keep in touch, even though my book is a novel. I picked up a book about Flint, MI. Not exactly my home town, Flint is where my dad and most of my friends fathers worked. Flint is where parts of A SHIP OF PEARL takes place.
CoCo and I also sat in on a panel discussion about science fiction writing. I doubt I’ll ever write science fiction. Still, I got some great takeaways. Like how fiction can free us to make social commentary in ways that might we might not otherwise be able to. CoCo liked the part about robots made to be used as slaves with consciousness and how they eventually started being consumers in shopping malls.
The blue sky, the colorful booths, the interesting people: almost as vivid as Pierced Wondering’s New Orleans. And today she has a castle to show us. So hop on over and take a peak at what’s in her lens this week.
