Green Mountain Book Festival Recap

When I joined the board of the Green Mountain Book Festival back in 2024, the goal was to put on a traditional book festival: a couple of big-name authors as headliners, panels about various elements of literature and writing, and a general celebration of the arts. Last year's festival went off pretty well, but we ended up having to do some soul-searching after some bigger changes: we lost our executive director, as well as a couple of board members who'd been involved for a while and who had some other things going on. On top of that, the arts are facing a rough time here in the US: the federal support and grants that a lot of these sorts of organizations have relied on has been wiped out, and there's newfound pressure on individuals who can support these types of initiatives.

So, as a board, we began to work on figuring out what the next steps were: what would a festival look like when we as a board would have to handle the logistics? Could we hold a festival at all? How do we exist in this environment?

We ended up having some bigger discussions about what a festival would look like, and came up with something that would look a little different: invite a headlining author, and hang the rest of the programming around whatever genre they were writing in. Vermont is awash in writers, and if we could get a big name in, we could shine a spotlight on the work that local authors are doing.

As it turned out, John Scalzi had gone on tour earlier in the spring for his book When the Moon Hits Your Eye, and would do so again this fall with another novel, The Shattering Peace, the latest installment of his Old Man's War series. We reached out to his publicists at Tor Books to gauge interest, and when we got an affirmation that they could include a stop in Burlington for this tour, we realized we had our theme: science fiction. I know plenty of authors from my days running the now-defunct blog Geek Mountain State, and began reaching out to some of the authors and friends that I'd worked with back then, as well as some of the newer names that have popped up on the scene since.

We had a good response: Craig Alanson (Expeditionary Force), William Alexander (Sunward), M.T. Anderson (Nicked), Emily Hamilton (The Stars Too Fondly), Margot Harrison (The Midnight Club), Mike Luoma (The Star Seeds of Earth), and Brian Staveley (Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne) all agreed to come and attend, and we began building programming around them.

We decided to run a workshop and two panels about the craft of writing. The morning workshop with Scalzi was capped to just 10 writers, who could ask questions about the professional side of writing. We figured that there's no shortages of writing workshops about the craft of writing, but fewer opportunities to learn about the publishing, PR, and sales side of the craft, something that Scalzi has written about extensively. We had a lot of good questions: everything from writing after one's book failed to one's social media presence, to a handful of other topics.

The first afternoon panel was about worldbuilding in science fiction, based on the idea that science fiction's often known for its fantastic worlds. I'm a big fan of Staveley's books and the fantasy world that he put together for them, but we wanted to make sure that we'd have other authors with different types of stories to bring in their perspectives, so William Alexander and Margot Harrison fit in nicely there. They had a great, free-ranging conversation about the elements that went into constructing their worlds, from maps and geography to figuring out how the worlds they were creating figured into their storytelling.

The next panel was all about humor: Alanson suggested that Scalzi's books were infused with it, and it was a good counterpoint to the grim, dystopian nature that science fiction is sometimes associated with. In addition to Alanson, M.T. Anderson, Emily Hamilton, and Mike Luoma sat in on the panel, and they were joined by Scalzi at the last minute. Their conversation was also far-reaching: talking about the types of stories that lent themselves well to humor and comedy, but also dissecting how authors can use humor and how to find funny moments in serious situations.

The final event of the evening was a Q&A with Scalzi at the Fletcher Free Library, which the board voluntold me to do, given that I'd suggested Scalzi and had written quite a bit about him over the years. This was a fun challenge, because I wanted to make sure that we were going beyond the "How do you get your ideas" questions that drive authors nuts, but also make sure that my questions aren't so down in the weeds that anyone attending wouldn't be able to follow (or frankly, care about them.)

We ended up talking about a good range of things: the long-running nature of the Old Man's War series, writing and publishing in 2025, how he's played with structure and form in his stories, and the nature of science fiction in the larger publishing world. (As soon as the video's up, I'll put together a transcription and publish it here.)

All in all, it was really good event, one that went off without any hitches. We had folks come up from all over New England, and I think the conversations in the panels and Q&A were interesting and entertaining. There's always small tweaks to make: I think we'll be a little more proactive with communications ahead of time and the single-genre had some folks confused about what we were intending – we had a handful of people pointedly ask why we weren't holding any poetry sessions.

But as a test and experiment for an ongoing literature event, I think this is a model that will work well moving forward: one of the things I noticed from the 2024 session was that we'd have folks come in for one panel, but not really stay for the rest, which was a little frustrating to see. This time, we had a lot of folks stay for more than one panel, and I think that the focus on a single genre really helped there.

Another positive thing was that we kept it to a single day. Adding another day of programming feels like it makes for an exponentially greater amount of work for all involved, and keeping it all contained to one day of programming means that you don't have to burn up your entire weekend, as a guest or as a volunteer, to attend.

And the nice thing about genres is that there's a lot of them: we've started talking about what else we'll be covering in the future. We have some thoughts on more speculative fiction in the future (with some exciting authors that we're talking to!) but it'll be nice to jump around to cover everything from mysteries to climate and nature writing to more literary topics and yes, poetry. Stay tuned. If you're in the area, I'd definitely recommend signing up for our newsletter to get updates as we have them.

I would say: let me know if you did attend: I'd love to hear your thoughts on your experience!