His festival will be one for the books

Apr. 16--Aaron Greenwald gets off the phone with a corporate sponsor. The conversation was strained.

No, he told them, they can't sell their publications at the upcoming N.C. Festival of the Book. Only authors' books will be sold.

It's one of those last-minute hurdles that pops up in these final days leading up to next week's biennial state literary event, which begins April 24 and reaches full concentration the following weekend. But Greenwald, the festival director, has a plan, and he's sticking to it.

Unlike most literary festivals, this will not be a publisher-driven event. Nor will it rely heavily on local writers.

Rather than the predictable program of staged readings, this one will pair writers discussing their relationships with one another as well as literature and anything else they want to talk about.

The result is a significant departure from the previous festivals, which have twice been held at UNC-Chapel Hill and once at N.C. State University. Eighty well-known writers, musicians, filmmakers and others will be involved in more than 40 events, mostly on the Duke University campus and all for free.

As unlikely as it is, the task of organizing this weeklong examination of Southern letters has fallen to a total outsider. Greenwald is a 29-year-old Californian transplanted to New York City, who admits he was a little surprised but happy to find a region with such a rich literary life.

"I can't think of another place with such a concentration of writers," he says.

Greenwald's office in Duke's Perkins Library looks like he just showed up -- which he kind of did, a little more than a year ago. A bookcase is half filled, there's a poster from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and a red plastic shopping bag from a Mexican market hanging on the walls. A potted green plant sits on a pink plastic-cushioned chair. Stacks of programs and the empty boxes they came in are piled in corners of the room.

He speaks quietly and seems calm. But Greenwald swings around to look at his computer whenever a new e-mail message pings loudly to the surface.

The all-star lineup has been set for months. But now there are all those details, such as coordinating nearly 200 volunteers and checking in with panel moderators to make sure they know what they're going to talk about. "Logistically, it's a huge festival," he says.

Greenwald's restrained attire -- a cotton sweater pulled over an oxford shirt, khaki slacks -- is balanced on the hip meter by his scuffed brown European-style shoes and a thin hoop earring. He leans forward on a circular table in the middle of the room, fiddling with a pair of pens, and explains how he came up with the guiding themes for this year's festival.

"I had an enormous amount of freedom and autonomy to create a festival that looked and felt different," he says. "We pursued that to the hilt."

The notion of pairing authors was inspired by a long-running lecture series in San Francisco and from his work on the first two festivals for The New Yorker magazine, which featured writers on stage together but not necessarily in conversation with each other. Also, he wanted something more interesting than standard readings.

Greenwald also ran a large festival in New York for standup comics, produced country music videos in Nashville and handled programming for a 400-seat theater in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. That's the resume that landed him the job of directing this year's literary fest.

Half of the festival's $280,000 budget comes from Duke sources; more than one-third comes from foundations and corporations, while UNC-CH, NCSU and N.C. Central University (which Greenwald brought into the festival for the first time) share the balance.

New faces, new ideas

When he arrived in Durham, one of his first tasks was to meet local literary luminaries.

"I was very impressed, because he obviously knew what he was doing right from the beginning," says Shannon Ravenel, an editor and founder of Algonquin Books in Chapel Hill. "This is certainly the best-looking schedule by far."

Greenwald latched onto the concept of mentoring, influenced by the longtime teacher-student relationships at Duke that connect the writers William Blackburn, William Styron, Fred Chappell and Reynolds Price. Author Allan Gurganus was the first writer he approached with the idea, and then he enlisted Gurganus' former student Ann Patchett.

From there, one pairing led to another. Greenwald asked writer and political cartoonist Doug Marlette, who has a home in Hillsborough, to attend with his longtime friend and fellow author Pat Conroy.

Over the course of several lunches together, Marlette shared other ideas with Greenwald, including an author-songwriter pairing of his friends Kaye Gibbons and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Greenwald eagerly agreed.

"It made me realize it would be different from the usual literary conference, and that seemed smart," Marlette says. "His whole off-the-nose approach seemed more creative than the usual: writers reading from books -- it's so predictable I fell asleep just saying it, much less sitting through it."

Greenwald says he thinks he has come up with a festival that gives audiences an opportunity to sit in on conversations that will happen only once. Unfortunately, he won't have time to hear much of what is said. His job will be making sure everyone is in the right place at the right time, and he'll try to be in as many of those places as he can to shake a lot of hands and just generally be visible.

When it's all over, then what? Greenwald says he'll stick around for another month to close the book on the festival. From there, he doesn't really know where he'll end up -- maybe he'll stay here, he says.

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