WESTWOOD - Over the weekend of April 24 and 25, thousands of canyon residents descended on the UCLA campus for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.  The festival, in its ninth year, featured more than 280 exhibitors as well as big names from the writing world, including Elmore Leonard, Anna Quindlen, Ray Bradbury, Dave Eggers, Jane Smiley, Mitch Albom, and Dean Koontz.

In a welcome letter to festival-goers, Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn wrote, “The festival brings people from all walks of life to celebrate literacy with leading authors who will share their works with the audience.”

The two-day festival featured more than 90 events, including panels on Latino writing, biography, journalism, the morals of history, explorations of LA identity, and writing Hollywood, among many other topics.  One-on-one conversations with authors, and panels discussing government and foreign policy also drew large crowds.

Alice Walker, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, discussed with her audience the role of the writer today. “If I understand something,” she said, “Then it’s my duty to share that understanding.” 

Regarding characters and personality, Walker recounted a recent Vanity Fair article about Jackie Kennedy.  By reading the article, Walker was surprised to learn that the former first lady often smoked cigarettes but wasn’t photographed doing so.  Walker said, “We don’t know Jackie Kennedy unless we know that every time she isn’t being photographed, she’s smoking.” 

Chang Rae-Lee, author of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, talked with his audience about language. “For me, the story is sort of there to house the language,” he said. “It’s not what happens for me; it’s why and how and how it sounds.  For me, literature has a musicality.  I tend to like to read writers who have a real obsession with language.”

In the panel “The Necessity of Fiction,” moderator and writer D.J. Waldie (The Holy Land) explored the ideas of ideas of community, home and exile with four Los Angeles writers, Alan Rifkin, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Michelle Huneven, and Felicia Luna-Lemus. 

Rifkin gave his take on the character of the many neighborhoods that make up Los Angeles. “The city is broken, and there’s some beauty in that,” he said.  “A sense of loss and hope mingled together.”

Waldie joked with the authors, “LA comes together in its kitchens and its bedrooms.”

Another panel, “Reporting LA,” brought together L.A. Times writers Steve Lopez and Patt Morrison, with Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Edward Humes in a discussion about bridging the gaps between neighborhoods in L.A. and the role of print journalists.

Morrison said of print journalists, “We have the immense luxury of freezing a moment in time, to bring the authenticity of that story, better than the electronic media can do.”

Morrison said that L.A. today is like it was 200 years ago- still divided into villages. “People tend not to cross into other neighborhoods,” she said.  “I want to take the reader by the shirtfront and say, ‘This is happening in your city.’”

Lopez spent ten years writing in Philadelphia, among other cities, before joining the L.A. Times with his column Points West.   He said, “So many people are not from here and are not necessarily connected to the history of the place.” 

He focuses on “the things that will bring everybody into the conversation.”  One current theme in his column is: “How many people are in L.A., and how many more are coming?” 

Humes takes an approach to writing that he jokes is arrogant; regarding subject matter, he said, “If it’s fascinating to me, it must be fascinating to someone else as well.”

The two-day festival also featured live music, giant outdoor crossword puzzles, a poetry stage, and other stages where story-tellers and children’s book authors shared their work.

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