On stage, Al Franken cracked jokes and talked politics. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera praised poet Ray Gonzalez, who smiled and praised him back and then read a few poems.
Cartoonist Roz Chast shared her quirky vision of New York, and young-adult writers S.K. Ali and Peter Bognanni talked about the worst thing that has ever happened to them on a book tour.
Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler kept folks laughing; memoirist Alex Lemon kept them pondering, and poet Yrsa Daley-Ward kept them enthralled.
All of these things did not happen at the same time, of course, but they all happened on the same day, over the span of about five hours. I hope you didn't miss it — "it" being last weekend's 17th annual Twin Cities Book Festival, a big, inspiring celebration put on by the literary journal Rain Taxi.
The whole thing went off without a hitch, as far as I could tell — except when Twitter autocorrected one of my tweets, changing Al Franken into Al Frankenstein.
Gonzalez, who teaches at the University of Minnesota and is the 2017 Witter Bynner fellow, credited Herrera with helping him establish his career. "He said this to me many, many years ago: Love what you have," Gonzalez said. "That simple. Love what you have. And that is why I am here today."
And then he read his newest poem, "Solar Eclipse Totality."
Herrera listened intently. "Ray writes solid, rockin' poetry," he said. "Every time I come back here, I want to stay here. Everyone has happiness on their faces. I want to have happiness on my face."
