Geraldine Brooks

In an era where too often discussions are polarized and exchanges of ideas become rancorous the Authors Guild Foundation is sponsoring a Words, Ideas, and Thinkers Festival September 22nd through 25th to promote a free interchange of ideas and opinions.

The festival, which will be held on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox MA, will explore the theme Reimagining America through thought-provoking conversations, presentations, panels and speeches. Authors, novelists, playwrights and journalists such as Dan Brown, Simon Winchester, David Blight, Elizabeth Kolbert and Henry Louis Gates Jr. will engage in conversations about critical issues facing the country today. Pop-up events—readings, performances and an Authors Guild fundraising event—will be interspersed thoughout the weekend.

Topics range from issues such as identity and belonging, to reexamining history, climate change, the U.S. Supreme Court, and visions for our future. Festival attendees will have the opportunity to interact with speakers in Q&A sessions, book signings and receptions. Dinners with speakers and additional special guests are also available for ticketed purchase.

Among the literary luminaries participating will be Pulitizer Prize-winning author, Geraldine Brooks, who will engage in a conversation with Roxana Robinson whose six novels, three collections of short stories and biography of Georgia O’Keeffe have garnered many awards. The writers will discuss America Through Fiction.

Brooks, a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, covered crises in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East before starting a family. “I was a newspaper foreign correspondent for more than decade and covered crises around the world,” she said in a phone interview. “That was one career. But when my first child was born, I had less desire to go to undesirable places. I started to think about doing something less dangerous, like writing a book.”

Like many writers, she had ideas she had harbored for years, in her case an interest in English villagers who in 1665 “took the unique decision of voluntarily quarantining themselves to prevent the spread of the plague to neighboring cities and villages.” Published in 2001, her novel Year of Wonders became an international bestseller.

Her next novel, March, published in 2005, was inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In it she created a chronicle of wartime service for the absent father of the March family. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Brooks continues to plumb little-known historical events to form the basis for her books. In 2008, she created a fictionalized history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, drawing on her reporting in the aftermath of the 1991-95 break-up of Yugoslavia, and in 2011 she turned her attention to Caleb’s Crossing, the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a 17th-century Wampanoag who was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College.

Most recently her imagination was engaged by the story of Lexington, the greatest American racehorse and stud of the 19th century. It has quickly become a New York Times Best Seller.

“I’ve been on tour since mid-June,” she said during a break from her peregrinations.

She said she does not attempt to interpret societies through her books but rather wants to tell stories “based on something extraordinary that has happened.”

“We can’t know everything about something that has happened,” she continued. “I look for a story where there is a void in the historical narrative. I am very interested in hearing the unheard which often happens with women and indigenous people. You have to engage in the story in imaginative interpretation.”

She reported that Lexington “was such a celebrity in his day that they documented his every foot beat. He was beloved for his speed, stamina and incredible spirit.” He was also the foundational sire of a dynasty of great racehorses. To this day, no sire has produced more champions: Between 1855 and 1880, more than 230 of his progeny won nearly 1,200 races.

“He had so many famous babies,” Brooks said, including Preakness, for whom the race was named.

But ironically, this superstar stud faded from the nation’s consciousness within years of his death in 1875. His was just the kind of story she was looking for and she discovered it completely by chance. “I was having lunch at the Plymouth Pautuxet Museum on a completely unrelated matter,” she said, “when a Smithsonian official who was there said he had just delivered Lexington’s skeleton from the Smithsonian to the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky, where the horse was born in 1850.”

She said the timing was fortuitous as she had “only recently become obsessed with horses.”

She admits that writing the book required “a ton of research.” “The story went in so many directions,” she said. “It branches into science, art, the history of race relations—I had to do research for everything, but I love that aspect of the job.”

The horse himself was the easiest to trace. “There were three newspapers of the day that did nothing but write about him,” she said. Owners and trainers were also reasonably easy to follow, but a list of equestrienne portraits provided her human hero. “One catalogue mentions a lost picture titled ‘Black Jarret leading Lexington out,” she said. “It was obvious that at that time, Black Jarret would have been a slave and his groom. He was the one who lived with the animal day and night and knew his soul.”

Although unknown to history, as Brooks imagines him, Jarret is central to the stallion’s story. “We don’t know much about what his life was like,” she said. “I had to piece him together from what we know of enslaved people of that time.”

The introduction of the Black groom/trainer and a parallel theme of a modern-day interracial romance turn the book into a story of the race world as well as an exploration of race relations.
Brooks said she is looking forward to her participation in WIT. “It’s not hard to accept an invitation to come to the Berkshires in the fall,” she said. “I am looking forward to connecting with the other authors and the audiences.”

For more information about the Words, Ideas and Thinkers Festival or to reserve tickets, please click on the link below.