The 2024 Festival of Faith and Writing: Reflections of a First-Time Student Committee Member
My father, I’m convinced, has three favorite phrases. The first was “Stretch yourself”, and the second, “Take initiative”. No matter how true, it always made me groan and want to shrivel away from my responsibilities into my blankets—but the third never failed to draw me back out: “Alright kids,” he’d say. “How about another chapter?”
It was the easy stuff he’d read at first. Picture books, children’s classics, fairy tales. When my father saw I’d grown into a voracious reader, he started retelling stories from books I was too young to read. I must have been in first grade when we stayed out in the car instead of going in to listen to him finish the story of the Lord of the Rings. It wasn’t long, of course, before I was weaned onto Tolkien and he started to read me The Hobbit. When my brother and I begged him to start the trilogy, he looked at us, eyebrows quirked up.
“Are you sure?” he’d asked. “It’s a little scary.”
By the time we hit the movies, my fate as a writer-slash-booknerd had been sealed and there was no going back.
It’s no surprise, then, when I found myself—albeit slightly terrified—at the 2024 Festival of Faith and Writing as a member of the Student Committee. As a sophomore, it was my first Festival at Calvin, and I knew from the start it wouldn’t be my last.
The best party about this Festival? Anthony Doerr, in the house, set to give the closing plenary session. The potential of running into him? Of meeting the mind behind All the Light We Cannot See?
Bonkers. Insane. I needed a book signed.
I didn’t realize how much Anthony Doerr was like a real-life unicorn until I realized he was actually coming here, and then he actually came.
It rained for most of the weekend—it’s drizzly, dreary and absolutely wonderful. Between ferrying my guest authors around campus and attending sessions, I walked from class to class, stunned, soaking in the palpable energy of the ideas and insights being shared here.
“Hey, Chantale!” How’s the Festival going for you?” Dr. Zwart asked me as I bumped into her on the sidewalk.
I gaped at her, bewildered. “I think I just held the door for M.T. Anderson.”
It’s exhausting, and at times, chaotic. But after the first day, visitors had figured out how to navigate the maze of Calvin’s grounds, and I’d settled into a comfortable routine. I gave directions, grabbed tech support for my speakers, and was delighted to both introduce and be introduced to the wonderful minds of Festival writers. As the weekend flew by and the closing plenary drew closer, I started getting more and more excited.
I didn’t know I’d imagined Doerr to be a somber man, bearded for some reason, with a deep bellowing baritone kind of voice, until he walked up on stage. What greeted the auditorium instead was one of the bounciest, energetic people I’ve ever encountered.
The plenary flies by, the audience totally enthralled. Before I knew it, I’m standing in line clutching my copy of All the Light We Cannot See, and a post-it to write down an autograph note. When it’s my turn, I hand him my book and the autograph post-it, hands and neck weirdly sweaty.
Doerr beams at me. “Brian,” he reads off my notes, as he slides the book toward him. “Tell me about Brian.”
“Um, he’s my dad. He read me your book when I was small.”
Thankfully, I’m not starstruck to the point of embarrassing word vomit. Maybe it’s the fact I’d realized a whole person stood behind the book I held in my hands, or that I felt a hundred eyes on my back from the line behind me that stretched around the building. I had a few moments, at most. So I don’t tell Anthony Doerr a number of things. I don’t tell him that the password I made in middle school used a beautiful word I read from his book that somehow gripped me by the throat and tightened my grasp around the writer’s pen. I don’t tell him All the Light We Cannot See was one of those “milestone” books my father read to me, and I don’t tell him my family gathered around our television to watch his new Netflix show made out of it—though I probably could’ve congratulated him. I don’t tell him his words are magic, and I certainly don’t ask him to spill his magician’s secrets.
Instead, I stuttered out something barely coherent about my father reading me All the Light We Cannot See, something about loving stories and loving words and how it’s his birthday soon.
“Oh, it’s his birthday!” Doerr is the peak of enthusiasm. “I’ll add that in!”
I skipped away, elated. The sun was shining and the cherry tree by the dorms was flushed with spring blossoms. I opened the cover of my book and held it up the light to read its contents, a smile on my face.
I didn’t get to make it home for my dad’s birthday that year, but the book made its way safely across the Pacific into my dad’s hands, jammed between clothes in my brother’s suitcase. A signed page and a photo hardly seem to justify the years of being nestled in my father’s lap, drinking in words that have molded me into the person that I am, but it’s not a bad place to start. The words that closed off my first Festival of Faith and Writing with a bang are these that greet him as he flips open to the title page:
Spring 2024
To Brian—Happy Birthday!
Thanks for stretching your kids with words.
Signed: Anthony Doerr
