
Organizers for the upcoming Sunshine State Book Festival are focusing on climate change in their sixth annual event set for Jan. 31 through Feb. 1.
Attendees will have a chance to browse the books of 200 local and regional authors and learn about the influence of climate change on literature with free admission to the weekend event at Best Western Gateway Grand (4200 NW 97th Blvd, Gainesville).
“It’s timely because of what is happening in the world,” said festival chair Pat Caren. “Climate is an important thing for people in Florida and everywhere. Our take on it is climate change in literature. We are not coming at it from a scientific angle, but the use of it in literature and how people can use climate change in their writing.”
Award-winning environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett is the keynote speaker, and she will offer a presentation called “Writers on the Storm” that reflects how climate influenced past writers.
“Climate is not only important to writing in our time or in this place. It has always been part of humanity’s most-lasting literature, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’” said Barnett.
Barnett explained that “Frankenstein” came into being during the summer of 1816 when Shelley, her husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Bryon were vacationing near Geneva. That was the year after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which became known as “the year without a summer” because of how it dimmed the sun.
“It was the coldest summer ever recorded in Europe. Shelley and her poet companions had to stay holed up in their villa, huddled over a constantly burning fire. Lord Byron suggested they all write a ghost story. ‘Frankenstein’ was hers,” Barnett said. “I will tell these stories and others to stress climate as a force in human history and all literature and how to grapple with these questions as writers.”
Barnett is the author of four books, including her latest, “The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans,” considered by NPR’s Science Friday as one of the year’s best science books.
She is a fifth-generation Floridian and Climate and Environment Reporting Initiatives director at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications in Gainesville.
Four award-winning local novelists, who have all written fictional tales set around environmental issues, will participate in a panel discussion on the perspectives of climate change in literature. Caren, who writes as Marie Q. Rogers, Richard Gartee, Mallory O’Connor and Bonnie T. Ogle, who focuses on environmental stories for children, are the panelists. Ellen Siegel, climate speaker specialist for the CLEO Institute, will moderate.
“It’s just becoming more evident with impactful hurricanes, with the droughts last summer, with the wildfires that are going on, with the incredibly cold weather going on that the whole country is experiencing right now, brought it to mind that climate change is something we should talk about,” Gartee said.
Teen writers will also be spotlighted in the Sunshine State Teen Lit Awards ceremony that kicks off the festival.
“We wanted them to get experience writing and get their thoughts on paper,” Caren said. “Something they’re not going to be doing at school. This is an opportunity for them to write something and be recognized.”
The three student winners, whose names will be announced at the ceremony, will receive scholarships from Steve Spurrier’s HBC Foundation.
In keeping with the idea of getting everyone reading, six children’s book authors will read their books to entertain the children. The dramatic and playful storytelling sessions will occur at half-hour intervals from noon to 3 p.m.
Participating children’s book authors are Karl Riemensperger, Keith Carson, JN Fishhawk and Johnny Rocket, Jenny Dearinger, Terri Ashchi and Karen White Porter.
The festival kicks off Friday night with a reception where attendees can meet and mingle with the writers who will have their booths and books set up on Saturday.
“Writers are coming from all over the country, mainly from Florida and the Southeast,” Gartee said. “We are drawing a lot of writers from around the state.”
When the festival started six years ago, there were 71 participating authors. This year, there are 200 participants and festival organizers had to stay at the number because of space limitations.
Something new this year is a day-long writer’s workshop intensive on Jan. 31 for aspiring and already published writers.
“Our festival is about bringing readers and writers together,” Gartee said. “People said if you have all these authors, maybe we should have a program of interest to them.”
So many people signed up for the workshop that organizers had to close the participation list weeks before the event, but it will likely be on the festival agenda next year.
In addition to Spurrier’s HBC Foundation, event sponsors include Visit Gainesville, Florida Humanities, Renaissance Printing, The Lynx, Gainesville Health & Fitness, The MacAlden Group, National Endowment for the Humanities, KNL Editing, Papa Johns, Children’s Trust of Alachua County and Cox.