By Lauren Dorsey, Staff Writer
In the early hours of Monday morning, Bookstock’s board released a statement announcing the cancellation of its 2024 “Green Mountain Festival of Words,” originally planned for the weekend of June 21. “We’re all still in a mild state of shock right now,” Bookstock co-founder and board chair Peter Rousmaniere told the Standard. “It was very sudden, just in the last 10 days. We still thought [the festival] was going to happen as of early last week.”
According to Rousmaniere, the board scrapped the festival because they saw lagging support from Bookstock’s partner organizations. “The festival requires a lot of organizational muscle, which eventually turned out to be lacking,” said Rousmaniere. “The 2023 festival appeared to work pretty well, but it was putting strain on local organizations. We thought we had addressed that, but it turns out that we hadn’t.”
Over the years, the festival has worked with well over a dozen local organizations, but Bookstock’s six co-founders are Pentangle Arts, the Norman Williams Public Library, the North Chapel, the Woodstock History Center, Yankee Bookshop, and The Thompson Center. Since Bookstock began in 2009, it has hosted over 400 authors, ranging from nationally known Pulitzer Prize winners to local emerging authors.
Speech Thomas addresses the audience about his film 16 Bars while Robin Casarjian Listens in during a presentation at the 2023 Bookstock festival.
Robert Shumskis Photo
Rousmaniere told the Standard that Bookstock had sufficient financial and volunteer support to continue this year, but it had become clear that at least one of its key partner organizations did not want to participate. Rousmaniere says that some organizations that were enthusiastic about the festival initially began to feel “that it was not their cup of tea.” He continued, “It may have just been that we were asking too many organizations to have people show up. [It’s] a systemic issue that simply bit us this year very badly. It could have happened a year before. It could have happened next year.”
Rousmaniere says he is not confident that Bookstock will ever be able to return, at least at its former scale. Beyond the inevitable fallout from the late abandonment of the 2024 festival, future attempts will run into the same challenges that eventually forced this year’s organizers to fold. “There are two issues involved there. One is that there is a lot of mud on our faces for canceling so late in the game. It’s embarrassing for us, and may lower our credibility,” said Rousmaniere. “The other is that it probably has to start from the ground up. There have to be organizations that say, ‘We want this for our own mission. We’re not doing this as a favor to you.'”
Should Bookstock revive in any capacity, Rousmaniere thinks that, in addition to securing more robust partner support, the festival would need new leadership. “[If] Bookstock is going to be viable in the future, [we] would have to have a fresh board, there’s no question about it,” said Rousmaniere.
Rousmaniere says that the festival, which has been an annual fixture in Woodstock for the last 14 years, exploded in complexity after incorporating as a nonprofit in late 2021. “It has turned into a very complicated watch-like device that ranges from Eventbrite online registration to tents on The Green — all stretching over three days with upwards of a half a dozen directly involved organizations,” Rousmaniere explained.
As the festival’s logistical challenges increased, Bookstock’s leaders and its partner organizations diverged on how to proceed.
One route that Bookstock has historically taken is to create a festival that draws people from outside of the immediate community. “In 2023 our survey indicated that 80% of the people at Bookstock were from out of town,” said Rousmaniere. “We have the capability of running a festival for a 50,000 population town when you put the pieces together. [We] wanted it to be so professional that it could really attract national attention.”
Some believe that running the festival at that scale, in many ways, provided a real benefit to the town. “Bookstock is exactly the kind of event that we felt was good for Woodstock,” said Jon Spector, the head of Woodstock’s Economic Development Commission. “First of all, it’s not held during the peak season, so it doesn’t contribute to overcrowding in September and October when there are particularly difficult challenges for us. It’s also an event that’s really on Woodstock’s brand. It puts Woodstock in a good light and appeals to the kind of people who live in Woodstock and the people who visit.”
Seton McIlroy, the chair of the Village Trustees, echoed Spector’s sentiment. “It’s always been a fantastic event for Woodstock. I think it brings people to the town who normally wouldn’t be here with its great authors and speakers and poets.”
Rousmaniere acknowledged that hosting such a complex event puts strain on Woodstock’s limited infrastructure and population. “The central question is, ‘Why do [such a large festival] when you have a 3,000-population town?’” he said. “The second approach is to have basically a local festival. In that [case], everything can be shrunk down.”
Morgan Brophy, Bookstock’s event manager in 2023, began promoting simplification last summer. “The scope and scale of Bookstock is pretty ambitious, which is great, but it does present a lot of challenges no matter how you approach it,” Brophy told the Standard. “After my experience in 2023, a lot of my recommendations in the post-event meetings were to scale back. It is a lot for the community of Woodstock to sustain.”
Pentangle Arts executive director Alita Wilson has long supported simplifying the production. “I got so frustrated, every year I would say that I would do fewer events,” said Wilson. “I wouldn’t have events competing with one another at venues, [and] they never really changed that.”
Wilson emphasized that helping Bookstock host the literary festival had become extremely taxing to Pentangle. “When we open our doors as a venue to Bookstock, it’s not just opening the doors, it is making sure that there are tech staff here for the entire duration of the authors’ presentations. It is tidying up the theater,” said Wilson. “You get to a point when you’re turning on the AC and paying for the cleaners and you have hundreds of people coming in and out, and you just cannot do it for free.”
Wilson explained that Pentangle began charging Bookstock for labor last year, and the board had planned to require a rental fee to use the space this time around. “Working with Bookstock has really been out of the goodness of our hearts, because we lose movie and concession revenue, and while they collect donations, all those donations go back to Bookstock,” said Wilson.
This year, Rousmaniere said the tension came to a head, and even before cancellation loomed, organizers agreed that putting on such a large-scale festival had begun to seem unsustainable. “We were already in the process of downsizing, and we had modeled a downsized festival for next year,” Rousmaniere said. “We just couldn’t get through the last two months, which is a shame.”
In the wake of the cancellation, the board is considering hosting a small poetry festival this year in Bookstock’s place. “We’re working on that pretty intensely right now, to see whether we can continue with a poetry festival at the time Bookstock would have been,” said Rousmaniere. “That’s a distinct possibility, but we have to move very quickly on that.”
Bookstock’s cancellation this year will likely ripple into other parts of town. The Norman Williams Public Library is considering moving its annual used book sale to another weekend. “We have always had a sale the same weekend as Bookstock,” Clare McFarland, director of the Norman Williams Public Library, told the Standard. “We’re talking now about moving it maybe to alumni weekend or to the Covered Bridges weekend when there’s more people in town.”
Officials also spoke to the effect of the festival’s cancellation on summer tourism. “I’m not sure if it had really gained the popularity quite yet to put a big dent in [the numbers], but I think it was on the way,” said Beth Finlayson, the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce executive director.
“The impact will probably be modest,” said Spector. “It will affect local businesses to some extent, but I think the impact will be larger if this is a permanent cancellation — if there’s no way to resuscitate Bookstock in future years.”