By Tom Ayres , Senior Staff Writer
Bookstock, the “Green Mountain Festival of Words,” will take place in Woodstock on Friday, May 16 through Sunday, May 18, 2025, following a one-year hiatus occasioned by the literary festival’s abrupt cancellation of its 2024 event this past spring.
The decision to revive the annual literary gathering, which was founded in 2009, was announced at a special meeting of the Bookstock Board of Directors on Monday afternoon. At that same meeting, the now-former, four-member board voted to dissolve itself and turn leadership of the rebounding festival over to four newly named board members and a pair of co-executive directors, who will oversee the 2025 festival.
The 2024 Bookstock was scheduled to take place June 21-23. It was canceled by the organization’s board on April 15, citing lagging support from the festival’s partner organizations. “The festival requires a lot of organizational muscle, which eventually turned out to be lacking,” Bookstock co-founder and board chair Peter Rousmaniere told the Standard in the wake of the cancellation. “The 2023 festival appeared to work pretty well, but it was putting strain on local organizations. We thought we had addressed that, but it turned out that we hadn’t,” Rousmaniere added.
In the wake of the cancellation, a group of Woodstock citizens, several with longstanding ties to Bookstock, convened to begin discussing a relaunch of the literary festival in 2025. “After the Bookstock board announced the 2024 festival was canceled [Woodstock resident and Economic Development Commission chair] Jon Spector conducted a series of interviews with Bookstock planners and a few people from organizations in town that hosted events,” Michael Stoner, a festival co-founder and the secretary of the newly named Bookstock board, wrote in an email to the Standard last week. “[Jon] was trying to learn how they felt about the festival, its past challenges, and whether it should continue. The results? While people have been frustrated by past experiences with Bookstock, everyone agreed that [it] is a valuable event for our community and that Bookstock is worth preserving. Additionally, everyone thought that the challenges around Bookstock could be solved through greater community engagement.”
Tapping into the community in a more focused and engaged fashion is exactly the task that the new Bookstock Board of Directors have set for themselves. In addition to Stoner, a longtime communications, marketing, and public relations specialist in higher education, the new Bookstock board members include Spector as chair, Priscilla Painton as vice chair, and Julie Moncton as treasurer.
Spector, who has had a home in Woodstock for 25 years, retired as Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company and previously served as the CEO of The Conference Board and with several private equity startups. In addition to chairing the Woodstock EDC, Spector also serves on the board and executive committee of Northern Stage.
Painton joined the publishing world in 2008 after 28 years as a journalist. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief at Simon & Schuster, where she has published books by Hilary Rodham Clinton, John Bolton, Michelle Obama, and other luminaries on a wide range of political, social, and business topics. Painton is a member of the board of the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock.
Moncton moved to Woodstock from California this year. She worked as an engineer in Silicon Valley until she started a second career in the book industry. She has held positions in the publishing world as a volunteer, employee, and bookstore owner. Moncton will serve as the volunteer co-executive director of Bookstock 2025, along with Jen Belton, the former Executive Director of the Norman Williams Public Library. During her tenure at the library, Belton contributed to the development and evolution of Bookstock. She has 24 years of experience managing research and information services and designed and directed the first White House library for a sitting President during the administration of Jimmy Carter.
Former Bookstock board members Rousmaniere, Edward Ciarimboli, Peter Gilbert, and Dave Whitney wholeheartedly endorsed the efforts of the new 2025 Bookstock leadership team in stepping down from office on Monday. Interviews with Stoner, Moncton, and Rousmaniere following the 45-minute Monday afternoon board meeting offered a look into where the Bookstock organization is headed as it looks to the future.
“We’ve reached out to everyone about the 2025 date and we’ve heard great things via feedback thus far,” Moncton said during a Zoom interview in which Stoner also participated. “One of the challenges that came up with both the lodging community and other members of the community is the difficulty of holding an event like [Bookstock] in late June,” Stoner offered. “It is difficult for a number of reasons. One, the town is really busy then. We seem to have come up with a date that seems to work from the standpoint of everybody we checked in with.” Moncton added that the other purpose of the Monday afternoon board meeting and the reorganization that ensued was to address the communications issues that have plagued the Bookstock organization in recent years. “We received some feedback that Bookstock hadn’t been great at communicating with partners in the past. So we’re beginning to communicate with them a lot,” the new board secretary offered.
“Satisfying our partners and volunteers is particularly important this year so they can see their operational concerns have been heard and addressed,” Stoner wrote in a “Relaunching Bookstock” memo he presented to the former and new festival boards and shared with the Standard. To achieve these goals, the organization is establishing six working groups with clear responsibilities for the operation of the festival; the groups, which will begin work in September, will be focused on the literary program, vendors and exhibitors, venues, operations, marketing, and fundraising and the annual book sale. Stoner also touted the importance of having co-executive directors Belton and Moncton as key contact points for Bookstock moving forward. The co-executive directors will coordinate weekly meetings of representatives from each of the six festival working groups “to ensure coordination between the various functions — an operational improvement that everyone feels is important,” Stoner said. “One of the weaknesses that we identified in previous festivals is that there wasn’t a person in charge, really — the leadership was spread out,” he continued. “There was no go-to person that partners could reach out to. This time, there happens to be two people — Jen and Julie — but they’re both extremely well-qualified and they work very well together,” Stoner averred.
Bookstock co-founder and former chair Rousmaniere was in London on Monday evening when the Standard reached out via a WhatsApp call. He was effusive in his enthusiasm for the new leadership of the literary festival and confident about the organization’s future. “Organizations go through periods of transition — and sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s quick and sometimes it’s troubled for long periods of time,” Rousmainiere commented. “We had a really good run for upwards of 15 years and the model for Bookstock evolved over that time. What it really needed — and Julie Moncton was key in bringing this out this past spring — is that the festival needed to be rethought, particularly with a board that was much more grounded in Woodstock. I myself have not been living in Woodstock full-time since 2020 — a crazy situation. The new board that is taking over is 100 percent Woodstock, all the way.
“I’m quite enthusiastic about the new team,” Rousmaniere offered in conclusion. “They know the town. They know how a literary festival fits into the town, both in terms of local participation and people coming from outside. It’s not an easy thing to have a very visible cultural event that addresses both the local population and people from away. That’s a tricky thing to do. I believe that by having a fresh bunch of people coming in who really know what they are doing, it’s all going to work out. I am enormously grateful for their stepping in.”