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Our Opinion
Our Opinion: The WIT Literary Festival points the way toward thinking in public
Starting today, the WIT Literary Festival returns to the Berkshires. Organized by the Authors Guild Foundation, this third annual iteration promises another weekend of high-level conversation between acclaimed writers on the festival’s weighty namesakes: “Words, Ideas, and Thinkers.”
And don’t we need those intangible but invaluable resources right now more than ever? We hear our civil discourse coarsen by the day. We see political violence on the rise. We feel the tension points of our social fabric and democratic institutions bending toward a breaking point, pressurized by systemic issues and bad actors alike.
The conversations on tap for this three-day festival will touch on all that and more, channeling and combining the talents and expertise of novelists, playwrights, journalists, translators, poets, critics, historians and essayists. From the role of the writer in society to the complexity of overlapping identities to the importance of the law and the classroom in a democracy, this year’s festival features a potpourri of discussions that should prove both stimulating and nourishing.
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And one conversation slated for Saturday morning, no less substantive than the rest, brings some star power to the occasion. Journalist and primetime political analyst Rachel Maddow will sit down with Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner to discuss the American democratic experiment. That session, unsurprisingly, is sold out, though the festival will offer a free livestream that requires registration on The Author’s Guild website. Meanwhile, the rest of the weekend’s sessions are still open for those who wish to expand their minds in the light of some of the literary world’s brightest stars right here in the Berkshires.
It’s great to see this festival going strong in its third year and expanding the scope of how the region can attract visitors and activity in the so-called “shoulder season,” but it’s the substance of this grand experiment in public intellectualism that is the true draw to us. Perhaps it’s our occupational bias, but in times like these, a festival with a theme like this year’s — “The Power of Words: Why Writers Matter” — offers a beacon of clarity in the dark. We need to learn how to talk and listen to each other and, when necessary, disagree without being disagreeable. We need to figure out how to dissect complex issues and wicked problems with critical thinking and a multitude of perspectives. We need to encourage thinking in public. And that is the soul of WIT.
