Reading Gone Rogue
Ever-popular East Austin Lit Crawl sets the scene for Texas Book Festival
Austinites crawling through that last book they picked up (you had such high hopes, and yet…) have a chance to renew their vigor for reading on Saturday, November 5.
Lit Crawl Austin, a free spinoff event of the Texas Book Festival, will take participants through a series of locations where they’ll enjoy the literary equivalent of a session IPA: a short story, a conversation, perhaps even an actual beer with a new bookish friend.
The crawl calls this its “12th year of irreverent literary programming,” which ranges from straight-up silliness to political activism, culminating in a closing celebration dedicated to banned books. Four locations — Vintage Bookstore and Wine Bar, Easy Tiger on East 7th Street, Hillside Farmacy, and Saddle Up — host at least two events each across the series, lasting four-and-a-half hours from start to finish.
The adventure begins at 5:30 pm at Vintage Bookstore and Wine Bar, with a happy hour and a recording of Hopeton Hay’s Diverse Voices Book Review podcast by KAZI 88.7 FM. The crawl closes at Saddle Up, where Tony Diaz, author of The Tip of The Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital and leader of Librotraficantes (members of a movement of “book traffickers”), has curated a collection of words from banned books and the readers they informed and inspired.
There’s no shortage of readings at the Texas Book Festival, so the Lit Crawl offers some more improvisational events. A live episode of the podcast Literary Death Match, at Easy Tiger, pits four authors against each other in a twist on a traditional reading event interrupted by critiques and comedy. Hillside Farmacy hosts a large-scale, live version of a common writing exercise, passing a paper between participants writing one line at a time. At Saddle Up, a storytelling event inspired by The Moth asks authors at the festival to speak extemporaneously on the theme “On the Edge of Dreams.”
Unfortunately, since there is some overlap, crawlers will have to make a choice between some of the scheduled events. However, there are only 10 events, and since some are recordings, they will still be available after the festival ends. As any crawl would imply, the venues are also fairly close to each other; three of the venues are lined up within a third of a mile, with Easy Tiger about half a mile south.
More information about the Lit Crawl, including a full schedule and event descriptions, is available at texasbookfestival.org. The Texas Book Festival is also free to attend.
