Bookstock: It’s Back
Bookstock is back! Mark your calendar for May 16-18, 2025.
The sudden cancellation of Bookstock 2024 has turned out to be not the end of the festival, as many had feared, but a new and promising beginning. A new board is at the helm; Board Secretary Michael Stoner—co-founder of the original festival and the one who named it “Bookstock”—says everyone is now focused on making next year’s festival a well-run and successful one.
Of course that means a lot of work between now and next May. It’s not that Bookstock needs a complete overhaul, but several issues require exploration and resolution to make it run more smoothly. Stoner, who is responsible for marketing and communications, says Board Treasurer Julie Moncton and volunteer Jen Belton have agreed to co-chair the event, which should improve lines of communication. The group is assessing current and possible future Woodstock venues with an eye toward using them in the best ways possible while maintaining the importance of accessibility for festival attendees; walkability from the Woodstock Green to various sites, for example, has long been a welcome feature. The website and how it is used will be given a second look.
Since its inception, Bookstock has hosted more than 400 authors and 75 poets, including Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners; sold more 70,000 used books under a huge circus tent on the Village Green; and been attended by tens of thousands.
Asked about whether Bookstock had simply gotten too big and unwieldy—as some had cited as a contributing factor to its cancellation—Michael said that the issue is better explained as “right-sizing” the event. The number of venues in downtown Woodstock is by definition limited. Festival attendees of Bookstock 2023 noted that too many of the individual programs were scheduled concurrently or back-to-back, which kept audience members from seeing many of the authors and reduced free time just to hang around and enjoy activities on the Green. (I myself have experienced the agony of those choices.)
Some had voiced that there had been friction between competing views of whether the festival should focus more on local authors rather than those with national reputations and Pulitzer Prizes. Stoner believes Bookstock needs to do both. Part of the richness of the experience, and the fun, has been the ability of attendees to rub shoulders with well-known authors and equally to recognize the writers who are their regional and Upper Valley neighbors. Moreover, the groups are not necessarily exclusive—many nationally-known writers make their homes and write in the UV.
Will Bookstock 2025 be different from those of past years? Stoner says if you attend next year, you will definitely recognize the event as Bookstock: authors, readers, the poetry program (director Chard de Niord is returning), food and music on the Green. The massive used book sale (typically between 10,000 and 14,000 volumes) is an integral part and will remain, though how to collect and process of all of those books may need another look-see.
My conversation with Michael cheered me considerably about Bookstock’s future, and I came away with two thoughts: 1) Bookstock is a great big and complex project with any number of moving and intersecting parts, and 2) remarkably, there are people in the community willing to devote themselves to tackling the challenges it brings. Such is the hallmark of life in the Upper Valley. I, for one, am grateful.
With still so much to work out, it’s difficult to describe what would constitute success for next year’s festival. Michael Stoner’s view? “We hope when it’s over everyone has had a great time and wants to put it on their calendar for 2026.”
(Photos by kind permission of Michael Stoner. For more information, including profiles of the current team, head to Bookstock’s webpage here.)
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.