[B]RATTLEBORO — When Michelle Burford was growing up in Phoenix, she didn’t know she’d go on to work the night shift at a Sears store in Colorado, earn a master’s degree in educational psychology from Harvard University, become a founding editor of Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine or help pen a string of best-selling celebrity memoirs.
“I stumbled into the world of collaborative writing,” she says. “I love it, but didn’t intend to be here.”
The Brattleboro Literary Festival is a celebration of stories. But those told by 60 novelists, poets and nonfiction writers at this weekend’s annual event weren’t limited to their books.
The 15th anniversary program’s most recognized name, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo, read one of his latest essays — but only after remembering friend and fellow writer Howard Frank Mosher, the Northeast Kingdom novelist who died this year.
“Crossing over the bridge, I found myself choking up,” said the Maine writer who had traversed the nearby Connecticut River into Mosher’s beloved state. “Howard was a wonderful, kind, generous, beautiful man.”
Russo, addressing a capacity crowd at one of six downtown festival sites, was just one of many participants who shared their life stories.
“I had no intention of becoming a writer,” said Russo, best known for the novels “Nobody’s Fool” and “Empire Falls.” “I grew up in a very blue-collar working-class family. The possibility didn’t occur to me until late.”
In contrast, fellow presenter Claire Messud talked of receiving a typewriter for her sixth birthday, while essayist Joyce Maynard, author of a 1972 New York Times Magazine cover story titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life,” offered an update nearly a half-century later.
“I began to write this book the night he died,” Maynard recalled of the dark hour she woke to discover her husband, Jim Barringer, wasn’t breathing. “I went downstairs and made a pot of coffee and opened my laptop. I wanted to tell this story.”
“I don’t think I have bounced back from anything — what I am is resilient,” she continued. “Every experience should change us. If we go through all this hard stuff and take nothing from it, that’s a double loss.”
Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers expressed similar reasoning for writing his new memoir “No One Cares About Crazy People,” inspired by his two sons’ battles with schizophrenia, as well as recent headlines sparked by the mentally ill in connection with homelessness, panhandling and drug dealing.
“The sudden mass visibility and eccentric behavior,” the Castleton resident read from his book, “have made them subject to demonization of a scale and intensity not seen since the Dark Ages.
“The police round them up for their crimes of survival: for robberies of food; for possession of the illicit drugs used for self-destructive self-medication; for loitering, vagrancy, and street harassment; for bothering noninsane people with their monologues and declarations; for not having homes. Bereft of committed support from any quarter, they live marginal, miserable lives.”
“What a crime that is,” Powers concluded.
Burford, for her part, spoke of breaking into the art of ghostwriting when a colleague asked if she could help Olympic gold medal gymnast Gabrielle Douglas write an 80,000-word memoir in a matter of weeks.
“I was just doing a favor,” she said, “that turned out to be a hit.”
Burford has since collaborated with clients who include Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight, former Dallas Police Chief David Brown and double-amputee snowboarder turned “Dancing with the Stars” contestant Amy Purdy.
“I am part writer, but I am also part psychologist, part friend,” Burford said. “I need to understand them without judgment.”
Even so, she won’t assist just anyone. Take President Donald Trump, who worked with another ghostwriter on his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.”
“Back then, you didn’t know what was going to come, but you knew what the material was,” she said. “Is this something I truly want to be aligned with?”
Other participants tackled similar questions in a panel discussion titled “Poetry of Witness: Where the Personal Meets the Political — Writing and Witnessing in an Age of Resistance.” Vermont Poet Laureate Chard DeNiord asked his peers if they could effect change.
“Yes — next question,” author and activist Carolyn Forché replied. “Those who can must try to protect those who are most vulnerable. I’m not speaking here specifically as a poet. I’m speaking here as a human being.”
